NOTHING LEFT TO DO BUT DANCE

marshmallowtentacle asked: Just curious, but what do you think the A1 trolls would play? Sgrub alpha or sgrub beta?

Beta I guess, for no other reason other than it paralleling the humans’ sessions?? The trolls didn’t really seem to have a name at all for their game, Sollux was just like hey I guess we should slap some shitty name on it so we can stop calling it That Game Aradia Told Me To Make and so they called it Sgrub with no beta/alpha stuff.

Since it hasn’t gone through any testing whatsoever Sollux’s version would be the alpha? Technically??

But we don’t know anything at all about A1 or how the game came into existence there. I’m thinking beta/alpha is specific to John & co.’s sessions, which is why using the A1/A2/B1/B2 universe names given in the comic are so much better than saying like “alpha Rose” and “beta Rose.” It just doesn’t apply to the trolls!! And it’s so much simpler.

Tho if we’re going to get into theory territory beta versions of the game are far more open than alpha, right? Alpha releases are usually only a small amount of people playing the game, beta versions are sometimes released to a large amount of players so they can find and report bugs. Both versions are by default flawed and glitchy, the point of them isn’t for people really play the game, but smooth out all the wrinkles so that future players of the full version don’t have to deal with that shit. I think that’s how it works, anyway, I confess I know absolutely nothing about software development or anything and I’m mostly basing this off Steam betas and Minecraft.

So you can get two things from that. One is that if your session is designated as alpha or beta, you’re probably going to encounter game-breaking mistakes, and because of that, you’ll probably fail. But there’s also a possibility that all unscratched universes begin as beta; the game is widely dispersed and gives rise to a bunch of sessions, most which fail, some that succeed, and some which are scratched and given another chance. Natural selection!! You could say it is perpetually in beta because it is constantly refining itself and changing, there is no final form to work towards. Scratched versions—alphas—are only distributed to a select few, the ones already marked from the previous iteration as possible players, because it’s in limbo. For some reason the beta players fucked up, and it would be very bad if there was something fundamentally wrong with that session and it was allowed to reproduce and spread its seeds everywhere, so you can’t spring multiple child sessions from a scratch. That’s why John’s copy was produced by a company and seemed to be known outside of his group (the Game Bro “review,” etc.) while in the trolls’ A2 session one of its players created it and gave it only to his friends and B2’s was super secret corporate stuff supposedly only Jane and people who were already aware of its existence and where to find it (Roxy) would have had access to.