Funny, I GOT paid to test it (Destiny)

by Speedracer513 , Dallas, Texas, Wednesday, January 21, 2015, 14:13 (3838 days ago) @ Earendil

Jokes aside, I'm still not sure I understand your point. From where I'm standing:

1. Normal mode wasn't "beta" quality, even if there were bugs. And most of the bugs involved cheesing, not detrimental defects that prevented a player from accomplishing a given goal.

2. The alternative to any pre-release testing is to simply not play. This is where I would consider myself "paid", because I was able to play and enjoy software that you would call "beta".

It seems you would have preferred that Bungie release Normal and Hard mode together, which would mean that all this time no one would have been playing the raid. It also likely means that more internal testing would have been required, since a community of millions of players is more likely to find defects than a team of a hundred (or however many Bungie has). So you'd really rather the raid was released weeks/months from now so that you didn't "have to pay" to play? This is where I don't understand.

I don't presume to be able to speak for Scheddonardus, but I think his point is that since there are not really any new mechanics to hard mode, it's not really any different. The difference betwee normal and hard is really not much more than the deiffence between the normal level Phogoth strike and the Weekly Heroic version of the Phogoth strike. It's not that they should have waited until now to release even the normal mode raid - it's that they could've released the hard mode back then with the normal mode. They obviously weren't working on any new mechanics that needed to be implemented, so it kind of feels like the normal mode version we've been playing was no more than a beta version for what we have now.

(I'm mostly just playing Devils Advocate here. Even though I am personally a bit disappointed that there weren't really any new mechanics or puzzles to figure out, I wouldn't personally consider it to be a beta/final version relationship.)