QA = Failure Testing?
While this is an important and valuable part of QA, is this still the only/main aspect of QA at ArenaNet? Shouldn’t it also cover design of branch, merge/re-integration and release processes as well as quality requirements that code needs to meet before it is even tested for failures?
Usually this falls by default to QA. As a QA (in another company), it consist in a LOT more, I need knowledge and I HAVE to know how to do Data Analytics, DBA communication, Different Test managers programing and configuration, Design and Architecture, etc etc etc.
And something that I have learned is that we can spool proof the code, verify collisions, do Unit Test, Configure Work loads to test how a line of code may impact a complete server, automated tests, etc etc etc but even as I do everything by the book there are things that always appear and we are capable of fixing in a next iteration.
I do believe ANET does an AMAZING job at QA when you compare the size of the company and the game. Also, the fact that their server are almost always up amazes me.
Any how, sorry for my bad English. have a good Day ^_^
Edit: Also, User feedback is the most important part, soooo keep giving feedback and report everything you see wrong. W/o user feedback everything would be clunky.
(edited by Jhoul.6923)
Shouldn’t it also cover design of branch, merge/re-integration and release processes as well as quality requirements that code needs to meet before it is even tested for failures?
Not every company calls this “QA”.
John Smith: “you should kill monsters, because killing monsters is awesome.”
I do believe ANET does an AMAZING job at QA when you compare the size of the company and the game. Also, the fact that their server are almost always up amazes me.
It’s not hard to improve on terrible.
Like seriously, you must have played some terrible games to consider up-time as being amazing. Please don’t take offense, this is an honest reply that you gave in regards to the industry. Quite disturbing that doing what a game company should be doing, is amazing. This is like teaching your kids to be descent adults, and then being told that’s amazing.
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I do believe ANET does an AMAZING job at QA when you compare the size of the company and the game. Also, the fact that their server are almost always up amazes me.
It’s not hard to improve on terrible.
Like seriously, you must have played some terrible games to consider up-time as being amazing. Please don’t take offense, this is an honest reply that you gave in regards to the industry. Quite disturbing that doing what a game company should be doing, is amazing. This is like teaching your kids to be descent adults, and then being told that’s amazing.
Even though the technology has existed since at least 2005 (when GW1 came out) it is still quite unusual for an MMO to not shut down regularly for maintenance.
Even Elder Scrolls Online which also uses a megaserver system (which is apparently the key to Anet being able to update without taking servers down) has weekly maintenance periods of several hours when the game is unavailable. Of course they try to schedule it for times when the fewest people are online but even then there’s people complaining on Facebook and the forum (and probably other places) every single week that they can’t log in.
As far as I remember GW2 has been offline twice since it was released.
Danielle Aurorel, Dear Dragon We Got Your Cookies [Nom], Desolation (EU).
“Life’s a journey, not a destination.”
“Life’s a journey, not a destination.”
O you mean up-time in the sense of beyond what is reasonable for most MMO games. Thanks for clarification.
Intel Core i7 4790K @4.7 GHz, 32 GB 2133 MHz DDR3.
MSI GTX 1080 Sea Hawk EK X 2xSLI 2025 / 11016 MHz, liquid cooling custom loop.
Samsung 850 Evo 500 GB. HTC Vive.
MSI GTX 1080 Sea Hawk EK X 2xSLI 2025 / 11016 MHz, liquid cooling custom loop.
Samsung 850 Evo 500 GB. HTC Vive.
Ha!
If the summer disaster that was WvW Golem Week didnt give you a strong enough indication, the HoT WvW update proved that Anet Q&A does not exist. The update broke WvW objective walls and it took them several months and about five patches stating the walls had been fixed before it was finally fixed.
It was actually quite disapointing and disturbing to see because Anet otherwise has a pretty good record with fixing things they break.
Shouldn’t it also cover design of branch, merge/re-integration and release processes as well as quality requirements that code needs to meet before it is even tested for failures?
Not every company calls this “QA”.
Well I do and I think the following is true.
You can’t test quality into the product; it must be built in.
The amount of bugs that present themselves after any patch amazes me.
RP enthusiast
I’m curious whether any of the people who claim that the number of bugs in GW2 proves they don’t test it have ever used genuinely untested software. Because I don’t think you’d say that if you had.
For an extreme example I’ve done a fair bit of QA for people making 3rd party mods for games – so we’re talking software made by self-taught amateurs which has only been tested in the sense that the maker loaded it into their own game for a couple of minutes before sending it to me.
On a good day I can load it without the game and/or entire computer crashing. But it’s not uncommon for that to happen. It’s equally common for it to simply not load at all. And sometimes it won’t be just 1 thing causing this, there will be 4 or 5 completely unrelated bugs which all cause fatal crashes.
