Question for all playtester.
JuCCi
Join Date: 2011-08-08 Member: 114961Members, NS2 Map Tester
Join Date: 2011-08-08 Member: 114961Members, NS2 Map Tester
<div class="IPBDescription">Call out</div>How many hours do you guys play the game for fun? Not looking for bugs, or testing new stuff being put into the game or anything that you should be doing? I mean joining a server killing and talking smack. The reason i ask this is i feel alot of the play testers, don't put in as many playing hours as the people "on the band wagon" due. So how many hours do you put a week into playing the game for fun.
Comments
Or that the lerk didn't feel ridiculously slow in 199?
Did anyone notice that xenocide was in a build when the developers didn't mean for it to be?
What about when the onos was first introduced and stomp did absolutely nothing?
What about the numerous builds where tram was unplayable because you couldn't cyst south of server room? (plus the builds claiming to fix it that didn't)
Does anyone do a full-team rush on the opposing chair/hive to test the damage/run distance/spawn time numbers?
Before the motion tracking patch, had anyone tried a sustained full-team shade attack in playtesting?
UWE really does try to fix all the bugs that the playtesters report as game breaking bugs, but sometimes things have to be delayed to later builds because of a new feature that is being implemented or that they want to keep up with their weekly patch schedule.
People need to chill out and give the new changes a chance before they yell "OMG BROKEN". Negative feedback like this does nothing to help them get a feel for what changes they need to make to get the game where it needs to be.
As far as my hours, I have played 633 hours in the public builds and probably over 400+ in the playtest builds.
Bugs have a chance of not getting fixed before the deadline, simply because of the fact that bugs can be quite hidden in some cases and aren't detected until after the patch went live (hours/days after). That is the way play testing and public testing works. You cannot release any piece of software without bugs. So yes there is a chance bugs go out to the public builds, due to time constraints. With these weekly/monthly patches, we test every day of the week. With either Friday or Thursday as "Release Candidate" day and sometimes even in the weekends with devs working on the game even... It can even occur that a RC is rejected and pushed to the next phase, big changes cause big issues sometimes :)
For example, Build200 has the marine sprint issue. Build199 has the slow Lerk. We write up a report for it and the devs will get on it to get it fixed in a next patch. That is simply how testing works.
Like Saba said, we play test for the devs internally and also play test during scrims and public games... I dunno how many hours I play each week, but once PT-ing gets done or starts I either have a good few rounds under my belt (before or after PT-ing), whenever I have the time...
lol i guess im not a play tester, but a beta tester :)
Since there are very frequent releases, not everything is fixed in time. Sometimes even big problem get trough.
Then there are changes where internaly the playtesters don't agree with the developers, and the change gets trough to the public. This does not have to be a bad thing. Sometimes there are changes that we playtesters don't agree with, but that actually play very well once its released and people adapt. Sometimes its the other way around where there are changes that the playtesters agree with (because we know the reasoning and might have some experience on how to play with those changes), but they don't work out in public.
Also, big parts of the playtesting goes towards real bugs. We track down bugs you could not even imagine they exist. Thats normal, and the internal playtesters are there to catch them.
NS2 is a beta. Everybody is a playtester. Internal playtester really only filter out the bugs so that the "public" patches don't crash on everybody or have any catastrophic changes in them. If you wanted good and balanced patches, there would be a beta release every 2-3 months. I doubt this is what people want.
I hope you understand the nature of the internal playtests a little better now.
The problem is, from a player perspective some of the glaring bugs that go public (that have a huge impact on balance and gameplay) do appear baffling. I am probably not the only one dissapointed to be in another patch with no gathers/clan matches due to the terrible state of the game. Which seemingly could have been avoided by playtesters actually playing the game normally. In the end it is UWE's choice, we have to live with it.
<i>Sidenote: What is all the talk of weekly patches? Since ive been in the beta we have been so far away from weekly patches it is laughable. Why even bother talking about it? There is nothing wrong with a small team being incapable of keeping to a weekly schedule.</i>
We <b><i>DO </i></b>play the game normally. We test, find and help fix lots of bugs you never get to see. Then after hours of doing that, we have 'normal' games, on different servers for hours at a time.
