Guild Wars 2

Ok this isn’t defending anybody and genuinely a question I want to know an answer to…please no flaming and stupid comments because I genuinely want to get peoples (Anets would be nice) thoughts. This comes about after reading a post listing all the quite intrusive bugs created in the past 3 months. There were quite a few to say the least but I myself am fully aware you can’t point fingers at developers for bugs, you can only create procedures to remove them.

How do you QA test something that requires 150 people to complete/test/break without employing 150 QA testers and not doing a public test server?
Can’t do a public test server of the final patch of LS due to spoilers and leaks. I can imagine how difficult it is to employ and coordinate 150 QA testers that are experienced enough to complete the knights event.

The only thing I can think of is an ANET public QA team. Forgot the idea that your content won’t get leaked, because it inevitably will even with an NDA. Run a survey similar to a beta roll out asking your profession, MMO background etc. hand pick your QA testers with those of a testing background who can fill in a QA form.
Real test environments, real QA testers with production ready content, ready to test a few weeks in advance.

Actually i just made a similar suggestion:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Suggestion-LS-and-Content-release-and-QA/first#post3735043
Here is what i write on that topic

after the last release of the LS unfortunately we can see that maybe the 2 weeks release schedule is to tight.
I would like to suggest to Anet a couple of things as a “programmer” myself (i’m an Oracle DBA and i know how much testing is needed to do something in the right way as the customer want).
First thing:
If you want to maintain the 2 weeks release schedule i would like to suggest to reclute some of the players in order to massively test the patch one, two or three times. So a closed beta test of only the content. You can come up with the process to choose which players to reclute (with non-disclosure agreement and so on). Or maybe as someone as said in the forum use something like DOTA2 that have a client only for testing the feautures.
Otherwise please change the schedule to something more “human” to test more intensively the new content, so less people will be angry for the bugs and more people will be happy with you and your job.

I agree with what you are saying. And i think is totally possible to do what we are suggesting.

The thing is, no matter how much you test something things might (and will) slip through. You can never get a test environment to be 100% identical to a live environment, and thus you always risk running into issues not present on the test one, but on the live one.

I have played quite a few games with player-tests before release (both PTRs and NDA-protected betas) and they STILL have bugs and issues when released, so adding those doesn’t really make something issue-free. It just costs time, money, resources and hurts the game by spilling out information before it is ready to be revealed. There is always some kittens that can’t respect NDAs after all.

Good to see somebody else is on the same wavelength Lyanna! I think coming from a programming/data/software discipline always helps to see things logically!

In regards to krall I 100% agree that you won’t be able to get all the bugs removed but having a build you would have pushed live in 2013 an extra phase of QA for the 2014 releases will reduce that number. Something is obviously missing from the procedure. It’s especially important to refine and review something that in anets own words has ‘never been done before’.

Time resources and money shouldn’t be overlooked but this subject precisely is something that your profit should go towards. Put it back into the product to improve it, increase the income get more profit rinse repeat. If ANET and it’s parent companies have the money (which I’m sure they do) why not reinvest in something as as vital as refined QA. This is still public testing after all, if anything it’s cheaper than private QA and more appropriate in this scenario.

Time is a different matter, they’ve consigned themselves to bimonthly releases, this solution (if any) should tailor to that.

lordkrall.7241:

The thing is, no matter how much you test something things might (and will) slip through. You can never get a test environment to be 100% identical to a live environment, and thus you always risk running into issues not present on the test one, but on the live one.

Bugs we accept. They’re inevitable, and no reasonable person is going to get worked up over bugs. But the mess they just released? That’s beyond the pale. There’s a line between “bugs happen” and “we’re not doing a good enough job”. ArenaNet, with increasing frequency, is finding themselves on the wrong side of that line.