Beta test next time pretty please!!

[TheeLord]

I love Paradox and I am very very much enjoying EU4 and AoW. But I am SO SICK of seeing all the complaints and oversights and bugs and boycotts and everything else.... Please oh please, have a different way of doing this next time. Get a group of 100 or so people to beta test it for you or something Paradox. Obviously what you are doing is not catching some big obvious bugs, time to change your methods.

 

[Mortheim]

Yeah, 100 ppl for beta test would be good.

 

[A Swell Guy]

But I am SO SICK of seeing all the complaints

So meta.

 

[unmerged(1823)]

Yeah, 100 ppl for beta test would be good.

Actually, the group is currently 150+

 

[Cossack8559]

How about stick a pre-order up a couple weeks earlier and let all who pre-order participate in a beta ? Just like the Football Manager series does.

Thousands of testers are better than 150

 

[Lord Finnish]

For Paradox standards AoW was almost unusually good release. If something needs beta testing it's CK2.

 

[deathsheep221]

OP: "I love Paradox, but I hate Paradox."

Which is a Paradox.

 

[Schmoekoeksklok]

How about stick a pre-order up a couple weeks earlier and let all who pre-order participate in a beta ? Just like the Football Manager series does.

Thousands of testers are better than 150

Since the vast majority of those thousands of testers would give no useful feedback, but mostly white noise, not really. Open beta's have never been very helpful unless you can afford a huge staff to sift through the data they provide. Judging from the bug forum, Paradox can not

 

[Lord Finnish]

OP: "I love Paradox, but I hate Paradox."

Which is a Paradox.

"Paradox was named in honour of its fans".

 

[IIWW]

OP: "I love Paradox, but I hate Paradox."

Which is a Paradox.

Wait, what? It's "I love Paradox, but I hate one thing about them". Have You even read OP's post?

 

[TheeLord]

Actually, the group is currently 150+

I mean this in the most polite manner possible, they are not doing a good enough job. You probably need to expand it or get new testers. There are lots of bugs that should have been easily found in testing.

Not trying to dissuade people from buying AoW or anything of that manner, and I have spent probably $250 on PDS stuff now. AoW plaable for the most part and adds a ton of great features to the game, and Paradox always fixes their errors, but I think all of us who purchase it day 1 should be able to expect cleaner products then we sometimes receive.

 

[Frederick III]

An open beta is the only solution to this particular problem.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I mean this in the most polite manner possible, they are not doing a good enough job. You probably need to expand it or get new testers. There are lots of bugs that should have been easily found in testing.

Who's to say they weren't found? There are usually some bad systemic difficulties between what a beta team finds and what actually gets fixed.

 

[bbspoon]

Actually, the group is currently 150+

most of them are not gamers, but workers with full time jobs, you need people with years of gaming experience with atleast some programming knowledge and alpha/beta testing in the past while actively reporting bugs

from what i've seen/heard the recruitment process is whoever is the most friendly with certain pdox staff, and not actually those who have said knowledge or experience

 

[TheChronoMaster]

most of them are not gamers, but workers with full time jobs, you need people with years of gaming experience with atleast some programming knowledge and alpha/beta testing in the past while actively reporting bugs

That's some interesting inside knowledge.

 

[Korburss]

I mean this in the most polite manner possible, they are not doing a good enough job. You probably need to expand it or get new testers. There are lots of bugs that should have been easily found in testing.

Not trying to dissuade people from buying AoW or anything of that manner, it's playable for the most part and adds a ton of great features to the game, and Paradox always fixes their errors, but I think all of us who purchase it day 1 should be able to expect cleaner products then we sometimes receive.

People tend to forget but bugs aren't ubiquitous. It is perfectly possible for one in a thousand or even ten thousand people to get a specific bug. Sure testing will catch most common bugs but it just isn't possible to get them all. Especially as games and the machines they run on get more and more complex.

 

[Lakedaimon]

Aside from the performance issues reports (which I haven't had personally) this was an incredibly good patch. Most of the complaints are either about the performance issues or people having to adjust to new mechanics.

 

[TheChronoMaster]

People tend to forget but bugs aren't ubiquitous. It is perfectly possible for one in a thousand or even ten thousand people to get a specific bug. Sure testing will catch most common bugs but it just isn't possible to get them all. Especially as games and the machines they run on get more and more complex.

Beyond that, even if a bug is caught, it can affect so little (or be so rare) as to be marked "Will not fix" (which means that the prio is on bigger, more showstopping bugs until later patches), or the cause may be difficult to diagnose prior to locking down for release.

 

[FreeSoc]

Who's to say they weren't found? There are usually some bad systemic difficulties between what a beta team finds and what actually gets fixed.

Either way, I think it's fair to say that some things need improving in the QA/beta area.

The bug that best illustrates this would be the "AI Thinks That Formable Nations Relocate To The Moon And Thus Cancels Alliances Because Of The Massive Distance Penalties" bug. All that was required to spot that would be forming any of the formable nations (major ones like GBR, Spain, Russia, Scandinavia, Prussia, Mughals, Qing) at all, of which there are many, while having an alliance. That it was not spotted and fixed indicates either:
- Out of 150 beta-testers and QA people, not one formed a formable nation at any point in pre-release testing, or were so unobservant in forming them and failing to note the huge distance penalty that they basically weren't testing at all.
- Some of the 150 beta-testers and QA types spotted that forming a formable nation makes the AI think you relocate to the Moon, but this notice was not acted on during preparation of the patch.

Either one of those things is a problem. I can understand that there are loads and loads of bugs which would be difficult to spot, even for a very large QA team, but the Formable Nations bug is not one of those.

Clearly improvements can be made to either testing protocols or in-house protocols for reporting and addressing bugs discovered in testing.

Nonetheless, compared to some recent CKII patches in particular, this has been a pretty solid patch, and I don't want to sound too negative, so thanks for all the work that went into it!

 

[IIWW]

One major bug that should have been seen is the distance while creating a new country. It is so common...
Performance issues were speciffic, as some computers got them, some didn't, it wasn't based on the "strenght" of a PC. If a standard (I think) "go-not go" test was applied, it could have not been seen.