Are the QA testers under qualified?
Many times, (playing since 2017) we've seen ludicrous numbers in varying categories. Be it Perks/addons/offerings to Rng pallet numbers and hook distances that never should have been released into the public build. (Not the PTB, the actual live build.) Then we have killers who straight out have not worked from day one or have gotten little to no attention even after countless feedback from popular members of the community. (Otz/True for instance.) The common issue all of this has is not down to the ability of the coders/artists involved (although the fov is awful for 2022 as killer.) but down to the people's ability to spot these issues before release and have them reported to the people in charge.
I personally assumed the Fog Whisperers would have a more important input other than just glorified salereps. Many a time there has been very unwise and unfinished versions of this game sent to the public be it by lack of feedback or down to the deadlines. Why aren't the Fogwhispers taking part in these tests? A profound amount of them are very experienced and would offer very valuable feedback over the more casual.
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You can find all the bugs in existence as a QA tester, but multiple things can happen. Devs can deny the bug exists. Devs can send back "could not reprod". Management can not care about the bugs if they don't affect the launch date. Etc. This is why most QA testers keep a paper trail of bugs they find and report.
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As a QA tester it's your job to make sure you note down repro steps as part of your bug ticket, because that's how you add things to a regression suite.
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I don’t think it’s down to the QA testers and probably how much time the team is given for QA at all. They have pretty strict deadlines and are already working on future stuff etc. We really don’t have enough insight in the work processes to pinpoint where the problems are - though if it was just the QA testers then the team/management would have realized that by now. It’s more likely that BHVR is fully aware that there are plenty of bugs and they are okay with those existing for the bugfix patches etc.
generally they have gotten better with super gamebreaking stuff (not including whatever happened to PlayStation platforms here - but live environments can vary and result in something like this - I am pretty sure they had to get approval from Sony for this update and apparently that worked? Though this is really just speculation)
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…and? That doesn’t prevent developers from sending the bug back with the comment ‚could not reprod‘ at all…
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I never would have guessed they had QA testers honestly. Not saying it to be mean. It's just the way the game plays and how the gaming industry is nowadays I thought that the model had switched to making the actual player community the QA testers. I mean just about every game nowadays releases as a buggy or unbalanced mess because it seems like most game studios are only concerned with hitting deadlines and racking up profit as quickly as possible. Gotta push those pre-orders too.
I don't see how they can even have time for QA with a 3 month development cycle on chapters. I'm sure they have a QA Standard Operating Procedure that is part of the production pipeline, like a set of checklists as assets and code gets developed but I doubt they have much more than maybe a week or two to QA before it hits the PTB.
My guess is PTB forms a large chunk of the QA. But I could be wrong. They might contract some QA testers but it might not always be the same people on QA as a result and so the quality of the QA might vary between chapters as a result.
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That's not just the gaming industry, that's the software industry in general. Let the customer do the testing and bug finding for you. There's never time to do it right, but there's always time to do it over
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This
Anyone who has done any software testing of any kind knows that it's incredibly likely QA catches most of these issues but management for whatever reason decides to push it through anyways.
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And depending on the severity, and if you're still able to repro it, you get that dev on a webex or something and see why they're not able to repro it but you are.
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We just need to hope that the one day they come in to work falls on the update release
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Sadako got a TON of buffs before official release and she's still awful.
What kind of design team and QA team sees her pre-buff incarnation and says "Yeah, that looks right. Let's send it to the PTR!"
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As a console player, I half-believe they did not have DBD testing for my Xbox over the years.
Half-believe...
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Sure. But we are still closer to the deadline and depending on the bugfix attempt the bug may even linger even though fixing it was attempted. Maybe slightly different event.it’s not like having it reported and having a reproduction that works guarantees a fix is directly working.
thing is… if you are just assuming maybe don’t try to personally attack some people instead give constructive feedback like ‚the quality of the product seems lacking and needs more attention‘
QA testing isn’t about balancing or buffing/nerfing killers though?
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I for one am glad Fog Whisperers don't have a prime place in QA or balance tests. Most of them are very high skill and don't have the first idea what it's like to be a casual in this period. It's been a long, long time since they were low/mid mmr.
If they were the ones doing the balancing, everything would be balanced around the top, which is not a very viable model.
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Well we really don't know what the QA testing process is like--maybe they're working on strict time deadlines, maybe there just aren't enough resources to catch every single bug, maybe they thought that a bug was intentional, however inconvenient. We shouldn't be so quick to point fingers when we just don't know that much about what goes on in BHVR.
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The QA is done by the same people who did Cyberpunk 2077's .
Jokes aside there's probably more than just the QA team.
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QA employees do have deadlines, which are usually pretty strict. And you have to keep in mind that QA doesn't only test bugs. There are different types of QA and in some companies the QA employees are do-it-all, so that means testing code, testing if the game is running right, testing for bugs, stress testing, performance testing over different types of machines - weaker and stronger to hopefully make sure that, let's say players on weaker PCs don't crash when they open the game.
There is a lot of testing going on, and it depends on the team, how much time they have, how possible it is to fix certain things within the deadline, is it a big issue, is it game breaking, can we push the update without fixing it if we don't have enough time to fix it right now, etc.
