Pre-Patch = free testing?

[Latherfal-nordrassil (Latherfal)]

All pre-patches are testing. There is only so much testing and fixing you can do, that million of players can’t break.

[Rosele-bleeding-hollow]

@Carhagen-moon-guard

No, everything is not broken, not by a long shot. This is another thing that doesn’t help game developers. Hyperbole. Right now there are a few minor bugs here and there, with the largest issue being Warband banks not functioning due to a critical issue. Hopefully that will be fixed by next week with maintenance, but we’ll see.

I’ve played not even 4 hours since pre-patch hit, I’ve found at least 5 bugs this far, more than 1 per hour, imagine if I would play more, lots of sources saying that last bosses from the raids are completely broken, so I think you are mistaken on this one buddy.

@Carhagen-moon-guard

I’ve worked in both.

Which is why I know that no patch/release is bug free, that it is a literal impossibility, and the larger your audience, the higher the chance that there will be bugs. This is especially true when your audience is in the millions and running your software on rigs of varying levels of performance (the older the hardware/software on the rig, the higher the chance that there will be bugs).

Doesn’t seem so, if you did you would know that this stage that they released is unacceptable, bugs will happen, more with a 20 year old game that they put feature over feature, but still far to be acceptable those issues.

@Carhagen-moon-guard

It actually is the right way of testing. One of my old friends who used to do game development used to have a saying. 1 day of a patch being in the hands of the players is worth 10 weeks of QA. That’s simply because of the volume of reports that can help narrow down a bug. When you have a fairly closed environment for testing (internal testing, closed alpha/beta tests), you’re limiting the amount of reports you can get. Open PTR testing is better, but then it really depends on your audience. Are they treating the PTR like actual testing for bugs? Or are they treating it like an early preview? Because the former is great, the latter? Not so much.

Agreed that players help a lot, but 1 day is not 10 weeks of QA, not even close. But anyway, the point is, production isn’t the place of testing. Huge changes like done would need further inspection and careful debugging. The beta test wasn’t close to be fairly closed, the servers were literally full…

[Carhagen-moon-guard (Carhagen)]

@Rosele-bleeding-hollow

but 1 day is not 10 weeks of QA, not even close.

Again, I’ve literally worked in game dev and in development IT. I can flat out tell you that it is, simply due to the volume of reports.

The developer I used to work for would get maybe 200, 300 people testing for their game (I cannot reveal who the developer is or what the game is because of NDAs that I signed when I left) during closed testing. They’d be testing most of the content for that release, be all over the place, so we’d get maybe 10 reports on each issue with detail on the issue ranging between unhelpful hyperbole to extremely detailed and helpful thank you for making my day easier. Some content got no reports at all, because it wasn’t something we were actively testing, but it got altered all the same (dungeons for example, hardly anyone was forming groups to test dungeon content during our testing unless we were releasing a new dungeon).

When we’d drop a patch on live servers though, we’d get thousands of reports on each issue, far more than we’d even remotely get via closed testing. Weeks of time that QA would have spent trying to lock down bugs was done in hours, because we had that much more to work with.

[Myzrym-area-52]

@Rosele-bleeding-hollow

I would play more, lots of sources saying that last bosses from the raids are completely broken, so I think you are mistaken on this one buddy.

Was fun doing Tindral yesterday when he just wouldn’t land on the second platform and then nuked the entire raid three times in a row.

[Rosele-bleeding-hollow]

@Myzrym-area-52

Was fun doing Tindral yesterday when he just wouldn’t land on the second platform and then nuked the entire raid three times in a row.

I think that is intended then, since people here are saying that there are only a few minor bugs right.

[Myzrym-area-52]

Yeah I think it’s just the Tindralphobia filter working as intended.

In Blizzard We Trust.

[Bugbug-chaos-bolt]

So true! The bug must be recreated or specifics given for the dev team to fix the line of code with the error. It’s not as easy as most think to fix a bug with minimal details provided.

[Aeryas-stormrage]

and you’re writing this because…
you hate the game…?
no…it’s because, like me,
you love the game, and you
hate what’s becoming of it.

[Adorability-moon-guard]

Nothing new. We were live testing DF.

[Pakapaka-aggramar]

Nah live is currently beta testing irl.

[Rosele-bleeding-hollow]

And found yet another bug… When you use the table mission for BFA, if you put a single hero the chance is 75%, if you add a companion troop that counters the enemy skill it goes to 10% lololol

[Hysorn-stormrage]

No, that would be the paid Beta.

[Randrizz-wyrmrest-accord (Randrizz)]

Always has been. And good luck to those who have “early access” for TWW launch.

[Henceforth-area-52]

@Rosele-bleeding-hollow

I play since TBC

@Rosele-bleeding-hollow

never seen a Pre-Patch that was this bad

@Rosele-bleeding-hollow

bad implemented “features”, unbalancing old things

You seem to have a pretty bad memory.
I play since Vanilla and I’ve seen worse.

[Rosele-bleeding-hollow]

@Henceforth-area-52

You seem to have a pretty bad memory.
I play since Vanilla and I’ve seen worse.

Tell me when, I didn’t played pre-patch BFA and SL, because… reasons…

[Be-chogall]

expansions and prepatches are huge complicated things and world quests from 3 expansions ago are not a high priority to fix. I wish there were fewer issues, I wish warbanks were working, but a BFA world quest is just not a big deal.
If you enjoy the game play, if you don’t enjoy the game, stop playing. It’s not really rant worthy.

[Shandrenna-sargeras]

Hi played since vanilla what patch was worse ? majority of bug were lag issues and or spells / skills not working

or a quest/mob glitched

nothing since i can remember had a pre-patch that affected the entire game (world quests pre expansion) quests , guild ach / etc.

[Pakapaka-aggramar]

Same here. Because of 1 quest breaking it broke 2 quests.
Losing my walking animation
so many things got broken that should never of been touched.

[Henceforth-area-52]

@Shandrenna-sargeras

Hi played since vanilla what patch was worse ? majority of bug were lag issues and or spells / skills not working

Things that I can get on top of my mind, we might’ve had others as well:

TBC pre-patch

• Players unable to enter Onyxia’s Lair
• Thrall wouldn’t respawn after an alliance raid killed him

Pre-wrath week 1:

• Brutallus was 1 shotting tanks.
• Many guild banks were wiped.
• Achievements not working

During Wrath, not even pre-patch

• Every time there was Wintergrasp combat, the whole server, even raids and instanced dungeons would lag, not fixed until almost Ulduar came out

Pre-cataclysm week 1:

• People were getting dismounted while flying in Northrend
• People were getting raid locks by just being invited
• Guild achievements and perks not working either

This pre-patch is not that bad.

[Weathervane-windrunner (Weathervane)]

maybe having only the people who pay extra get into the beta was not the best idea then? i would have definitely tinkered around and send in bug reports (hell, that’s my irl job)

i am finding bugs constantly with this pre-patch stuff. a bunch of small irritations. Ah! that reminds me I never sent in the bug report for the forsaken heritage armor questline…