1. Early alphas are great. We had a half-dozen playtesters swarming over the game from the moment it was barely playable, when it was a monochrome text-only experience with two dozen storylets, and we kept them at it. It wasn't what you'd call a formal testing process. But it did provide early evidence that we had something people would want to play, and it did shine a searching light into the crevices where bugs hide. It meant that going into beta was merely terrifying and not cripplingly terrifying. Which in turn kept my gin intake to genuinely respectable levels.
The down-side has been that you can't really test social features with five players in a game intended to scale massively. This is my excuse for why the Friends page and the buffing options are all a bit pants.
2. The low-spam policy looks like a qualified success. Failbetter's founding philosophy (i.e. what I would shout at Paul after too much coffee) was that we be as unspammy as we could be without being dying on our feet. We want to co-opt you into recruiting for us by sharing content, but we want you to enjoy sharing content. And we want you to be confident that once you've let us into your account, we won't, say, randomly direct-message director-level contacts at your current employers. Don't laugh. It happened to me.
So the 'success' bit' is that we grew organically from 50 to 180 players over a week, just by giving out a few business cards. A drop in the ocean, but quite a keen and supportive drop. The 'qualified' bit is that we are still tarred with the spamminess brush of some other Twitter games, so we find ourselves caught in a bind where people won't sign up because they're worried we're spammy, but we've ruled that weapon out of our armoury anyway...and other people with fair-sized Twitter followings are playing the game silently. But several of those people have said that if they couldn't have played without advertising it, they wouldn't have touched it. So we've lost nothing but a few server cycles, and we've gained support and handy feedback.
3. Sometimes, people are just nice. We put the ability to Twitter content without getting an action refresh advantage into the game, rather experimentally. Some people really ran with this. No idea how it helped with recruitment, but it really made us feel good. Thanks guys.
4. If beta-testers are into a game, they won't always rush to report exploits. A very early piece of admin stupidity on my part now referred to in hushed tones as the NIGHT OF A HUNDRED MILLION ECHOES made everyone fabulously rich for about two hours in the middle of the night. A numbers glitch with the exchange opportunities ('x lamplighter beeswax for y appalling secrets') allowed for a dramatic carousel of bling purchasing. Some people mentioned it, some people didn't. Quite an engaging little psychology experiment actually.
5. People like a sense of place. Fallen London has been the single aspect of EB that people have responded to most: to the extent that we hear it talked about as 'that Fallen London game' at least as often as 'Echo Bazaar'. We hoped it'd be a popular game element, but frankly it's exceeded our expectations. We've also heard, though, that it feels a little lonely when you get out of prison: that it'd be more like a place if you got a sense of what other people were doing around you. This, as part of the drive towards more social features, is one of the things we're keen to address with the refurbishments.
Ta for reading. Feedback, as ever, not only welcome but solicited.