future lw releases, open beta testing plz?

future lw releases, open beta testing plz?

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Posted by: plushiesoda.8150

plushiesoda.8150

I know I may sound as a QQer, but if you’re a long time gw2 player, you probably already know THE FACT that after every release/update we get days, sometimes weeks… even months (oooh dry top~ the memories~) of daily hotfixes, which is a good thing!! however…

Sometimes we get them once a day… twice… thrice… 4…. didn’t we end up getting 6 on the same day when bitterfrost’s released?

For a HUGE part of the community this may just be of little annoyance, _ you have to update 300 files every couple of hours??? so what!! shut the hell up frigging QQer!!!!!!_ you may think…

However, the world ain’t that perfect, gw2 is a game that goes beyond the so called “first world countries” and “lovely” internet connections sadly are still a thing even in parts of Europe and North america.

Just a small 66 files update may interrupt their gaming to a couple of thousands of players for “more than a couple of minutes”, me and my friends among them.

I know Anet may have better places where prioritize their resources, “love” happens, game-coding may be hard and fixing something without breaking anything’d be next to impossible, I’m not really blaming their errors.

I’m blaming the feeling that everybody reading this probably may be thinking* if you bothered to reach this part without skipping ahead*, whether you want to admit it or not Anet doesn’t beta-test enough before releasing something.

I know nothing about programming or how the inner-workings of a company such as Anet may be…. but…. is it too much to ask? a Public Test Server before releasing a LW update? must we take the “days” worth of hotfixes way all the time? just look at the last GemStore update from a couple of days ago, they’re still releasing hotfixes for it at least once a day.

Maybe I haven’t investigated enough and gw2 has a Public Test Server of sorts…. if that’s the case… how come I have never heard of it? are they promoting it? then why no matter what they update, a couple of hotfixes will always come along with it?

sorry for the long post o/ I know it may not among to anything, but hey! I can dream… umu

future lw releases, open beta testing plz?

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Posted by: Ayrilana.1396

Ayrilana.1396

They have people that test the releases. Some things break between the test server and live servers. Having open beta tests ruins the surprise and honestly isn’t any different than just releasing the episode as normal.

future lw releases, open beta testing plz?

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Posted by: Illconceived Was Na.9781

Illconceived Was Na.9781

ANet (as well as many other game companies) find that sometimes it’s more trouble than it’s worth. Open testing reveals some bugs, but more often attracts folks who are more interested in exploring the new content/mechanics and aren’t invested in quality; they burn out quickly when the release actually ships. Plus, this also takes people away from the existing game (at least for the duration of the test).

It’s also an enormous amount of work. Essentially, they have to release at least twice (once for testing, once for ‘live’) and maintain multiple versions of the game.

So a few more issues exposed, at the expense of faster content consumption, increased maintenance, and multiple versions of the game being live… it’s not necessarily worth doing.


It’s an inherent problem with content-driven software: it’s complicated, there are lots of moving parts, it gets used drastically differently by different people, there are all sorts of interrelated bits that can cause unexpected effects, there’s potential for many foreseen consequences, and so on.

Take BDO: the EU/NA version essentially gets publicly tested in Korea a month or more in advance, they have weekly maintenance patches, and sometimes, they still have to Hotfix.

Clearly, there’s a lot of preventative measures that can be taken (and maybe ANet does enough… or maybe not), but I doubt very much that we’ll ever see a major release without the need for hotfixes… not for GW2 or any other MMO.

John Smith: “you should kill monsters, because killing monsters is awesome.”

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Posted by: Danikat.8537

Danikat.8537

My other MMO – Elder Scrolls Online – has a Public Test Server (PTS) and exactly the same thing happens there with numerous hot fixes and follow-up patches after an update is released.

I think there’s a few reasons public beta testing isn’t effective at stopping this:

1) The vast majority of people who play on the PTS are not actually interesting in finding and reporting bugs. Many simply want to mess around with the tools provided for testing (like instantly creating a max level character), or they just want to play the new release early, either just because they’re curious or so they can do things like practice raids so they can claim to be the first to beat it when it’s released.

2) Related to 1 in some cases people have actively tried to prevent bugs and exploits from being reported so they’d make it into the live game and could be exploited before being reported and fixed.

3) Even when people do provide feedback it’s usually not great. QA is as much a skill as any other part of game design – I’ve been told that a good tester can recite from memory every single action they took (as in every key they pressed, exactly where their character walked etc.) for the past hour. They need to be able to do that in order to correctly identify what’s causing a bug and replicate it. So a post from someone on the forum saying “X is bugged, plz fix” doesn’t really help the company at all – they still need to get someone to find out what’s actually wrong with it, what’s causing that and what needs to happen for it to be fixed.

