Travian 4 BETA Server Invites

A wave of euphoria has swept accross Travian in the last few days. Travian 4 is happening and it's happening a lot sooner than expected. Although the public release date is not until the Summer 2011 it seems that the code has already been completed and testing has already started. Thousands of people have been lucky enough to recieve a personal invite for the Closed Beta of Travian 4 (and I'm lucky enough to be one of them) which is due to start on the 20th of October 2010 at 12:00 GMT. I would suggest that anyone who hasn't checked their inboxes in the last two days rush and see if they have recieved an invite for the beta.

So let's explain how the beta works  to start with, although the idea of a beta will be familiar to most of you. Basically the idea for the beta is to find as many bugs as possible before they release the game publicly, there will be a lot of little bugs that the Alpha test (yes there was a secret alpha test, I didn't find out about it until a few days ago) has not yet found. I've been told from a relatively high up source (someone on the Alpha and has links to the development team) that the changes of the beta crashing or restarting is close to zero. However because there is a chance of it happening Travian Games are making it so when you purchase Gold on the server you will recieve double the gold for your money; so a purchase of 600 Gold means you will recieve 1200 Gold for the usual 600 Gold price. This is not going to be a feature of the public Travian 4 launch as far as I am aware and there has been no news on whether there will be extra tarrifs to choose from. The other major point of the beta is for Travian Games to find out which features work (from a gameplay sense not a technical one) and why and which features player are not happy with and want to change. I have a feeling that while a lot of features will not be to the public content only some changes will be made as a result of feedback by the beta testers although I do hope that they would make major changes if the testers demanded them.

So far, because the server is not yet active, the only Travian 4 feature I have been able to try out is the 'create your Hero' feature which you will now complete as you register. The interface for the create your hero is clean, fresh and easy to use and does not take long to complete. However there seems to be a lack of options at the moment, limited to 4 per category which gives me the feeling that a lot of heroes will end up looking the same. Although they have said more options will likely come in Travian 4.1 I would hope they take on this feedback now and add at least another four options per category before Travian 4 launches publicly. Maybe they could take some inspiration from Voki with it's vast range of avatars and abilities to add things and to change them, although it'd still need to be Travian themed. Any way, here was my attempt to create a Travian hero:

I hope to blog more about Travian 4 as I discover things within the Beta but I need to find out what exactly I am allowed to share and what has to be kept under raps. I'll be interested to see if they take any of the ideas I posted a month or two ago onboard (found here).

Steve

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