There is so much going on there and it's impossible to catch all issues that come with updates and the simple fact that you as a player might experience something, like a bug that the QA employees didn't find during their testing, because sometimes bugs are inconsistent. They might not happen to everyone, which is why when you report a bug, you need to provide steps to reproduce and say how often it occurs, so the QA team can make the bug happen on their end as well.
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Perhaps.
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That too. Plus, we don't have a second PTB to test the fixes from the first PTB, so the live version is bound to have a few problems initially.
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Please be kind to QA testers out there. Not just for our game, but for other games as well. QA is probably the most commonly misunderstood role on almost any project and get way more heat than they deserve. Just because QA works with bugs does not mean that bugs are QA's fault.
To give some insight, video games are incredibly complex these days. They're made up of thousands of moving parts, most of which are built on other parts that are also updated. To use DBD as an example, there's 219 perks, 30 killers, over 600 add-ons, etc. and counting. So when an underlying system changes, it can sometimes cause other things that rely on that system to break in unexpected and often subtle ways. People often think QA simply plays the game and writes down whatever they find, and while there is some of that, there's far too many things in the game to check and test everything with every update.
In reality, QA is much more focused. Whenever a task is completed (programming, art, etc.), someone from the QA team will check it over and over to make sure it works. If it's not, that'll be flagged with the team and someone is assigned to fix it (QA typically finds and reproduces bugs so they can be fixed, not directly fix them themselves). But with the scale of video games, a fix or change elsewhere can break something that was already tested. (Say a script that tells one of two pallets on a tile to spawn breaks after the tile was tested and confirmed working. You may not notice two pallets appearing while you're laser focused on testing the Killer's power the next day.)
This is something that even happened just recently. The flashlight buffer was tested extensively ahead of the PTB- I even tried it myself and could confirm that it was working- but unfortunately a separate bug fix just before the PTB build was created caused the buffer to break and hold stuns for the entire animation.
Beyond that, there are other reasons why a bug might go live. For example, it wouldn't make much sense to delay a whole update because there's a typo in the description of one perk. If something is small and unobtrusive enough, then delaying the update over it will make people more frustrated than the tiny bug ever would. We try to mention this in the known issues so you know we're aware of it (though some known issues are trickier to fix and something that we're still actively investigating/working on).
But most of all, millions of people are playing the game. Even if you hired a thousand QA testers, they still wouldn't be able to find the amount of things that combined millions of people can in a single hour. On launch days especially, they're glued to the bug reports section taking everything that's reported and making sure it's reproduced and logged in our system.
In short, QA teams around the world do an amazing job finding and reporting bugs, but they are by no means the only people responsible for making sure updates go out bug free. It's like blaming the person who pull the fire alarm for a building burning down. Please cut them some slack. By no means is any of this to excuse bugs, they still fall on us at the end of the day, but QA teams in the video games industry don't deserve anywhere near the amount of blame they get.
All that aside, we do our best to catch what we can before an update goes live. Part of that comes from internal testing, part of it comes from the PTB. Unfortunately as long as we're making changes, new bugs can appear. While we try to make sure everything's working smoothly for launch, some things will slip through the cracks. We react as quickly as we can to get those fixed for one of our bugfix patches in the weeks after our major releases.
On the second point about Fog Whisperers, they are not QA testers, consultants, or even sales reps. The sole purpose of the program is for content creation. They are people we can endorse and partner with when we have opportunities (e.g. sponsored streams, featuring on Steam store page, etc.) It is not their responsibility to play upcoming chapters and give feedback/find bugs.
Post edited by Peanits on13 -
Maybe they arent underqualified but understaffed or red tape prevents them from doing their job properly, I work at a big corporation (big enough to influence my goverment and goverments in South America) and I can guarantee red tape prevents me from doing my job more often than not, some times in a way I have to circumvent the procedures and "good practices" manual just to get high priority stuff done, one would think paperwork wouldnt be as much as a hindrance as it is in the way of profit but it actually is.
P.D. Im nobody important in said corp, just a very small cog in a inmensely huge machine and Im still swamped by paperwork...
Post edited by HectorBrando on1 -
While I understand the underlying structure of what you're saying (and mostly agree) from what I'm understanding there is a massive time crunch from the departments you mentioned. Be it from going from said QA tester finding an issue to the actual employee responsible for doing the work to correct the bug. While it has been well documented in the past Dead by daylight was built on Kismet from the early days it really sounds like the foundational elements of that engine (UE3 I believe back then) is still unstable for making quick precise changes without affecting other elements of the game resulting in a crunch. Would it not make more sense as mentioned before, to have a health update versus cranking out killers and multiple perks (as you said before it's reaching a point, we are about to hit 250 perks) many people would rather a stable easier to modify game versus a content overload which eventually won't be held together with the rocky foundation.
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DbD actually has QA?
You've been fooling me for years.
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QA is rarely the issue.
What happens mostly is that their reports get ignored and the product gets pushed out.
I know one instance where, to ensure there weren't too many issues found on a product (preventing its release), the QA team was gutted. Magically, almost no issues were found and the product got out, riddled with bugs.
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I ask myself that same question. It's time to update their engine and release health updates.
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