Why would you need to be rewarded for it in the first place?
Alpha-testing something would suggest you actually care and like the product, and thus making the product better would be more than enough reward.
Why would you need to be rewarded for it in the first place?
Alpha-testing something would suggest you actually care and like the product, and thus making the product better would be more than enough reward.
Does this explain how so many bugs make it through to live patches?
[Edit] Okay, now that I have the (well earned) snark out of the way… In CoH, they had a couple of Beta servers. People played on them freely for various reasons, and there was generally a good back and forth with the Devs about what was going on there. Some did it to improve the game. Some to get a handle on upcoming changes. Some, because they simply liked the challenge of breaking things without the down side of doing it on the live servers (where it might mess up their real characters).
Give us a server to test on, and people will find reasons to do it. Not everyone, not even a majority, but enough that you’ll get more testing and feedback than you’ll ever get from “in house” testing.
Sarcasm, delivered with a
delicate, brick-like subtlety.
Why would you need to be rewarded for it in the first place?
Alpha-testing something would suggest you actually care and like the product, and thus making the product better would be more than enough reward.
Does this explain how so many bugs make it through to live patches?
This happens in all development situations. No matter how much testing is done. A testing team simply cannot come up with every possible scenario.
I see it here at work. I test as I’m developing. When I’m done, we have an embedded QA that does the initial testing (and I’ve seen some of his QA docs, they are long and thorough). After he is done it is handed off to a team of integration testers (think there are 6 of them). Bugs still make it through to production… There’s always at least one that someone doesn’t think of.
Don’t look at me like that. Whatever you’ve heard, it’s probably not true.
Does this explain how so many bugs make it through to live patches?
The bugs that come through are such bugs that would potentially be caught in Beta-testing (if at all), so don’t really see what alpha-testing have to do with it.
But then again, there will always be bugs in every thing released ever.
There is nothing that is released completely bug-free. And it is also more or less impossible to get something 100% bug-free without testing it on a live environment.
Why would you need to be rewarded for it in the first place?
Alpha-testing something would suggest you actually care and like the product, and thus making the product better would be more than enough reward.
Does this explain how so many bugs make it through to live patches?
[Edit] Okay, now that I have the (well earned) snark out of the way… In CoH, they had a couple of Beta servers. People played on them freely for various reasons, and there was generally a good back and forth with the Devs about what was going on there. Some did it to improve the game. Some to get a handle on upcoming changes. Some, because they simply liked the challenge of breaking things without the down side of doing it on the live servers (where it might mess up their real characters).
Give us a server to test on, and people will find reasons to do it. Not everyone, not even a majority, but enough that you’ll get more testing and feedback than you’ll ever get from “in house” testing.
The poster you are replying to is talking about the entitlement to rewards mindset of some for ALPHA or BETA testing additions/changes, not voicing against testing.
Blackgate Megaserver – [LaZy] Imperium of LaZy Nation
Mud Bone – Sylvari Ranger
What kind of reward would encourage you to continue testing patch notes ?
You mean alpha testing or live testing?
I mean live patches, that they add and then fix. And ingame patches that they are not fixing, like really old patches, that are braking the gameplay… Example are dungeons
They are more like jumping puzzles, and fast runs, and are full of bugs that are really really old.
game looks like its in alpha state even if its not.
Why would you need to be rewarded for it in the first place?
Alpha-testing something would suggest you actually care and like the product, and thus making the product better would be more than enough reward.
Does this explain how so many bugs make it through to live patches?
[Edit] Okay, now that I have the (well earned) snark out of the way… In CoH, they had a couple of Beta servers. People played on them freely for various reasons, and there was generally a good back and forth with the Devs about what was going on there. Some did it to improve the game. Some to get a handle on upcoming changes. Some, because they simply liked the challenge of breaking things without the down side of doing it on the live servers (where it might mess up their real characters).
Give us a server to test on, and people will find reasons to do it. Not everyone, not even a majority, but enough that you’ll get more testing and feedback than you’ll ever get from “in house” testing.
Even with the Training Room we still saw major bugs make it to live, so the fact we have that extra layer of testing doesn’t take away any chances of bugs once the patch hits live.
I do not know if there are players that helps test the game upcoming patches under an NDA, a lot of games have such meassures, and assuming they do or don’t do it would be an error on my part. But even if there are, I believe it should stay like that instead of an open-test environment like CoH was back in the day. While a few players wanted to genuinely help the game, that was a smaller community and even there we saw people that just wanted the test server to get the content first and spoil the story to everyone else.
somthing simple, maybe a mini? for participating in so many tests.
Good idea!
Maybe give them out once a year for helping with the testing. And maybe a booster, and a level-up scroll, too!
Sorry, I’m a bit snarky today, but my point stands. They’re already “rewarding” us for playing the game. That includes dealing with the bugs that make it past their QA.
And yes, I know that it’s impossible to catch all of them. I do think a public beta server would still be a good idea, ESPECIALLY for things like the upcoming feature patch. There’s no plot to ruin here, just stuff that’s going to need a lot of people testing it and trying to break it.
Sarcasm, delivered with a
delicate, brick-like subtlety.
They should reward your hard work with a Donkey pet.
If you can only play for rewards, why should you test anything? And what, the quality of rewards?
If you like the game, go test it out, help the game. If not, nothing holds you since it’s not an actual content, not your in-game characters even (should be like this if we ever see it at least )
somthing simple, maybe a mini? for participating in so many tests.
Good idea!
Maybe give them out once a year for helping with the testing. And maybe a booster, and a level-up scroll, too!
Sorry, I’m a bit snarky today, but my point stands. They’re already “rewarding” us for playing the game. That includes dealing with the bugs that make it past their QA.
And yes, I know that it’s impossible to catch all of them. I do think a public beta server would still be a good idea, ESPECIALLY for things like the upcoming feature patch. There’s no plot to ruin here, just stuff that’s going to need a lot of people testing it and trying to break it.
I think that those are not rewards for playing the game. But it is a simple idea, give them a free sample so they can purchase if they like it. It is a marketing idea. They want to earn, so they are giving us a free samples of those products.
somthing simple, maybe a mini? for participating in so many tests.
Good idea!
Maybe give them out once a year for helping with the testing. And maybe a booster, and a level-up scroll, too!
Sorry, I’m a bit snarky today, but my point stands. They’re already “rewarding” us for playing the game. That includes dealing with the bugs that make it past their QA.
And yes, I know that it’s impossible to catch all of them. I do think a public beta server would still be a good idea, ESPECIALLY for things like the upcoming feature patch. There’s no plot to ruin here, just stuff that’s going to need a lot of people testing it and trying to break it.
I think a booster is the best idea actually, since it would enhance your time on the live servers for spending your time on the test servers.
I wouldn’t care for some stupid carrot like a minipet or a legendary. The fact that the game is better and the worst of the problems have been taken care of is the reward good enough for me.
There’s no reason to add an incentive to “test” the game. Has anyone noticed that fighting Tequatl is actually a bit harder than it used to be? Well, that’s because they increased his health/toughness. Why? Because TTS found out you could glitch him. And it had happened on multiple occasions, both with an anet dev there to see it for themselves, and without one there. Given the haphazard method of anet stealth nerfing and/or not fixing correctly, it would not surprise me if teq STILL can be bugged. Of course, for obvious reasons, despite my own personal suspicions, TTS is not going to attempt to blitz teq hard enough to make sure anet fixed it.
Point is, there’s going to be bugs anet never sees at all until a player finds it. If they had to find every bug before releasing the game, they’d never put out an update at all.
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