New test realm patch notes.

[Quark]

As someone that has spent a lot of time doing testing on both MMO's and console games the fact that this game is out and as successful as it is alone tells me that Blizzard is quite capable of doing internal testing.[right][snapback]77815[/snapback][/right]

I wouldn't be so quick to say that. How many times have they patched the game, only to introduce some really annoying disconnect bug that caused huge issues?

Actually, I'm going off on a tangeant here, but now that I think about it, I think I know what it's doing. Blizzard's code probably has a lot of failsafes that can be triggered through unexpected results. Get an unexpected result, disconnect the player. If the unexpected result was through cheating, they get kicked rightfully. If the unexpected result was part of normal gameplay, that means either the code for what's happening - like Mind Control, that's notorious for discs - or the code for the failsafe itself is wrong. A change in the code to make it more efficient or less buggy then starts triggering the failsafes like nothing, and you have massive disconnects in the game.

There's really only one person who can 100% completely test code, and that's the person who wrote it. I don't care what other people think, I've seen tons of bugs either skipped over, unnoticed, or simply not triggered because people didn't understand exactly what was supposed to happen in the first place. Then you hit problem number two - programmers don't test for bugs well. When a programmer tests a program, he typically goes through the expected processes. "I'll do this, then this, then that. Did it all work? Good." He did exactly what people are supposed to do. Real users don't act that way. They do the unexpected all the time. They break bounds, they do things in the wrong order, they click places no one expects to be clicked.

So, really, the best way you can test a program is to have someone who's really good at doing the inane. He finds an edge case and plays with it until he's certain nothing buggy happens. He must also have a good understand of what's supposed to happen, and has to collaborate with the programmer once he thinks he found something unexpected.


I'm not ready to bash Blizzard's QA overall. We have no idea how well they are doing, because we don't see the internal test builds. If they have bug-prone programmers, the QA is overloaded. If they have really good programmers, then QA may be slacking. However, I do think it's fair to criticize how certain things are going through. For instance, dwarf priests couldn't do MC discovery quest. They already had credit for it, even though they never touched the quest. Tauren females couldn't jump through the portal once they did it - they were too big. Since this is a quest whose reward is being constantly reused, it's critical to get that testing right.

This is where the test servers should theoretically shine. You get a huge addition to the edge case testing. Not because test server players are good at testing, but through sheer brute force and the fact that players aren't all the same. The more test servers you have, the better the amount of edge cases you get. The fact that European and American servers are completely seperate means player behavior has probably evolved to be at least somewhat different, so having a PvE test server over there only makes it more likely to find bugs.