… I didn’t say there was?
Dude, you’re not coming off as smart as you’re pretending to be.
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Yes, that’s because many people who employ IT have this thought that…if you can Google, you can IT. Not true at all. I was in the biz for over 20 years and there is so much more to doing any sort of IT job than what you find on Google.
I made it through two levels of interviews with Blizzard and I can tell you that I’m very happy I didn’t get the job. They silo off developers and the structure of how they do business… let’s just say that what I learned from my interviews almost made me quit playing.
But I think there’s much value in having those who play the game, test the game. Look at Star Citizen. I don’t even know what phase they are in, but I know that players are encountering bugs and once reported, it’s generally fixed within a few patches.
Blizzard had passion, but that died the moment they were purchased by Microsoft. And if you look at anything Microsoft has acquired in the realm of games… Microsoft is a game killer. Halo is my best example. Bungie should never have sold it… just like Blizzard should have never merged with Activision or allowed Microsoft to buy them.
I’ll never stop encouraging more players to go into the test realm. It’s important for Blizzard to understand what the players see, especially with development being so siloed. But that’s me. Trying to insert some common sense into threads like these.
Thank you for letting me rant. Lol
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You’re assuming those teams actually exist. After all the cuts it’s likely those teams are minimal at best and unable to do more than 10-15% of the work they are expected to.
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They get fired because C-suite Execs don’t value their contributions to the game, product or bottomline and end up understaffed or close to non-existent.
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Tbh why hire people when they can just have 7mil+ do it pro bono 
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With this game? Nothing
With other games… They make sure the games are as bug-free as possible
But it shouldn’t be the players responsibilty to find bugs. That should lie with the game developers to release a quality product to paying players. If players are expected to fill roles that should be done by QA / QC why are we even paying a sub?
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I guess to answer the OP’s question, what the QA team does is banter on the forums.
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We do a very good job too. We deserve a raise.
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I feel like we haven’t seen evidence of the existence of one in so long that we really don’t know anymore. lol
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That’s not at all my point, friend. You’re correct, they should be putting out a higher quality of product before even hitting PTR, but it’s still helpful to test these things in PTR as a player.
Not everyone at Blizzard plays these games. It’s understandable.
You also have to understand that each dev is siloed. There’s going to be stuff that’s missed. It’s inevitable, which is why I am encouraging players to test. I’m telling you to do it.
Just understand that this game has become so complex in coding that even if Blizzard has a stellar QC or QA department, we’d still have issues.
As others have mentioned, immediately after Microsoft acquired Activision they laid off a ton of QA employees company-wide. We are now reaping the benefits of that.
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Problem is there is no QA or QC taking place really at this point with the vast amount of bugs making it to live. Blizz is using players to fill these roles instead of paying staff to do it.
It also comes down to personal experience. Stuff never breaks equally. And with how many players actually play wow, even the smallest bugs become known just due to sheer volume and interaction.
Tbh I think more people would be open to live testing if we had a week dedicated just to the testing and it didn’t hurt our gameplay.
Like I know I was memeing earlier, but 7mil+ people live testing? You can’t get better interaction and feedback than that.
Just do rollbacks or set it up so the environment is controlled in a way it doesn’t hurt us tremendously.
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I agree. This is why players testing games is an essential part of the process, even if we aren’t compensated. I understand the nuance of gameplay, which many devs are unaware of because… they don’t play the game.
I would love to play in the test realm for two weeks to ensure that the patch is going to launch smoothly. I spent a lot of time in the test realm before TWW launched. Found a lot of things that needed fine tuning.
I don’t know if I’m crazy or if I just like puzzles, but going through the test realm gives me a chance to challenge the devs. I look at it as pre-game fun. So, yeah…I’m crazy. Lol
Every time I’ve encountered issues and reported them multiple times on the PTR, I’ve seen a blue post a day or so after the patch goes live that says “We’ve discovered an issue with…” and proceeds to describe the issue I reported over and over.
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The industry as a whole has pretty much decided to ditch dedicated QA and just assign developers to do quick passes over their own code. The customer becomes QA and must advocate for themselves, while it strains the already thin resources creating the content.
Add on pressures of aggressive content release schedules coming from above, and you get whatever can be shoved out the door and hope it doesn’t explode more than you can fix tomorrow. Working in a code base this old, the quality bar takes a hit every release until the entire house of cards collapses.
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I am assuming you mean this in WoW since you are asking this question on official WoW forums… The unfortunate (un)official answer would be, they will know when they actually have a functioning QA team to begin with! 
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We the players are doing what we are supposed to. Try to play, find the broken stuff, whine on forum, pay another 15 bucks to do what most companies pay 6 figure incomes to do. We are QA.
A good testing team would look for loopholes to things, try to break geometry in game, try to find any possible bugs in countless crazy ways, try to dupe, try to do anything a crazy good player would try with a database with classifications of various bugs
What Blizz team does I have no idea.
Someone on these forums tried to tell me the in-house testing team has accrediations from a college or some BS and I about laughed my bumbum off IRL.
No good gamer ever needs accreditation to break a game in any way possible.
Damn I miss Levelord.
We the players should not be the testing team