Today during a conference call with analyst/investors John Riccitiello (CEO of Ea) announced that TOR will enter a “high scale” beta period at the end of June. This is good news for a couple of reasons.
1- I now have another chance to get into Beta.
2- Since it was confirmed at E3 that there will be no traditional style open beta, this is likely the beginning of the final stage or two of beta. Indicating that release could be very soon (like 2-3 months).
Stephen Reid has indicated via Twitter that he’ll be making a post about today’s call soon.
EDIT:Â Stephen has provided the clarification he promised.. not just once.. but he’s clarified multiple times for us:
Initial Response:
Take a deep breath, everyone..
Game Testing is currently ongoing for Star Wars: The Old Republic. This isn’t news – it’s been ongoing for quite a while. At different points in the process, we have invited a number of people to test. Some of those people tested for short periods, some for longer periods.
We’ve recently transitioned into longer-term and larger-scale testing. We have more people testing the game now than ever before. We are allowing them to play for longer than ever before. We’re also continuing to invite people to test, so if you haven’t signed up for testing yet – now is a good time.
We will be allowing more and more people to test The Old Republic before launch, and that means occasionally we’ll spike in our invite numbers. It doesn’t mean everyone who’s signed up for testing is going to be invited in one block.
What we’re doing now, essentially, is similar to a ‘Closed Beta’ for other MMORPGs, but we call it Game Testing. It’s invite-only, and it’s limited in size. That gives us the most ‘bang for our buck’ in terms of getting meaningful, actionable feedback. However, we’re still ramping up, we’re getting more people in… and we’re still aiming to launch in 2011.
A little bit later, we got:
I’m behind on the total thread, but this seems as good a quote as any to respond to.
You may be surprised to know that the CEO of EA does not brief me on every word he’s going to say in every conference call he makes.
Today’s call was not on our radar, and was not part of a wider PR strategy to talk about the release date for The Old Republic. (We’ll make a slightly bigger announcement about that.)
As the call wasn’t on our radar, we didn’t hear it live. We’re looking at the same transcripts you guys are. Frankly, it’s not a good transcript. Parts of it make no grammatical sense. In fact, everyone assumes John said ‘high scale beta’ in one sentence, when according to the transcript, he said ‘high scale data’. That’s why I take the ‘six weeks’ sentence with a large pinch of salt.
Yes, I am going to try and clarify what that statement meant, but I’m afraid you’re not going to like the answer any more than today. Game Testing is ongoing. The number of people we’re bringing into Game Testing is increasing. That’s all that’s going on. The ‘six weeks’ timeframe doesn’t relate to anything that I’m aware of, and I’m aware of just about all significant dates for The Old Republic.
You can believe that I’m trying to ‘cover this up’ if you like, or you can accept that not every communication that comes out of EA is intended for a general audience – and that sometimes we play catch up, just like you.
Followed by this in response to EU Beta testing:
European Testing has not fully started yet. We’re about to invite some people from the EU, but it’ll be a while longer before full EU testing begins.
When it does, we’ll definitely talk about it.
And finally, we got this last little tidbit, after someone re-transcribed the call, and got something that made more sense then the official transcript:
From hearing the audio myself, and I’d say that this is an accurate transcription, it’s clear that John is talking about the outcome of Game Testing, and the ‘six week’ reference is to the potential success of the title.
As I said, the reference to six weeks has nothing to do with Game Testing, or any other moment on the calendar in particular.
Thanks for transcribing, Gumstumdar!
And there you go… Beta is expanding, but I still have no invite ;) and we still have no release date =( but.. we are getting closer…