Heya, After observing the Topic viewtopic.php?f=61&t=45421&start=0 i was wondering about the alpha, whenever it will come. That question goes to the uber team in the first place. I think we got as mutch opinions as users in the forum. Thats normal, we are all human. But you got the experience Uber-Team, and when the Alpha will come, how about to post a little sticky Testguide in the Forum? There will be people who play alpha only for fun or to see what will come. Then there will be people who play alpha for the reason of really help with suggestions and bug reports, but maybe they dont got the experience to determine what a real bug or glitch could be, and then there will be the people who got some or mutch experience in alpha testing, want to help and know what to look for. Nothin personla, but i guess group 1 will be big and group 2 will be big too, by comparison to Group 3 that knows the drill and got the experience. So i would suggest to post a a little 1&1 guide about alpha testing with the importent things that you maybe want or need to that player look for.
This is a great idea for bug testing, but for things like gaming balance, nudging people into playing/testing in a cetrain way prevents them going out on a limb in the way some players would after release so somethings may get missed as a result. By definition structure tends to wall you in lol
Thats true, but the question wasnt about a checklist or a deffinied way how to test things, i mean a guide, a simple Q&A list as example so that people at least know what should be importent and what not if they want really serious to test for bugs and exploits. Dont get me wrong, i dont say go out and test. Like i stated, there will be many peoples who doesnt give a thing about report bugs or make suggestions during alpha, i talk about people who could be willing and has no experience at all in a area like that.
As a seasoned veteran of SMNC alpha testing... People can play the alpha for whatever reason they want. They backed the project. Unlike SMNC where Uber invited people they thought would add value.
Uber will have some in-house guys doing the "proper" (structured) testing, and I would assume are relying on the public (us) to do a lot of the edge-case testing. You know, stuff like building ridiculous amounts of units just because, trying to smash 4+ asteroids into each other (and/or a planet) at once just because, trying to run PA on a Raspberry Pi just because... I think you get the picture Structured testing is important to get the baseline functionality working properly and stably. Destruct/stress testing is important to catch all the issues that only occur when someone is doing everything wrong (accidentally or otherwise) :mrgreen: A coördinated, simultaneous asteroid strike on all 6 cardinal axes of a planet is something I'd love to witness / be happy to participate in just for the giggles :twisted:
I think at the least we will need to add another section for people who have alpha access. To discuss bugs in alpha so we can report and discuss the bugs without having to spam the backers forum. I would say if that you will know a bug when you find one, normally when something doesn't do what its suppose to do as well as it should is a bug or something that is doing something it shouldn't be able to will be a bug/glitch/H4x0r. Generally alpha testing is to iron out the major issues and work out the balance of the game etc this can be done just by playing it normally, Anything that is missed will be picked up in Beta so I think a general description of how the game should run is enough for alpha. Perhaps for the Beta testing we will want to create some sort of guide on how to go actively searching for the bugs then have a process in for reporting them.
