ManyCookies wrote on Jun 24
th, 2022 at 10:33am:
Then they shouldn't be rushing out expansions in ~9 months because they are fixated on the money. Spend at least a year, or 1.5 years like the amount of time they spent on Ravenloft and Sharn. Deliver a high quality product to your playerbase.
Yeah that's how I feel, too. Like I mentioned earlier, it's not like Turbine has clients who are lined up and demand their deliverables by a certain deadline. I can't imagine there's a single DDO player who says "I WANT MY EXPANSION NAO!!!" My feeling was always that players would rather wait a few weeks for an announced expansion to drop, as long as it's a quality product.
bob the builder wrote on Jun 23
rd, 2022 at 8:49pm:
that's all good in hindsight, once you have seen this bug, you can easily reverse engineer an easy test and say "well why didn't they do this".
The thing is, I don't really feel this bug would've been that hard to pick up. Let's assume you have a few guys running around in Isle of Dread testing stuff. Let's say we're understaffed and we have a party of 4.
1. Everyone joins a party then pops a slayer pot.
2. Everyone runs around getting slayers, tests a segment of the map for rares/explorers etc. Everyone will note any issues with rares or explorers; these things should
definitely be tested as they are the finalized deliverables. Recall once everyone's finished their section.
3. Now, rotate stations. Tester B goes to the section that Tester A did originally, etc. This way, you get more Slayers, plus you get additional rounds of testing for each segment of the map. Maybe Tester B will find an issue with a rare encounter which Tester A did not. Maybe Tester C finds an environmental clipping issue which Tester B did not. This is why multiple rounds of testing is always helpful.
I would imagine this process would not take too long. Probably an hour, two hours at most to test out the entire wilderness area. And during this testing, you're getting a LOT of slayer kills, provided you have a slayer pot (which you should have in the dev environment). Also, for testing purposes, I would imagine the software engineers should create an "uber slayer count potion" that makes slayers that much easier. I don't think 7500 slayers with a party of 4 would take longer than 2 hours. 2 hours x 4 QA testers = 8 billable hours total, which is nothing.
With a slayer pot and multiple testers in the dev environment, I would be very surprised if testing stopped at 7500.
It's almost guaranteed that you'll exceed 7500. At which point the bug would've become obvious.
And yes, like ManyCookies mentioned: players probably would've tested the functionality for free, too. My only guess is that the wilderness area really wasn't tested at all, or the testers were too rushed for time. I wouldn't necessarily blame the QA department because they don't call the shots; it just reeks of poor judgment on whoever is managing the development/testing and/or the dev -> live pipeline.