(Suggestion) Pulling From The Community For Extra Qc

[Raulnor516]

Hey DE, just your friendly neighborhood game-player and forum-browser here. Every patch we have, there are usually at least 2 or 3 hotfixes afterwards to fix some game-breaking issues. I know that development of such a huge game, with an enormous gamer base, is very difficult, and some bugs will continue to get through. But the amount of bugs that persistently get through every patch makes me wonder if maybe you guys could use some additional help for Quality Control. It doesn't help the image of DE as a company or developer when every patch has so many things wrong with it. Here's the idea I had:

 

- Pick a number of the most active contributors of bugs and other issues from the forums (If they are already posting bugs, they will be more likely to help with actual QC.)

 

- QCing will be completely voluntary, and bound by a strict NDA to prevent leaking of the game data. Any posting of information on wiki, forums, fansites, etc, will have accounts closed immediately.

 

- Authorize their accounts for QC permissions, giving them early access to the alpha builds as your development team pushes them out. (I figure you already have something like this, so your employees can test out new functions.)

 

- QC testers probably don't need any significant bonuses from doing this, as they are already playing the game and getting early access to the content. Just allow the progress they make in the Alpha builds to still apply to their account, having to earn the new content then losing it on logging off would just be ridiculous.

 

- If you want to allow QC testers to test content quickly as well as from the F2P perspective, give them a weekly (based on the update rate of the game) stipend of platinum so they can buy the new materials and make sure they are working as intended.

 

This is just an idea to clean up the image of the game a little bit, while allowing additional community feedback (from the tester's perspective) on upcoming changes.

[ArcSynder]

Theoretically, we ALL are QC testers. Once upon a time, that was what a Beta was for. 

[Raulnor516]

Theoretically, we ALL are QC testers. Once upon a time, that was what a Beta was for. 

Note where I said access to alpha builds. I understand this is a beta, but with this large of a game, the cleaner releases can be, the better.

[SetAbominae]

I have been head of QA/QC testing for a couple games, one of them used this sytem of mixing just-your-regular-player with the actual hired goons, and let me tell you something, from my experience it was a disaster.

 

First of all, the player portion does not really give a rat's behind about having to sign an NDA, or having signed it, the changes are going to leak, and with those changes, people gain the ability to get "ahead of the curve" by using knowledge they should not have in the first place.

 

As an example, imagine DE was pondering the possibility of making potatos cost 50 plat each (they won't, just an example to make this clear), the players whom have had access to this data will then start purchasing 20 plat potatos en masse.

 

Of course being that warframe has no actual in-game economy such an event would not have consequences as big as they had that one time I seen it happen.

 

Warframe being different from your average MMORPG (i.e. not being one but having a lot of RPG elements) might actually be able to pull this off, however I would say it needs to be considered very carefully.

Edited May 25, 2013 by SetAbominae