Our playtesters work VERY hard. If things slip through, it's cause they didnt happen during our PTs, or the devs want to fix it another time as the fix would take a long time.
We playtest EVERY DAY, and we recruit people who make their opinions known from both public and competitive communities to get a balance on feedback. But we're only human, and this isnt our full-time job. We do not get paid. We do our best for you and UWE. We're working on 201 which should address some of people's issues, but from now on you're going to get a real taste of a real beta with real bugs as we get closer to release.
People can help us out by posting bug reports and solutions/repo steps. Ranting about this or that because you've not actually played a large number of games with a recent dramatic change does not help us very much. I was initially against Lerk bilebomb, but now I think it works well, as the gorge will be getting more abilities to help enhance his role as a support class.
Our playtesters and public beta testers are some of the most dedicated players in the NS community. Keep with NS2, keep playing, keep finding bugs and posting them for us to test and we'll be able to make it even more awesome than it is now. Great things are coming.
We aren't doing the design decisions either, that's what the Game Director (Flayra) does.
P.S. Thank you to the playtesters that stepped up and posted.
So before every patch you have a period of time playing both 'public' and 'gather' type matches, that will allow you to discover issues relevant to real-world scenario gameplay?
P.S. Thank you to the playtesters that stepped up and posted.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I don't think that's fair to say, and this is coming from someone who raged out of NS2 at least 3 times tonight due to new patch 200 issues. I definitely do not like a few of the things in patch 200, but it's not appropriate to say that the dev's don't care about the players.
They definitely do.
I've got $45 (yey black armor) and some entertainment/hope invested in this game. They've got years and hundreds of thousands of dollars. I'm sure every one of them cares 1000x more about NS2, and the gamers who play it, than any of us.
I actually saw a UWE guy on the D|S server two or three nights ago.
However, I am really disappointed that we have another patch where you basically can't have any organized games because stuff is so broken. I want to scrim. :| It is a legit beta, though.
P.S. Thank you to the playtesters that stepped up and posted.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Seriously, I don't think they're ignoring us, but sometimes you need to do big changes in order to find a sweet spot for the things you want to try. It'll gather feedback and what to change and what to keep. We've had stuff being changed then changed back in patches before (skulk movement for example). Now, I don't want to repeat what it's always used as an excuse for everything, but it's true that in this stage of development you kind of have to expect sudden changes so they can gather feedback to have a clear vision of what's the right thing to do.
They're trying to release patches faster so these kind of things are to be expected, and it's not like the "normal" way to do things in completed games, where you wait months until everything is balanced and you've tried stuff internally that might not work and discard it without people ever knowing it existed. The game will reach its balance, eventually. I'm not saying you have to accept everything because it's a beta because that's counter-productive, just give your opinions on the changes and the devs (that DO read the forums and care for the community) will make a decision.
You can't let your comsumers design the game for you. There's a reason why game designers tend to work in small groups or mostly on their own. It just doesn't work to try 100 different ideas on the same topic every week, each with a completely different overall design goal for the game.
It's like you had 1000 people try to paint a painting: everyone has a different style and some people will want more space for their idea or want the overall painting to look dark/muddy while others want it bright and shiny... it just isn't going to work.
Of course, you (as a game designer) can always get inspiration from others or even directly make their ideas into the game if you really think they are good and fit into your overall design goal. This is what Charlie is doing.
@Argathor:
I do agree there have been some bugs I just can't imagine how they would come through testing. The problem is that there's <b>always</b> a new feature every internal build that is potentially buggy, so there will never be a bugless build unless they spend an extra week polising every patch. Additionally, the game is not being designed around being playable in (somewhat) competitive matches every patch.
I don't like this either, I'd also like to have less game breaking bugs in the patches myself, but we'll have to live with it.