4) Sometimes they simply don’t have time to fix everything. There’s a lot of factors that go into deciding when to release even a small update and bug fixing is just one of those. They can’t put the release on hold indefinitely to make sure all the bugs are fixed, so the QA team just has to do as much as they can with the time they have. They’ll have a list of bugs ranked by priority (how badly they break the game) and they’ll fix as many as they can in the time they have and then fix the rest later. Often if a release has “tons of bugs” it’s 99% very minor things – they description on an item was wrong or you have to talk to an NPC twice before they’ll sell you something. What you don’t see is the ones they fixed instead – the one where talking to an NPC crashes the server or entering a story instance locks you out of your character or right-clicking on an essential item causes it to disappear, or something explodes and turns 1/2 a dozen surrounding items bright pink….

5) Sometimes bugs appear between testing and release. My favourite example of this isn’t from a game at all: In my old job we had a database we used to log enquires. When we got a new version it was tested by all 7 end users on the same PCs we’d be using the final version on and we all agreed it was pretty much bug free. The only thing that happened after that was we saved it to a new location on the server. Somehow that introduced a bug where if you clicked the empty space next to a button it asked if you wanted to save, and if you clicked yes the program crashed. I left the company a year and a half later and that was never fixed, because no one could figure out what was causing it.

On top of which they have to accept that a PTS means putting staff time (and therefore money) into moderating that community, collating feedback and ‘managing’ testers, and that it means there will basically be no surprises in anything they ever release. It’s bad enough when stuff leaks – imagine if there was never any mystery about any new release because everyone already knew exactly what was in it, right down to every single new item, and 1/2 the players had already completed it.

Danielle Aurorel, Dear Dragon We Got Your Cookies [Nom], Desolation (EU).

“Life’s a journey, not a destination.”

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Posted by: Menadena.7482

Menadena.7482

They have people that test the releases. Some things break between the test server and live servers. Having open beta tests ruins the surprise and honestly isn’t any different than just releasing the episode as normal.

That is a trivial change to the ask. Just say release day is when it goes live to the test server. The following week copy the test server code to the live servers.

future lw releases, open beta testing plz?

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Posted by: Ayrilana.1396

Ayrilana.1396

They have people that test the releases. Some things break between the test server and live servers. Having open beta tests ruins the surprise and honestly isn’t any different than just releasing the episode as normal.

That is a trivial change to the ask. Just say release day is when it goes live to the test server. The following week copy the test server code to the live servers.

Did you quote the correct person? I wasn’t asking for any change in my post.

Things are different between the test server and live servers as we have seen. Anet has acknowledged that there have been bugs that weren’t present on the test servers but were on the live servers. A test environment will almost never be the same as a live environment. Simply copying the code over isn’t feasible otherwise they would be doing it. ThInk about why.

As others have mentioned, the vast majority of players are terrible at QA and many of those probably wouldn’t even bother to test. They just want to play the content sooner.

(edited by Ayrilana.1396)

future lw releases, open beta testing plz?

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Posted by: Menadena.7482

Menadena.7482

They have people that test the releases. Some things break between the test server and live servers. Having open beta tests ruins the surprise and honestly isn’t any different than just releasing the episode as normal.

That is a trivial change to the ask. Just say release day is when it goes live to the test server. The following week copy the test server code to the live servers.

Did you quote the correct person? I wasn’t asking for any change in my post.

Things are different between the test server and live servers as we have seen. Anet has acknowledged that there have been bugs that weren’t present on the test servers but were on the live servers. A test environment will almost never be the same as a live environment. Simply copying the code over isn’t feasible otherwise they would be doing it. ThInk about why.

As others have mentioned, the vast majority of players are terrible at QA and many of those probably wouldn’t even bother to test. They just want to play the content sooner.

Yes, I quoted the right person. I was saying you would not ruin the surprise if the first day of testing was considered the release (or soft release or whatever).

It may seem like a diversion but this is why I am using the 64 bit mac client as my main client now. Sure, it is not ready for prime time but it is the best way to gather data of how it operates to typical users just playing the game.

future lw releases, open beta testing plz?

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Posted by: Ayrilana.1396

Ayrilana.1396

They have people that test the releases. Some things break between the test server and live servers. Having open beta tests ruins the surprise and honestly isn’t any different than just releasing the episode as normal.

That is a trivial change to the ask. Just say release day is when it goes live to the test server. The following week copy the test server code to the live servers.

Did you quote the correct person? I wasn’t asking for any change in my post.

