Sugar Shack 21: Making QA Live Up To Its Potential
As Walrus pointed out in locking a recent thread, CR2.0 is not the only thing to be tested on the QA server. This came as a surprise to me, even though I am not a PvPer at all. But it makes me wonder if there is a perception gap, or a gulf of expectations, between the people running the QA project, and people who will be on the QA server. As a result, if people log on and just PvP, or just do PBs or just dance and pray for cake,
most likely we'll all be missing something the devs have been working on and need feedback with.
So, I'd like to suggest some way for the devs to task players with specific tasks to try and make sure that things work correctly. These are kind of like test scripts. There might be tasks like trying an emote (like /afk!!) or trying one type of weapon against a mob or a boss. Or trying to email various types of items (common, boss drop, consumable, code frag, singleton, etc.), etc. Maybe my examples suck, but you get the idea.
The other benefit of this is that it involves the RPers and non-PvP types. Lots of people will be testing the daylights out of the combat system. But many of us would rather test other things, and there must be a lot of these other things which will need testing.
Clearly business as usual will test some features of the game. But it may be that there are other, more subtle things, that we need to check out too. So, if there were some way for the devs to ask people to test specific things, I think it would make the QA time more productive. The tasks might be posted on a daily basis in a QA forum, or they might be sent by email to people ingame. Or Flash Traffic could be used again. No window dressing for ingame world consistency would be needed for this.
My shortest Sugar Shack ever!
This post may be found at manifoldmischief.blogspot.com, along with neighborhood mission reviews and other writings relevant to MxO.