Once we’ve gotten past that we’re down to relatively minor things like all the objects turning pink, NPCs drifting off into the sky instead of walking along the ground and object disappearing when you click on them (all real examples). There might be 20 or more bugs like this which have to be tracked down to the source and fixed individually. (And simply noticing that it happened is just the start of that process. Saying “This button disappears when I click on it” is like going into the garage and telling them your car “makes a rattling sound”. All you’ve told them is that there is a problem – not what’s causing it or how to fix it, they have to figure that out before they can do anything about it.)
After that it generally needs a fresh pair of eyes because I’ve spent so much time with it I’m less likely to notice things like text errors or having to double click things that should need a single click. There’s also some things that only the creator can really spot – like sound effects not triggering when they should and weapons doing the wrong amount of damage – unless you know exactly how it was intended to work you can’t spot that little things like that are going wrong.
Danielle Aurorel, Dear Dragon We Got Your Cookies [Nom], Desolation (EU).
“Life’s a journey, not a destination.”
“Life’s a journey, not a destination.”
I’m curious whether any of the people who claim that the number of bugs in GW2 proves they don’t test it have ever used genuinely untested software.
That’s maximum distance to the point I was making. Congratulations!
I wish I had gems to hand out.
The customer is always angry when something small goes wrong.
The programmer is always angry when the customer doesn’t realize that their computer isn’t on fire thanks to them.
Most of the bugs I encounter could have been figured out by simply playing the game as it’s supposed to be played:
- Why does my character keep mining for minerals when there’s no more to mine?
- Why does my character spend 6, 4 supplies for wall repairs when I have ability that allows me to spend 10 supplies per tick?
- Why is the orange progress bar that appears on your character narrow in the beginning and wide at middle towards end?
- Why does Mesmer greatsword autoattack animation appear to hit targets way beyond its range?
- Why does captured shrine veteran monster appear hostile for split second after capturing and after that turn friendly?
- Why does another player’s pet appear charmable after that player has teleported to your location?
These are just the bugs off the top of my head. I shudder to think how bad the non-obvious bugs are.
Most of the bugs I encounter could have been figured out by simply playing the game as it’s supposed to be played:
- Why does my character keep mining for minerals when there’s no more to mine?
- Why does my character spend 6, 4 supplies for wall repairs when I have ability that allows me to spend 10 supplies per tick?
- Why is the orange progress bar that appears on your character narrow in the beginning and wide at middle towards end?
- Why does Mesmer greatsword autoattack animation appear to hit targets way beyond its range?
- Why does captured shrine veteran monster appear hostile for split second after capturing and after that turn friendly?
- Why does another player’s pet appear charmable after that player has teleported to your location?
These are just the bugs off the top of my head. I shudder to think how bad the non-obvious bugs are.
I’m not sure anything you listed is even a bug. Sometimes it’s a measure of cost effectiveness. It’s far more cost effective to create a single animation for mining. You think it’s a bug because a real person would stop. A real person doesn’t need to be programmed. Programmers work under extreme time limits and under budgets as well. Making one animation for it is hardly game breaking and no game can afford to pay that kind of attention to detail or it would take ten years to make it.
The last two are probably signs of latency. All creatures probably spawn in one state, and then the server adjusts their state. So when a pet spawns it, and it appears, it’s tamable for a second before the owner appears taking that property away. It’s not a bug, it’s again, a detail not worth paying attention too. It’s not game breaking. Fixing that means not fixing something else and at any rate, if that’s how the game is programmed, there may be no easy fix for it at all.
Same with the appearance of veteran monsters. They likely spawn in one state and then the server provides the properties. The more latency, the more time it will take and the more likely you are to notice. Devs might never notice something like this on their own servers anyway, because the update is likely faster.
Having worked on creative projects that have deadlines in the past, something far less intricate than coding, I can tell you that time and budget constraints will always produce a product that has some flaws. But the only other real option is to never publish.
I’m not sure anything you listed is even a bug. Sometimes it’s a measure of cost effectiveness. It’s far more cost effective to create a single animation for mining. You think it’s a bug because a real person would stop.
Well it doesn’t seem to be taking any artistic liberties so therefore I consider it a simple bug. It’s coded in a way that mining animation plays for 3 swings, because before there was any extra gathering strikes most nodes would be 3 units. Now when you get extra gathering strikes you have to pause after 3 swings and then animation plays for 3 swings even if you got only 1 extra gathering strike.
Optimal, common sense behavior would be this: once the player presses button the character mines for minerals until there is no more left to mine or player interrupts the action.
If I had to choose between having one swing animation repeating as many times as necessary versus a custom animation of slightly different 3 swings, I’d choose the former. I guess that’s just my personal preference to put functionality above aethetics.
Having worked on creative projects that have deadlines in the past, something far less intricate than coding, I can tell you that time and budget constraints will always produce a product that has some flaws. But the only other real option is to never publish.
Another option is to scale the project so that whatever you put out is quality stuff. Some of the best games I’ve played have actually been small team projects that had correct idea what they can and cannot do with the resources they have.
