As we have a bunch of people going into beta-tests as Heart of Thorns approaches and many have expressed concerns about what they should be doing, I thought I would share some advice from working as an in-house tester.
Follow Instructions. Your email gave fairly simple ones – show up and play during a specified period. This particular test is focused on population and server behavior so you don’t have a lot of other demands this time, but other tests may have different instructions. Stay alert while playing – there may be in-game announcements, such as asking people to travel to specific zones (so they can study how the servers manage tidal shifts). Be ready to drop your personal play to carry out these tasks. If you get picked in the future, be mindful of what you’re being asked to do and read your email fresh each time you get one.
Reproducibility. If you do hit something that looks like a bug – stop and take stock. For the people who will be looking at your bug reports “what went wrong” is actually less important than “what were you doing when something went wrong?” See if you can repeat the action and cause it to happen again. Not being able to trigger it again is as important as succeeding in provoking it. If you can pass along a clear description of how to cause the bug, the people who have to run the bug down will sing your praises. After a few attempts at reproducing the bug yourself, then write your ticket. Be thorough – include what race and profession you are playing, what zone you are in, if you were in radius of a dynamic event at the time, and (this may sound odd) how long you had been playing/how long the client has been open at the time.
Congratulations to those who got invited. Have fun, pay attention, and help squash some bugs!
“You keep saying ‘its unfair.’
I wonder what your basis for comparison is…”
- Jareth, King of Goblins.
The email doesn’t specify but I’m sure many people will do anyway. Especially those who plan to stream it, make youtube videos or otherwise report on it to the wider community.
Danielle Aurorel, Dear Dragon We Got Your Cookies [Nom], Desolation (EU).
This particular beta event is a stress test, so it is mainly there to push the servers to a certain limit to see if it can handle a certain load of activity. As advice to people that may not have participated in a stress test before, you can expect lag and disconnects, because the test is there to see how much the system can handle.
its a “stress test” I am in Australia… it will be extra extra stress due of the lag :P
In this case that’s actually a good thing.
As other people have said the main point of a stress test is to find out how the servers handle the amount of players that are going to be in the map.
It might be annoying for you but it’s very useful information for Anet so they can ensure it’s less likely to be a problem when the expansion is actually released.
Danielle Aurorel, Dear Dragon We Got Your Cookies [Nom], Desolation (EU).
I have done some thorough bug-hunting during GW2 beta and I definitely will do so again this time around. Not much time for crazy stuff, but if I see something breakable I will give it a try.
I don’t think many players will go bughunting tbh. Not that I blame them.
Still some very sound advice.
Thanks. I don’t expect active bug hunting from public testers and I doubt ArenaNet does either, but better than average bug reporting helps everybody .
“You keep saying ‘its unfair.’
I wonder what your basis for comparison is…”
- Jareth, King of Goblins.
This is a stress test beta so they’re really looking for lots of people to log on and do the normal activities. And of course see what they have to offer and try those out and see what happens.
I post from a phone so please excuse any references to ducks or any other auto corrections.
But OP….. I was planning to spend the whole 2 hours dyeing and redyeing my armor!!
(OMG! This is the exact wrong shade of purple! I can’t play with my armor looking like this!)
^^
But thanks for the tips on what to look for.
Be careful what you ask for
ANet may give it to you.
Yeah, we have a thread with someone concerned about how the Revenant armor dyes thanks to previews, we must give feedback on poor dye channel choice! (Seriously it might be worth a couple of minutes to check that, as the 4 channels in the preview window are not always accurate to actual dye options).
Resist the urge to role play and stare at tool tips. We have to put these servers to the test! Attack anything that’s red. Spam skills wildly like a crazy person! We have to mimic wvw zerg battles as much as possible.
(Seriously it might be worth a couple of minutes to check that, as the 4 channels in the preview window are not always accurate to actual dye options).