Being a programmer assigned to a Customer Service team where I work, I can
understand this in a sense. A fix is made to a piece of code and now it must
be tested. Since the dev team does not have oodles of free time on their
hands, they cannot properly level a necro to the neccessary testing points
or they can't run scenarios through a variety of different spawn point
situations. (Take the whole shaman alchemy thing for example) They test a
few variations to make sure that it works as they expect. The other, and
more important thing that I have learned in situations like this is this.
The customer can always find more inventive ways of breaking something than
the coder can.
I think the other thing is that they are trying to make up for the Levitate
'fix' that went in. They didn't mention the fix to anyone and it never
really got tested all that much on the test server. Then *wham*! Hello
Production. This actually makes a lot of sense in the testing world. A
tester would be told what was changed and asked to test it, not just told
that there may or may not be a change somewhere and be expected to test the
entire system.
Good Journey
Sineras Silverlyre, The Divine Alliance (Cazic-Thule)
-----Original Message-----
From: Kimes, Dean W. [mailto:
Dean_Kimes@...]
Sent: Thursday, January 06, 2000 2:58 AM
To: '
eqbards@onelist.com'
Subject: [eqbards] EQ Testing Procedure
Well, here you have it straight from the EQ team themselves. In an excerpt
from the test server:
Solution:
Ideally, Feign Death should work like Invisibility, where summoned pets
suicide and the charmed ones break Charm. We do not want, however, to
adversely affect lower level Necromancers to such a large degree. What we
do recognize is the need to prevent higher level Necros from exploiting key
spawn points. Hence, when you Feign Death, any charmed NPC will immediately
break Charm. However, summoned NPCs (pets) will not be affected. While
this still allows the use of the Feign Death tactic with your summoned pet,
it does not imbalance the game and many dungeon spawns to the degree that
charming an NPC does.
We would appreciate diligent testing of this change, to insure that no
unforeseen problems have been caused by it.
-The EverQuest Team
So now they are saying they would appreciate diligent testing of a change?
Wtf? Who is the customer and who is the service provider here? I guess
this tells us everything we need to know about Verant test procedure. Throw
the code out on the test server and hope some player puts it to task.
Kitasi
more disillusioned than ever
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