Things are different between the test server and live servers as we have seen. Anet has acknowledged that there have been bugs that weren’t present on the test servers but were on the live servers. A test environment will almost never be the same as a live environment. Simply copying the code over isn’t feasible otherwise they would be doing it. ThInk about why.

As others have mentioned, the vast majority of players are terrible at QA and many of those probably wouldn’t even bother to test. They just want to play the content sooner.

Yes, I quoted the right person. I was saying you would not ruin the surprise if the first day of testing was considered the release (or soft release or whatever).

It may seem like a diversion but this is why I am using the 64 bit mac client as my main client now. Sure, it is not ready for prime time but it is the best way to gather data of how it operates to typical users just playing the game.

Those who are not testing would have the surprise ruined. If everyone could participate then what’s the point of having public test servers?

It’s been established that they’re ineffective in other games. Think about all of those HoT beta tests. How many players actually contributed quality bug reports? And this is out of how many that were playing? Did this prevent all bugs from being present on that map?

(edited by Ayrilana.1396)

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Posted by: Illconceived Was Na.9781

Illconceived Was Na.9781

Um, what’s the difference between calling the day the test servers are updated release day and what we have now? There are occasional bugs affecting non-new content (and many of those wouldn’t be caught on a test server; see above); most bugs affect the new content.

The end result is that ANet works a lot harder to put out any content, there’s a lot of people playing on different servers (diluting the MMO-ness of the game), many people are spoiled, and not all that many bugs are prevented.

John Smith: “you should kill monsters, because killing monsters is awesome.”

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Posted by: Healix.5819

Healix.5819

The live servers double as the public test servers. If the living world had a beta, nothing would change; you’d still need to patch.

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Posted by: Menadena.7482

Menadena.7482

They have people that test the releases. Some things break between the test server and live servers. Having open beta tests ruins the surprise and honestly isn’t any different than just releasing the episode as normal.

That is a trivial change to the ask. Just say release day is when it goes live to the test server. The following week copy the test server code to the live servers.

Did you quote the correct person? I wasn’t asking for any change in my post.

Things are different between the test server and live servers as we have seen. Anet has acknowledged that there have been bugs that weren’t present on the test servers but were on the live servers. A test environment will almost never be the same as a live environment. Simply copying the code over isn’t feasible otherwise they would be doing it. ThInk about why.

As others have mentioned, the vast majority of players are terrible at QA and many of those probably wouldn’t even bother to test. They just want to play the content sooner.

Yes, I quoted the right person. I was saying you would not ruin the surprise if the first day of testing was considered the release (or soft release or whatever).

It may seem like a diversion but this is why I am using the 64 bit mac client as my main client now. Sure, it is not ready for prime time but it is the best way to gather data of how it operates to typical users just playing the game.

Those who are not testing would have the surprise ruined. If everyone could participate then what’s the point of having public test servers?

It’s been established that they’re ineffective in other games. Think about all of those HoT beta tests. How many players actually contributed quality bug reports? And this is out of how many that were playing? Did this prevent all bugs from being present on that map?

Or just make everything easier and call patch Tuesdays test day? That following Friday is the official release day.

future lw releases, open beta testing plz?

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Posted by: Ayrilana.1396

Ayrilana.1396

They have people that test the releases. Some things break between the test server and live servers. Having open beta tests ruins the surprise and honestly isn’t any different than just releasing the episode as normal.

That is a trivial change to the ask. Just say release day is when it goes live to the test server. The following week copy the test server code to the live servers.

Did you quote the correct person? I wasn’t asking for any change in my post.

Things are different between the test server and live servers as we have seen. Anet has acknowledged that there have been bugs that weren’t present on the test servers but were on the live servers. A test environment will almost never be the same as a live environment. Simply copying the code over isn’t feasible otherwise they would be doing it. ThInk about why.

As others have mentioned, the vast majority of players are terrible at QA and many of those probably wouldn’t even bother to test. They just want to play the content sooner.

Yes, I quoted the right person. I was saying you would not ruin the surprise if the first day of testing was considered the release (or soft release or whatever).

It may seem like a diversion but this is why I am using the 64 bit mac client as my main client now. Sure, it is not ready for prime time but it is the best way to gather data of how it operates to typical users just playing the game.

Those who are not testing would have the surprise ruined. If everyone could participate then what’s the point of having public test servers?

It’s been established that they’re ineffective in other games. Think about all of those HoT beta tests. How many players actually contributed quality bug reports? And this is out of how many that were playing? Did this prevent all bugs from being present on that map?

Or just make everything easier and call patch Tuesdays test day? That following Friday is the official release day.

Which is meaningless and is pretty much arbitrary.