We have a bunch of competitive players among us, but we don't really do 6vs6 competitive testing on the maps with the new changes, which I think we really should do. Instead we just throw whoever's online at the time into the teams through random for a few times. Hopefully I can affect that in the upcoming weeks. :)
Despite that, NS2 has a whole different teamplay dimension in comparison to many other FPS games of today. That brings challenge to the masterful aimers because they need to learn to work as a team, not just as an individual. Everyone needs to aknowledge the strengths and weaknesses of each player, and the entire team's as a whole. Clan matches for this game will be amazingly interesting. Gathers already are. :)
Im sure people would say: "Oh god, the gorge lose bilebomb but WOW this runs so smooth, great!
I think we have an bad combination here: Drastic change of features + very bad performance for most.
So we have people complaining about feature-change, really bad performance and both.
Btw. if you want to help finding the stuttering problem, visit this thread:
<a href="http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/forums/index.php?showtopic=117103" target="_blank">http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/forums/in...howtopic=117103</a>
Im sure, im one of the most active NS2 players.
I play nearly dayly 1-2 hrs, host one of the most populated servers and trying to help eliminating server-errors.
If i dont agree with changes balancewise, i try to tweak values serverside like it did with bilebomb in the current build.
So as you can see, most playtesters PLAY the game.
We will always get bad and good patches, i can remember some really bad in the past with huge gamebreakers.
Thats how a beta work.
If you cant live with it, dont buy a closed beta game from an 7 people indie-studio.
At a few points of the beta i thought, wth i spending so much money for serverhosting, why i spend so much time.
The answer is easy: i totally love the game (like most of us im sure)
P.S. Thank you to the playtesters that stepped up and posted.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Erm, are you reading something other than me? How do you go from 'not all issues are fixed in time for any given patch' to 'devs don't care about community'?
Pretty much all the testers have said that the patches are released in the middle of development, meaning each one contains some fixes, but none will contain all the fixes needed at the time.
If the testers find a bug on wedensday, it might take till next monday to fix it, but if the patch is due on friday it won't be included, if you delay until monday then more bugs will have been found on thursday and friday, so you have to delay again until they're fixed, and it just keeps going.
At some point you kinda have to say 'we're releasing a patch, it has some fixes, it has some bugs, go play it and post any bugs you find'.
At some point you kinda have to say 'we're releasing a patch, it has some fixes, it has some bugs, go play it and post any bugs you find'.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
What Chris said is exactly the situation. We are trying to stick to a weekly schedule of patch releases, and while we may not always hit that, we've been coming pretty close. The times that we didn't ship a patch in that timeframe have largely happened because we try to get last minute features/ fixes in, that in turn cause more bugs, and more testing finds more bugs, and delays the patch release further. Meanwhile we are then having to hold off checking in new features, in order to insure the patch is stable enough to release, essentially halting forward progress on the game. This can quickly spiral out of control and lead to those cases in the past where we didn't ship a patch for a month or 2.
We are being more vigilant now, and that means that we have to make hard decisions about what is acceptable to go out with a patch or not. Something like sever crash bugs will hold up the release. If a major gameplay mechanic is broken, such as players can't spawn, or power nodes are not working, etc., then obviously that needs to be fixed. But that means that we can't delay the patch, just to tweak the balance values properly on a new gameplay feature such as Lerk bilebomb, because that in turn means we need to spend a lot more time playing full games, to see if it is working well. It is usually better to release it to the public, because we can get a much larger sample of players, and a much greater amount of games being played, to give us a wider range of feedback.
Undoubtedly there will be issues that slip through. While testing this patch, for example, we had some large sound issues, which were causing huge noticeable hitches in the game. We spent the time to track them down and fix the worst offenders. We knew there were still some problems, but when testing with our PT group, the game ran pretty smoothly in general, so we felt we could release the patch and deal with the rest of the issues when we had more time to look more closely at the problems. It turns out, the hitches are having a greater effect on other people's machines then we'd seen internally, but that is the nature of game development.
The PT's are working very hard to make help us make NS2 as fun, balanced, and bug free as possible, but while the game is still under development its always going to be a bumpy ride.
--Cory