Can we get internal testing before you put things into the beta testers?

What they test : Is the game playable? Do things work as intended? Does it crash with every time you save and quit? Then any obvious balance issues.

What We test : Is the game balanced? Fun? Does it make sense to someone who hasn't been working on it for a long time?

And I would know, because I'm a game developer.

 

I don't think internal testing works for Chucklefish. Even by the first version of the open beta they had those massively unbalanced pixel costs. No. They need all the rage from us open beta testers to make change.

 

They are helping. Why do you guys seem to be unable to show any kind of sympathy to someone who finds a fault in this game.

The devs should be able to spot this kind of thing, and calling them out on it is what we should do. Instead, half the people on this forum just yell "BETA" as if that makes anything matter. Then they proceed to insult anyone who says they don't like something.

Honestly, this place makes me sick every time I come to read a few posts. I don't think I want to hang around these forums anymore. There's so much dev dicksucking that nothing gets done or said.

Also, to the devs, if you guys do read this. You're doing great and are generally for the most part nice people. I just hate the people here now who seem to think everything the devs do is god, and any kind of complaint is just answered with "WELL ITS A BETA GOD"

 

If you're doing an open beta, generally speaking, you have an internal testing team that find glaring bugs. Often this is the dev team themselves. Things like CTDs, certain ore being impossible to find, your starting weapons being stronger than anything else you get early game. Why? Because it makes things easier for the next set of testers.

That being the open beta testers. These people find rarer bugs. They recommend changes to balance (usually on gut feelings, because users are idiots). If you leave massive glaring bugs in the game, at best people will focus on and report those, diminishing reports of the rarer bugs, like we're seeing all over the forum right now. At worst, those obvious bugs actively hamper the progression of the game and make it harder for the testers to find the bugs you want them to find. People reporting the same shit over and over again is useless. People reporting new bugs is useful.

And that's why they need some more internal testing. It's not about the devs spoiling their entitled fanbase. It's not about "waaaah bugs ar dum ur shit fuck chukclefish tiyuri is the second hitler nostradamus was right". It's about things being smoother and more efficient for everyone involved. Even the developers.

I shouldn't have had to explain that, but there you go.

 

A large test community is good at putting the game trough 'real' use and finding small balance issues (for instanceif a particular sword from a boss drop should have 55 or 58 damage (small teams of testers cannot do this).

A rough pre-test should smooth out obvious bugs so the game (or the system) they want to have tested by the large group actually works. If a game Dev wants to have a large group test if a pet should do 100 or 5000 damage, then being able to get a pet is kind of a key feature that should work Also, the game should launch etc.

So huge bugs should be fixed so the large group of testers can actually test.

 

I-
What?

That makes no sense. You mean to tell me that they should just pound out whatever and upload it to Steam services without testing to see that they didn't majorly bork anything up? Who are they? EA?

That'd be like designing a car without safety testing it before it goes into mass production.

 

I'm pretty sure it's the severity of the problem that's the issue here.
Something that's a little more obvious than a normal bug and could have easily been spotted, especially considering what this patch was all about.
Devs not finding more obvious issues just wastes time. You could be using your huge collection of testers to find something that's a little less noticeable once all the weapons' damages have been at least moderately adjusted.
Small tweaks to certain weapons, monsters, etc. I think that's a more efficient use of your testers.
You don't need thousands of people to tell you that smoking cigarettes is generally unhealthy. If you had thousands of people at your disposal and you wanted to find out more about cigarettes, it wouldn't be a good use of your resources.

 

Well, that seems completely arbitrary given that both of those are intertwined, and it still fails to explain why such a distinction would make sense.
In a game this massive with a limited scope of experience, it's impossible to assume that all the former will be caught by the developers.

So what? I've done mod work and bug fixing for games for over 14 years, ranging from programming, to audio to visual design. It doesn't give me magical credibility.

So quite frankly, I don't give a toss who or what you claim to be, nor do I have any way of guaranteeing such a claim is genuine.
And even if I did, it's an Appeal to Authority Fallacy and therefore irrelevant.

You fail to convince.

No, no no. When you assert something as fact, you give a fucking REASON.
So don't you dare push this condescending crap on me.

 

This.
Gamers play all sorts of different ways. If you're making a game you know how your game is supposed to work and you might have difficulty playing it any other way than how you envision it. That's why you need Average Joe to play his own way and discover things that are broken by doing things in ways you never would have thought to.

 

Appeal to authority is not alway irrelevant. Fallacies can be existentially valid. When it comes to a technical field, authority tends to imply knowledge and experience. Not always, but tends. Your move.

 

It should be obvious. Apparently I give everyone here far too much credit.

 

You seem a tad bit on the angry side Dragon. You might want to check your tone. Also, this IS a beta test. I paid to beta test a game. I LOVE that the devs are tossing out sweeping changes and letting us go at it to test them. It actually feels as if we're part of the creative process. I'm tired of devs taking weeks to change things for fear of the silly responses these forums are currently producing. We need to support the fact that they're not a massive group, and they're trying to let us in on the process.

+1 Devs, keep up the good work. I for one, salute you!

 

They can be, but it isn't the case here.
Claims based on Authority are only as good as their credentials, and you have "Anonymous Nobody on the Internet".

I'm just really fucking tired of seeing this nonsense day in and day out. "Oh, it's not OUR job to test shit as beta testers, whine whine whine".

It astonishes me how this happened. For MONTHS, people bitched about wanting to test the game and provide feedback and now backlash against DOING EXACTLY THAT based on completely arbitrary logic.

The second post nailed it. WE are the testers now. If there are obvious problems, then their solutions should be more timely. If there are less obvious long term problems, then we examine them with the appropriate degree of urgency.

 

if he's a game developer, there could be a possibility that he has more experience in the field of bug fixing and whatnot, right?
no need to be so mean

 

So now that that's out of the way, how about you reply to the post you commanded me to make instead of cherry-picking the last line and ignoring the rest?

 

We are the internal testers because you know what... they are a small studio. It is beta, we get to play the game TO TEST IT. This kind of stuff happens and is what I expected.

 

Gee, if this was ever the case I wonder how they knew the game would even turn on when they released it!

 

Can we all just agree that HUGE bugs (like the game actually starting) should be filtered out before the game is pushed to Steam?

So its all about the scale of the bug...and the impact it has on the game being tested.
It's irrelevant if the specific bug this thread was about should or should not have been found by the Devs, fact is there should be some testing before the game gets pushed (and im 100% sure there is such testing being done).

 

It keeps baffling me how anti-consumer the modern gamer mindset is. It's fine to love the developers, even to fanboy a bit, but it might do you some good to remind yourself, once in a while, that you are a paying customer, exchanging money for goods or services, and that you have some degree of entitlement that shouldn't be taken away just because video game journalists tried to convince you entitlement is always a bad thing.

Chucklefugs are not making you a favor by letting you Beta test, you're lining their pockets with money for the privilege of doing very basic testing they should have completed internally long before the early access release. I love this game but goddamn is the Beta being handled poorly.