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Beta testing again just small part of the world?
Elikal
Member UncommonPosts: 7,912
Mind ya, it is just hearsay. AND it is stuff the developers said, like the beta test involves testing selected parts. After SWTOR beta I am VERY skeptical against this sort of testing. It is a bit a red flag to me, if a game is not tested as a whole, as it is, but chunk by chunk, and only selected stuff. Actually I think MMOs would serve best if they had really open, vast betas with REAL feedback. And not those pre-made questionaires.
Just some impression. But I get the feeling them companies only beta test selected parts and only when most stuff is decided. Hurm...
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It all depends on what they are testing.
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That's mainly what beta tests are good for. If you focus all beta testers on a step by step basis more bugs and weaknesses will be revealed and fixed. You are thinking about open beta tests which allows you to play through the whole game (mostly) if you pre order it. That's hardly even beta testing. It's marketing.
I've been doing software testing for a living for 15 years, and there are valid reasons to do some of the testing part by part. But you are to some degree correct that there has to also be a portion of testing that is comprehensive to make sure all of those parts don't blow up when they're run together.
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"Hearsay....skeptical...."
As well you should be.
If the company and testers treat it as a marketing event then "yes" I wold be sceptical. If they are actually treating it as a beta test then I would say a focused approach to certain areas seems preferable.
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I agree, as long as they eventually test every area in the Closed Beta which I have no reason to believe they won't by the time Open Beta roles around. Elikal may be referring to Patch Notes he may have seen during the Stress Test or leaked videos only showing the same areas over and over again. I can't comment due to the NDA lol.
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Can someone who is knowledgeable about this make a comment?
My layman's, completely non-technical guess is that different areas are going to take different stress loads, er "differently".
by building up areas, examining the date and slowly adding more people, one might understand not only how particular areas handle population but there could be a possible large consideration when all these areas are running at once. Something that can be looked at when the minute details of each area are known.
However, I'd love to hear an actual educated and experienced opinion on this.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
There are all kinds of different levels of testing. The problem you're having is trying to find a single meaning for a vague general term. "Beta Stress Testing" can be a myriad of different types of tests from individual zone capacity, to data base performance, server performance, etc. It can mean a piece is being stressed or all is.
The type of whole meal deal stress testing you're talking about typically happens very, very late in the development cycle in the last couple of months before release.
There are also different ongoing levels of testing happening simultaneously. As far as I know, the waves of weekend testers that have been invited so far have not tested the AvA in Cyrodiil. But some testers have been there testing the capacity of the engine to handle large numbers and some also have access to the whole enchilada that has been developed to date... someone is doing that beta testing, but it's not the hordes that are allowed in on weekends every now and then.
Once upon a time if you were in the beta you were in all of the beta every day, all of the time for as long as it took. That still happens but in addition to that, there are other larger groups of special purpose testers that are allowed in occasionally.
The problem is semantics: all of those different things (plus additional pure marketing events most companies do to generate buzz after the NDA is lifted) are called "beta."
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I agree 100%.
I would guess that 8 out of 10 beta testers never submit a bug report. As stated by a few other posters, alot of beta testing is meant to stress different things at different times so that programmers and QA engineers can look for things like race conditions, zone failures, CTDs or other single points of failure with live data in real time.
Funniest thing I have seen during a open beta test was a team of bots testing their automated tools out.