I’m not sure anything you listed is even a bug. Sometimes it’s a measure of cost effectiveness. It’s far more cost effective to create a single animation for mining. You think it’s a bug because a real person would stop.
Well it doesn’t seem to be taking any artistic liberties so therefore I consider it a simple bug. It’s coded in a way that mining animation plays for 3 swings, because before there was any extra gathering strikes most nodes would be 3 units. Now when you get extra gathering strikes you have to pause after 3 swings and then animation plays for 3 swings even if you got only 1 extra gathering strike.
Optimal, common sense behavior would be this: once the player presses button the character mines for minerals until there is no more left to mine or player interrupts the action.
If I had to choose between having one swing animation repeating as many times as necessary versus a custom animation of slightly different 3 swings, I’d choose the former. I guess that’s just my personal preference to put functionality above aethetics.
Having worked on creative projects that have deadlines in the past, something far less intricate than coding, I can tell you that time and budget constraints will always produce a product that has some flaws. But the only other real option is to never publish.
Another option is to scale the project so that whatever you put out is quality stuff. Some of the best games I’ve played have actually been small team projects that had correct idea what they can and cannot do with the resources they have.
Yes, put out one perfect map. Rift had a nearly perfect launch, but it was a tiny tiny game. That didn’t go over any better than Guild Wars 2 did.
Have you played a Nintendo DS game called The World Ends With You? Credits list 7 creators and 14 voice actors for a game localized to Japan and western audience. The game isn’t too big, GameFAQs list the length as 43.6 hours. During that time you’ll be constantly immersed in the game world. There’s no unnecessary waiting and I feel that all the systems the game has are very well done – actually innovating the genre of story-focused RPG. That game is a great example of small team project that is perfectly scaled. Before you say it, no, it has nothing to do with MMOs.
Most of the bugs I encounter could have been figured out by simply playing the game as it’s supposed to be played:
- Why does my character keep mining for minerals when there’s no more to mine?
- Why does my character spend 6, 4 supplies for wall repairs when I have ability that allows me to spend 10 supplies per tick?
- Why is the orange progress bar that appears on your character narrow in the beginning and wide at middle towards end?
- Why does Mesmer greatsword autoattack animation appear to hit targets way beyond its range?
- Why does captured shrine veteran monster appear hostile for split second after capturing and after that turn friendly?
- Why does another player’s pet appear charmable after that player has teleported to your location?
These are just the bugs off the top of my head. I shudder to think how bad the non-obvious bugs are.
I’m not sure anything you listed is even a bug. Sometimes it’s a measure of cost effectiveness. It’s far more cost effective to create a single animation for mining. You think it’s a bug because a real person would stop. A real person doesn’t need to be programmed. Programmers work under extreme time limits and under budgets as well. Making one animation for it is hardly game breaking and no game can afford to pay that kind of attention to detail or it would take ten years to make it.
Even more than that, for a real person continuing to mine when there’s nothing left to dig up is a huge waste of effort, you’re spending energy to get nothing back.
Whereas for a game designer it’s the opposite. Tying the animation into the number of uses left on the node is much more complicated (and therefore more time and effort) than simply having an animation that plays for a fixed length of time.
I agree it would be better – it would also mean you only have to push once to mine the whole node instead of stopping and starting again. But we already have people complaining about how long Anet take to release new things, the amount and quality of things they do release and the bugs that make it through.
Taking the time to address every little thing like that would make development take even longer and may even introduce new bugs that could be even worse.
Danielle Aurorel, Dear Dragon We Got Your Cookies [Nom], Desolation (EU).
“Life’s a journey, not a destination.”
“Life’s a journey, not a destination.”
Have you played a Nintendo DS game called The World Ends With You? Credits list 7 creators and 14 voice actors for a game localized to Japan and western audience. The game isn’t too big, GameFAQs list the length as 43.6 hours. During that time you’ll be constantly immersed in the game world. There’s no unnecessary waiting and I feel that all the systems the game has are very well done – actually innovating the genre of story-focused RPG. That game is a great example of small team project that is perfectly scaled. Before you say it, no, it has nothing to do with MMOs.
Right, easy to program game, doesn’t constantly require new content, that’s like saying my skate board has less maintainance issues than my car.
It’s a pointless comparison.
You should try these things before hastily making judgments.
You should try these things before hastily making judgments.
A game being fun has no bearing on the complexity of the build, especially when you are comparing across genre.
“Trying to please everyone would not only be challenging
but would also result in a product that might not satisfy anyone”- Roman Pichler, Strategize
You should try these things before hastily making judgments.
In an ideal world, before anyone judges the quality of a game based on their understanding of bugs, they should have to work in a professional development environment, especially in the gaming industry.
I’ve played literally thousands of games over the years. I don’t need to play that one to know what you mean. It simply has no bearing on what we’re talking about.