Ray Warner · QA Pillar Manager, Squadron 42At CIG specifically, one of the big problems that we have is we have these universes that have hundreds of players, potentially in the future hundreds of players in a server at any one time. There are things that happen in the back end when you put that many people doing random things. As we say, people get destructive when they play video games, and when you put a hundred of them in and let them do what they want, it's very, very hard to replicate that in a controlled environment. And that is fundamentally the baseline for QA. We need to be in a controlled environment so we can find those steps, find the cases of how it happens, when it happens, what you need to do to make it happen. And when you put a PTU build out and we get 50 crashes, or we get the elevators killing people, everybody knows this, right? We put it into a game. We get 10 people into the game. We say, just ride elevators for a day and tell us what happens. And it's fine. It runs great. And you're like, why is it running great? And it's really, really hard to replicate. And you can do it in the PTU, but you can't do it in a dev build. So you can't get the information you require. And it's super frustrating. It really is.
Phil Webster · QA Pillar Manager, Persistent UniverseAnd we have to deal with multiple builds a day, whereas the servers will be up for days at a time with this amount of people on them, and so it's the soak time and stuff as well that we just can't replicate, because we have to keep on iterating and getting the fixes in, making sure they do work at a base level, so that we can get it out to the backers and they can start playing it and enjoying it as soon as possible.
Ray Warner · QA Pillar Manager, Squadron 42And then you get Rob Johnson, who comes in and goes, oh yeah, I'll fix that. And it's done. And it's like, I've been locked into this for a week.