Mihail d'Amour
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Posted - 2006.06.06 19:58:00 -
[1]
Quick disclaimer: I have not spent any time on Eve's test server.
However, I have beta tested a handful of games as well as 'playtested' updates for games I was playing at the time. The issues that are coming up here are that most people 'play around' on test servers and don't test. I'm guilty of this when I beta test, mostly because I want to know if I'm going to shell out money for the game when it is done. But I also spend time repeatedly doing some inane function and then tweaking a stat/skill/ability/yougettheidea and doing the same function again to see what the difference is. I'll dedicate a couple of hours to moving stuff in and out of hold/cargo/backpack/bank/hanger/etc, beating on cancel buttons in the middle of actions, trying to move stuff out of a trade window after accepting (or the other person accepting), and doing the stuff that testers are supposed to do.. namely, test. With that in mind, the most effective testing occurs when a scenario can be most easily accomplished and repeated. If I have to level up a skill or character by grinding through the normal process, it makes testing certain features difficult to impossible. Most mature games have features on their test server that allow you to manipulate these stats manually (blue frogs in SWG, /set skillname 1000 in UO, etc). This ability is invaluable for good testing purposes, provided you have decent testers who are motivated to find bugs. If we save ourselves three weeks of a titan parked at a high-sec gate repeatedly firing the superweapon and taking out every ship, every concord response, and every gate gun without ever taking any damage because everyone on the test server could fly Titans I don't see this as a negative thing. Skills, stats, isk, ships, equipment should all be completely accessible on test to every single player because every component should be testable. Just because I choose one course with my main in-game character does not mean that I don't have the intellectual prowess and determination to test some element of the game I don't normally use and am 6 months of training out from. Yes, it will introduce code that will never hit production (we all hope). Yes, this subtly changes the deployed code. But the difference is something that can be reasonably predicted. And if the difference is that disconcerting, then three-stage the testing process to 1. test server - fully customizable characters 2. playtest server - passed code from testing deployed on a mirror of the live server to see the impact of migration of new code and to test in a closed environment that perfectly matches production without the added testing tools 3. production. One can certainly disable the test server for a week or so before deployment to encourage use of the playtest server.
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