Patching 1.0.2c -- potentially nerfed mob damage

[Lissa]

Lissa, just accept the fact that what YOU think of as QA is NOT the industry standard for QA.

You've been around long enough to know Lissa isn't going to do this.

Before I posted this:

I agree, game balance and such are developer issues, and not QA issues.

At least according to my conversations with my friends who work (well worked) in game QA.

I had put another sentence that was something to the extent of... not that that matters since you'll argue that the game industries definition of QA is wrong....
I deleted it before I posted, but he is pretty predictable.

Lissa will be Lissa, Treesh. If he hasn't changed by now, he's not about to start. Just let it slide. I mean he's already been arguing with at least 2 or three people who agree with him in in the areas that matter, but disagree primarily in the semantics of the definition of QA... he's drawn in you and TD into the fray because of the definition of a word... just let him live in his world, the thread will die, and we'll all be happier for it.

Let me give you a comparison of what I consider a QA success so that you can see what I think is how QA is properly implemented in the game industry.

Even though I hate the last 5 minutes of ME 3, it is a QA success in my book.

1) They sat down and planned out a path from leaving off where ME 2 Arrival ended to the ending of ME 3 and wrote an engaging story (up to the last 5 minutes).

2) They took the annoyances that people found in ME 1 (like the Mako) and the ME 2 (scanning) and put in more streamlined and fun aspects.

3) They minimize the UI as much as possible while still giving you all the information you needed so that you had a more cinematic experience to the game play.

4) There were no glaring bugs.

5) They improved the graphics with better textures.

6) They took what was best about ME 2 (the action) and the best about ME 1 (the upgradeable items) and combined them together.

Simply, the QA process used by BioWare from start to finish of ME 3 (even if the ending has huge plot holes) was superior to what we've seen in D3.

What was missed with Blizzard in their QA process of D3:

1) Story is laughable. While Act 1's story was good, 2 was completely telegraphed, 3 was boring, and 4 was roll your eyes.

2) They made poor choices on how to handle inferno, way overtuning it so only those that used exploitive builds were able to get there before those exploitive builds were slammed down.

3) Complete lack of viabilty of some skills for a number of classes.

4) Issues that have yet to be addressed for some customer (latency for Euros)

5) Bugs that should have been caught internally (like the being able to cancel auctions by just changing your system time).

This is why I think Blizzard's QA is worse. They had a lot of time to look at things and they didn't.