Player tested content?

[Carl]

 

So we launched our new version, and after a couple of hours of launching the new version with over 100,000 simultaneous players, the amount of play from that many players at once equates to about 20 years of testing in just 2 hours! As you can imagine 20 years of testing DID try a lot more permutations and a few things which didn't quite work the same after all were discovered.

 

Found Here: http://services.runescape.com/m=devblog/view_post.ws?post_id=14&page=3

 

So yes, I still reckon the current system that's in place will do just fine as it has done.

Thanks I was hoping someone would post this as I always forget to bookmark it.

 

2*100000=200000 hours

Say each member of the team works the average (according to wikipedia, using the values for the UK) 1652 hours per year.

 

200000/1652=121

121/20=6

 

Yes according to Andrew the whole testing team for a game with millions of registered players only has 6 testers. Yes thats 6 testers.

 

I highly doubt they play the game, think edgeville bank issue, running and eat/drinking/changing equipment which the average player found in a few minutes of logging in.

 

 

Yet this update changed everything, you should never expect Jagex to find all bugs in something new.. I wouldn't expect them too. There's just too much!

Think of it this way.

About 50% of the activities most players do day to day are universal and are small things. I'm talking using banks (including walking in and out of them), entering combat, using spells, changing equipment and using common items.

You've got about 25% which is semi common and shared with a majority of players but less then the mentioned above. Things like safe spotting, more advanced combat (familiars, multi weapons, multi styles, etc) and so on.

The remainder are understandable to miss.

 

My biggest gripe is how long does it take to test the day to day stuff which 99% of players notice within minutes.

 

I think that was the one thing they missed out on, and in trying to fix it quickly not enough was done and it had a major knock-on effect for everything else, which you mentioned above... They don't know what's going to happen, you know. Anything's possible when they don't get enough time to check that tweak so they can get the update up and running properly instead of waiting until tomorrow, or the next day or the next day. One can only learn from their mistakes.