oh i agree, not only that but its not fun!
No matter how fun the end game may be (or not) beta testing is more fustrating than anything. Moreso if you can't actively edit/fix issues as you encounter them.
Also we do have a few beta testers on this forum but things like NDA and the inevitable question stream they would face if they revealed themselves means its better for them to say nothing at all.
I remember a post on here from some who had beta-tested an old game (he didn't mention which). It did not seem as enjoyable as I thought it would be. I think the point about demo vs. testing is right.
uhm, the 1 million+ different hardware/software configurations for systems running the game? Any of which can cause troubles. No company has the resources to test all of those. Especially when companies may write their code to be 'optimized for...' (pick a GPU company, CPU company, etc) and not quite doing well on the other ones.
I remember a post on here from some who had beta-tested an old game (he didn't mention which). It did not seem as enjoyable as I thought it would be. I think the point about demo vs. testing is right.
I'm going to give you an example of a situation I had when I was working as a paid QA for a video game:
I had around 150 tickets I was working on, but there was one particular bug that was frustrating me because I ran into this obnoxious bug several times, but I could only reproduce it maybe 1 in 20 times.
You see, one of the music layers was sometimes not turning off when transitioning to a different room like it was supposed to, and that caused two music tracks to play together for the remainder of play in the next room, which sounded horrible. Whenever I brought the issue up, the answer was always, "see if you can find the issue, then write a ticket."
Well I was sick of this bug, so I spent the entire morning working to trigger this bug consistently from every angle. If I move this character here and then move to the second room, did the bug trigger? If I started the game in certain rooms, would the bug trigger later? Would it trigger if I changed certain options? Would the track break if I spammed a bunch of inputs before entering the second room? Would the bug trigger if I let the game sit for a long time before moving to the next room?
Finally, I found the issue. There was a save/load issue where if you saved the game in a particular room two rooms over, then reloaded the game in that room, the music track would break because of a bad boolean blah blah blah
So it got fixed, and no one who plays that game will ever know that that issue ever existed because it was fixed before launch.
That's the work you can expect when you're actually testing a game for bugs.
I'm going to give you an example of a situation I had when I was working as a paid QA for a video game:
I had around 150 tickets I was working on, but there was one particular bug that was frustrating me because I ran into this obnoxious bug several times, but I could only reproduce it maybe 1 in 20 times.
You see, one of the music layers was sometimes not turning off when transitioning to a different room like it was supposed to, and that caused two music tracks to play together for the remainder of play in the next room, which sounded horrible. Whenever I brought the issue up, the answer was always, "see if you can find the issue, then write a ticket."
Well I was sick of this bug, so I spent the entire morning working to trigger this bug consistently from every angle. If I move this character here and then move to the second room, did the bug trigger? If I started the game in certain rooms, would the bug trigger later? Would it trigger if I changed certain options? Would the track break if I spammed a bunch of inputs before entering the second room? Would the bug trigger if I let the game sit for a long time before moving to the next room?
Finally, I found the issue. There was a save/load issue where if you saved the game in a particular room two rooms over, then reloaded the game in that room, the music track would break because of a bad boolean blah blah blah
So it got fixed, and no one who plays that game will ever know that that issue ever existed because it was fixed before launch.
That's the work you can expect when you're actually testing a game for bugs.
The point I was trying to make is that when you're in the trenches working on a game, the game is usually broken in many places, has bugs that are maddening to figure out how to resolve, and even if they are resolved, will be broken again after some new assets are added to the game.
By the time the game is actually to the point where it can be called a real "beta test," is generally a check on what systems can run the game and the occasional minor tweak bug that was missed, or didn't get resolved before the beta version was released.
What a beta is not for is for people to tell the designers their ideas of balance. The game's in the beta stage. It's too late for that. It's time to optimize the game and ship.
And, based on comments I've seen on here, people will accuse you of being bad at your job or potentially claim that you don't exist just because they don't have any knowledge of those bugs.
When I tested Civ4, we weren't given areas to test. Firaxis has their own team to work on the more mundane stuff, we were the unpaid community testers . So we got to play the game something like 6 months early, and provide feedback
I remember a lot of time went into balancing early strats with the Great Wall with its GE points + chopping forests being OP in Civ4 for early wonder rushes. This feedback didn't stop when game launched, we continued to have access to forums and provide feedback. They wanted us to test play through the entire game. We all had to submit our system specs too , so I assume they also wanted to see if the game worked fine with different PC configurations.
We all just played games and provided feedback. I remember we did report many bugs that we came across, but there were IIRC no individual quotas on how much we need to do per person.
At the end of the process the community came together and wrote a white paper on what to further change for the expansion.
I had a lot of fun, my only regret was I was way too busy trying to find a job at the time.
And, based on comments I've seen on here, people will accuse you of being bad at your job or potentially claim that you don't exist just because they don't have any knowledge of those bugs.
Furthermore. The company may choose not to fix some bugs you've found due to time or budget constraints. Then players will again claim that you don't exist or that you suck at your job.
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