Question on Beta-testing:

#0 - Nov. 3, 2006, 1:20 a.m.

I just had a thought. When Blizz designs the beta tests, WHAT exactly are you testing? Because when you think about it, the only thing you're doing is just letting players go out and find bugs, but its it truly necessary to let players post theorycraft?

I mean, is it possible to just find a set of reasonable numbers for damage/healing output for each class, and then make gear/skills/talents to fit the expectation? This is viable because you could sort-of set a pseduo-cap on DPS/healing for every class, making sure that it stays balanced from numbers alone. That way, the only time spent in BC is just finding every possible bug in the coding to make sure those expected numbers are being reached.

Blizz pre-theorycrafting FTW?

Tseric

#1 - Nov. 3, 2006, 1:40 a.m.

The devs do have structured testing for things like dps, kinda like what you have mentioned here. You can equip bots in blues and greens and have 'em run talent combos or various attacks, looking for crit percentages or damage output. They definitely have objective processes to measure potential powers of a character or class.

However, aside from the hard numbers, there are other things which the devs pay attention to with testing. How a zone plays through the first time is something that needs to come from player opinion and feedback. A common issue that comes up would be the respawn times of various creatures in the new starting zones. In something like this, player volume in a single zone is important to guage the impact of population on an area.

So, yes, there are a lot of objective tests that the devs are running to go in tandem with player feedback on things like combat systems. However, there are other needs in a test environment which can be attained by making decisions to direct game play, such as gradually increasing the level cap to 70 instead of having 70 available immediately.

Testing isn't necessarily limited to finding bugs. Often, changes are made that involve no bugs whatsoever.