What kind of tests was the RSI Perseus put through during its internal playtest, since the poster has not heard of an internal playtest for a ship before?asked by CR-0101-NA

Hey! Friendly neighborhood embedded QA here - I took the lead on organizing that playtest and I'm happy to share a bit more about this.

Earlier this year, we did some similar large scale internal testing to help prepare the way for the updated Aegis Idris to hit the Persistent Universe, which helped form a workable testing structure for these kinds of tests. After that success, we wanted to continue to learn from integrating the different levels of QA (upstream with embedded QA working directly with the teams, all the way downstream to Release QA who you may often see especially in the PTU and LIVE environments) to add new layers of testing that focused on multiplayer and momentarily stepping back from a highly technical approach to just play with the ship like many of us play the game when we get home. We also wanted to put into practice lessons that we learned about multiplayer testing that came up with the release night of the Kruger L-21 Wolf.

Earlier in October, we set out on a plan to answer a couple big questions: A) How does the Perseus perform under the rigors of a fully-crewed and multiplayer environment? B) Does the Perseus feel like the sub-capital killer we and the community envisioned during its concept? To answer those questions, we put together about a half dozen teams to fully crew multiple Perseus and put it through its paces from basic ground cargo and station operations, atmospheric and zero-g flight trials, and a massive melee that began with pitting the Perseus against all classes of fighters, sub-capital ships (think Aegis Hammerhead), and capital ships (think RSI Polaris) both in dense PvE engagements like our mission content as well as Org vs. Org style PvP battles. In our PvP battles we opened out flooding the field with fully crewed Perseus ships and as unfortunate crews met their demise, we reorganized into fighter squadrons to get revenge.

I want to give a shout out to all the folks internally that signed up to crew in our fleet; we had designers and artists who built the ship, tech artists, player and vehicle experience teams, as well as end-to-end representation of QA. What made the testing successful in terms of how we reported it in this most recent monthly report was multi-fold; it gave us an invaluable opportunity to answer our questions about how the ship feels by playing with it like the community, it also gave us an opportunity to have not only a funnel for gameplay feedback earlier in the countdown to release than ever before, but also gave many of the devs who directly work on the ship an opportunity to learn how players will use the ship when it is released while making adjustments and insights that will go on to benefit future vehicle content.

It's important to note that this kind of testing is an escalation of our approach that has always included continuous testing all through the development of our vehicles as well as playtesting as vehicles transition from active development into the final stages of their release. What we have done differently here, and what we are looking at as a potential option for vehicles in the future, is to set aside dedicated time where we focus on how the ship will be interacted with by our community - and how they will interact with others. Our job as QA is ever to empower our developers with accurate information about the health of our content so that they can triage feedback and issues as effectively as possible (often complimented by the amazing evidence and data coming from the Issue Council). This kind of playtest gave us a whole new level of insight that often we might not see until after the vehicle has already released. I'm excited to read and watch as the RSI Perseus makes its way into the 'Verse and keep notes of reactions, feedback, and any issues so we can continue to hone our testing processes and drive more gameplay-driven feedback into the vehicle development pipeline.