Beta testing

william kinder

        I am not a computer programmer in the classical sense. I have done just a little over the years, but have over 30 years experience programming industrial computers and machinery. let me tell you that nothing finds code errors faster than users. no programmer is able to imagine a code error easily. besides, the compiler catches code errors. what is difficult to catch is the things that users can do, quite by accident, to upset carefully made plans.

        so you test. I understand that there is a server or servers, that the developers use to test their code. all fine and good. that, however is not a beta test. no developer would ever hold down CTRL-ALT and click on Collect. a user could, probably by accident. releasing code like that to the world would be the beta test. open style.

        and that is just what gets done with League of Angels. the active game is mostly an open beta. not so bad for free players. just an Ahh Sh** and move along. for cash players it\'s more like Where the He** did my diamonds go?. followed by outraged forum posts.

        I suggest one more step in testing. a server or servers populated by real, non-developer players. This server goes between the dev server and the public servers to find the bugs that only users and heavy data exchange;can come up with. nothing is quite like 200 peeps running around a dungeon in real time for finding errors. or 2000.

        I realize that this would add time to the release schedule, but releasing something so laden with bugs that it is unplayable is much, much worse, especially if people are using real money. and much, much, much worse if you are trying to convince free players to part with a few bucks some day.

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janfousek

Yeah, LoA just saves on this stage and results are inevitable. But, well, they never cared about that and currently there is much bigger problem here.

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