QA are the enemies of developers; there's an antagonistic relationship between developers and QA. What do you have to say about that?
TL;DRQA and developers don't have an antagonistic relationship; they work closely from feature design, developers test their own work too, and QA's wide view of the game can reveal impacts on other systems.
Not at all. Definitely not. When it comes to devs and QA, obviously, we are there to somewhat ruin the day. And we do come in, and sometimes there'll just be something that they have not expected that crops up. But the vast majority of the time, I think we have a pretty good connection with the devs. None of them have called me names to my face. But yeah, we work very closely pretty much from the beginning of when a feature is being designed. So for example, at the moment, in the run-up to 3.15, we've got the healing and inventory changes that are coming in. We've been working really closely with the Actor Feature team on that. Guys like Chris Parry doing absolutely wonderful work, and they guide us and we help guide them. So we're all striving towards that same goal of having a good quality product. Developers also test their own work. So it's not just us that are coming around and saying, "Hey, it's broken." If they go through and launch it up and something's broken, they also don't want that. So yes, as much as it is kind of like a Tom and Jerry cat-and-mouse comedic relationship in theory, in reality we do have quite a good bond with those guys, which is really fun. And honestly, QA gets to touch on so many different areas of gameplay that we do have a close connection with all of the devs. Say, for example, artists may never get the chance to work with a particular area just because of the nature of their job. So it's really great to have our tendrils in there. And George being directly in the network team, obviously, if you didn't have a good relationship with those guys, that wouldn't work so well. I'm hoping stuff's good.
Yeah, stuff's going very well.
Also, because we touch on everything, we potentially know a bit more about other features than the devs, because they'll be very focused on what they're doing, their one little thing. For example, back when I was doing UI stuff, when I was here before, there was an occasion where literally they did something and it impacted on another system they hadn't even considered. The second we saw it, we were aware and we obviously fed that back. So having that relationship with the teams, you've got the ability to give them knowledge they sometimes don't necessarily have access to, because they're so focused on their one little area.