Given Funcom on the books only has from my LinkedIn super detective data mining expedition, i could only at most count maybe 2-3 QA person(s). Not to invoke the wrath of the ye olde industry question “how many QA’s does it take to fix a Engineering teams lightbulb” (ie whats the ratio of QA to Developers) suffice to say, 3 isn’t enough.
That’s a lot of ground to gover for a 2.0 release hidden behind the odd marketing pattern of a DLC whilst also being under the umbrella of a “Early Access”. I mean… let that sink in for a second.
Conan Siptah is actually a 2.0 release of a 1.0 release game, delivered under the guise of a DLC but with on going mini-feature growth(s) while using the Early Access “please give us some room to make mistakes” whilst at the same time holding your 1.0 release (Exile Lands) to any and all changes you make.
I feel QA isn’t actually the problem here. I feel its to do with inexperienced product management of some kind making decisions based on bad data or no data. I say that, as to value the data means you’d have to account for your TestLive reports thus far, triage those bugs, allocate some kind of severity level to each of them and knowingly go into a release cycle carrying the weight of these severity decisions to your customers. In which case, probably a good idea to communicate to the said customers who did participate in a way that leaves them understanding how their bugs fit within the release cycles, what severity they were allocated and more over encourage further investment of their time to help you.
All of which… never happened.
Then you have these little gems sprinkled in… my current go to favourite:
Which could lead many people into the constant echo I’ve heard from about 20 people in the last 24hrs “But they fixed undermeshing in this patch didn’t they?” or “I though its now fixed” or “Hah suck it meshers, you can’t mesh anymor…what…they’re still in there…”
Why raise awareness… well… if you’re going to talk about a release notes, and in that context it was. Talking about a system or feature you are releasing but then not actually release it… kind of again doesn’t bode well to others and more over the audience to continue investing in the said Test / QA process if it is to be ignored or continues to be ignored.
Suffice to say.
QA isn’t the major issue here, its one…it has importance…and given my little LinkedIn investigation journey, finding only maybe 2-3 people with the word “QA” or similiar in their titles. I can’t but help that that many people spread over 14 Game Titles in Funcoms portfolio isn’t exactly spelling out “Quality Assurance is important to us”.
You have more people doing Community Support (which i’m not sure what they do tbh - dont get me wrong, i’m not attacking them… i honestly have no clue what community support as a role does at Funcom… ) via this forum than you do in QA if LinkedIn is to be trusted.
O.o