[espher]

mfw when playtesters are given credit/blame for things that are design decisions.

 

Dial back the salt, please.

[ManicPixieGirl]

mfw when playtesters are given credit/blame for things that are design decisions.

 

Dial back the salt, please.

That’s what their job is. Address the design flaws. Not just play the game early for fun.

[espher]

That’s what their job is. Address the design flaws. Not just play the game early for fun.

 

If I tell my boss there’s a problem, that doesn’t necessarily mean the problem will get fixed, or that my boss thinks it’s a big enough problem to worry about (or even a problem to begin with).

[Farottone]

That’s what their job is. Address the design flaws. Not just play the game early for fun.

 

As I said, you are just showing more and more how little knowledge you have of any development process, which coupled with the pride you have in not being respectful is not the best way to represent yourself.

[TrojanNemo]

I was going to post another eating popcorn gif, but at this rate I’m going to have a severe weight problem with these forums.

[ManicPixieGirl]

That’s what their job is. Address the design flaws. Not just play the game early for fun.

 

As I said, you are just showing more and more how little knowledge you have of any development process, which coupled with the pride you have in not being respectful is not the best way to represent yourself.

Uh huh, you keep telling yourself that. Playtesters don’t test the game…right.

[TrojanNemo]

You go girl. You tell him. Until you get banned because he runs this place.

[Farottone]

You go girl. You tell him. Until you get banned because he runs this place.

 

Nobody gets banned for not knowing how things work. ” src=”/wp-content/uploads/invision_emoticons/default_SA_wink.gif”>

[espher]

Uh huh, you keep telling yourself that. Playtesters don’t test the game…right.

 

Not sure if trolling or legitimately oblivious.

 

Considering sodium content of posts, leaning towards former over latter.

[TrojanNemo]

You go girl. You tell him. Until you get banned because he runs this place.

 

Nobody gets banned for not knowing how things work. ” src=”/wp-content/uploads/invision_emoticons/default_SA_wink.gif” />

 

You have infinitely more patience and hope for this world than I do.

[Kemiroch]

I would be all over this if I were not already gainfully employed ” src=”/wp-content/uploads/invision_emoticons/default_SA_frown.gif” />

[Farottone]

Let me elaborate more on why we are commenting heavily on this: as hard working guys, we value other peoples’ work. We do not let any user disprespect any author who releases a song here in example, even if the song is objectively very poorly authored. We ask people to critique and comment but the work is there for people to either take or leave. The reason: any song takes hours of work regardless of the outcome, so we want people to appreciate that.

 

The same stance I’m taking toward anybody who works in the industry. If it’s bad playtesting it’s ok to criticize it, but not being disrepesctful. And that is without even addressing the fact that, as espher explained, we have no way of telling who messed up what. Actually, we can comfortably say that it’s 100% sure that playtesters are not responsible for the crate loading bug, unless we want to believe that those playtesters spent 8 hours resetting the console and going home without typing “The game crashes in loop”.

[ManicPixieGirl]

It didn’t take me or a lot of others, 8 hours to see the game crash. If they’re not responsible for noticing that, than who is? That’s rhetorical. They are.

 

Don’t even equate working on a song, or developing an ENTIRE game, to play testing. Not even the same ballpark. Not even the same sport. If it was, they wouldn’t be picking up volunteers from anywhere off the street to do it. If you want to prop those people up on a pedestal because they have some inside access, that’s your own issue. No one else has to abide by that misguided sycophantic attitude.

 

The RB3 Q&A team did a bad job. That’s not disrespect, that’s a fact. End of story. And if Harmonix finds another bunch of casual gamers who probably play on medium, they could have the same problems again. You should be able to empathize with that, because if you let someone play test your songs who didn’t know what they were doing, you could release a song with a bunch of errors. Would you do that? Would you trust someone who didn’t know tempo mapping or vocal pitch to play test your song to save you the trouble of finding errors yourself? NO. So HMX shouldn’t have to suffer through that again. They might as well release a beta, or ship the game as is and wait for their boards to erupt with complaints like last time.

 

They’re lucky they won’t have to deal with a Wii console this time, and that’s probably why that community dried up so fast on the DLC. No patches. Who wants to buy songs for a broken game? Nobody wants to see that again.

[Farottone]

It didn’t take me or a lot of others, 8 hours to see the game crash. If they’re not responsible for noticing that, than who is?

 

Well, we tried very hard to explain how playtesting is different than implementation, but if you feel very strongly about not wanting to understand it there’s really not a lot more we can say. ” src=”/wp-content/uploads/invision_emoticons/default_SA_smile.gif”> Nobody is putting anybody on a pedestal, we’re just saying you need to know how a process work before you comment about it, but this being the Internet and all I understand it’s not a requirement. ” src=”/wp-content/uploads/invision_emoticons/default_SA_smile.gif”>

[espher]

It didn’t take me or a lot of others, 8 hours to see the game crash. If they’re not responsible for noticing that, than who is? That’s rhetorical. They are.

 

Who says they didn’t notice it? You? Is this where you take off the mask and reveal you’re secretly an ex-HMX employee? One who knows it was never reported, and was in a position to receive that feedback, and thus is either a member of said QA team or a member of the programming team who was behind the ‘bug’ in the first place?

 

You’re coming across as hilariously oblivious to the way that QA (and, seemingly, the software world at large) works with these inane assumptions.

 

If it takes a rage-fueled, salt factory like you less than eight hours to see the game crash, it’s highly likely that the testers, who probably spent eight hours in a given day testing, would have encountered this bug — assuming it was present in their builds. Had they encountered it, I would say it’s far more likely that they would have reported it than not, as it’s not like “game crashes on specific loading screen but not on others” would be viewed as a feature and a bug, and much like farottone I’m not willing to believe they just ignored it the whole way through.

 

So let’s run through a couple of scenarios that are a bit more likely than “playtesters intentionally ignored and did not report a very frequently occurring, game-breaking bug”:

• The bug/behaviour was not present in testing builds, and was introduced as part of last-minute changes.
• The bug was present, but didn’t come up in the testing environment (dev boxes, PCs, whatever is used).
• The bug was present, and reported, but was not viewed as urgent (lower frequency in dev, figured it could be patched later, or something along those lines).
• The bug was present, and reported, but they could not find a fix before the game went gold (unable to identify cause, limited resources) and it was pushed out rather than delayed (GH:WoR had been out for a month by the time of RB3’s release, and BF/holiday season was approaching, and “business reasons” are very common reasons for pushing out a flawed product, especially in the game industry).

 

But no, you’re probably right, this and all of the games’ other obvious warts that needed to be patched were totally because these obvious, easily reproduced, frequently occurring (through the course of regular gameplay) things were simply willfully ignored by a

. It’s still a possibility, of course, but I doubt it would be my leading theory.

 

If you’ve never worked in an environment where you’ve had to use or deal with buggy software or software that HAS had insufficient testing that someone HAS pushed through to meet a deadline, well, you are indeed a pixie and probably don’t exist.

 

Edit: Of course, there are also things like the translucent fretboard where feedback may have not been implemented because things were “working as intended, design decision”. If the community at large was in such a tizzy over it, I would find it very surprising if not one playtester had issues with it.

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