I know the idea of a Test Server as a separate entity from the live game is a long way off, but I thought it would be interesting to discuss the options with you, my fellow gamers. I didn’t even know there were options until recently. I thought a test server was always just a fully copy of the live game, plus the new changes. But I recently learned this isn’t always the case! The World of Warcraft Test Realm is NOT a copy of the full game – it’s only the content that Blizzard wants to have tested.
On one hand, I can see an advantage to this. You get more focused, targeted feedback on the content you want to test. It also keeps the size of the test server down. In the case of City of Heroes, it wasn’t a big deal. The whole game was 5GB, so another 5GB for the test server was easily doable by most people. Warcraft is sitting somewhere around 70GB at the moment, and they recommend you have 80GB available. That starts to stretch the limits of availability for a lot of people.
On the other hand, I see this method opening up a lot of problems. When you’re testing in isolation, you can’t know how the new content will interact with older parts of the game. This was evident with the recent “Stat Squish.” Because WoW keeps increasing the level cap, stats keep going up and up. The numbers had gotten so large, that they compressed everything with the latest expansion. But they only tested those squished numbers at levels 110-120. And while the squished numbers worked okay at those levels, characters at lower levels were nerfed quite hard. Dungeons became extraordinarily challenging. They had to readjust the numbers at lower levels to make the game playable. This is something that could, and would, have easily been caught if the test realm were a full copy of the live game.
I only dabbled on the test server with City of Heroes, but I know there was a pretty dedicated test server community. Does anyone remember how responsive the dev team was to that community? My memory tells me they listened closely, and acted on their feedback, but I don’t have first-hand knowledge. From recent events, it almost seems that Blizzard doesn’t listen to the WoW test community. Some feel they let bugs go live to see if they go away on their own once the new content is integrated into the live servers. Some say the devs’ deadlines are too tight, and they can’t act on feedback even if they want to. The question remains, why have a test server if you can’t or won’t act on the information you learn from it?
I’m interested in your experience with test servers. Do you think one method is better than the other? Have I missed some of the benefits or drawbacks of either? Which would you prefer to see implemented in City of Titans?
Apologies if this is posted in the wrong forum, or if it has been discussed before, but I can’t seem to find a search feature.
"The best scale for a test is one hundred centimeters to the meter."
Smaller test realms might be acceptable for initial testing, but ultimately, I think, you want to test in the environment you'll be running in.
Meanwhile, if you look up at the top of the page, to the right, you should see a little magnifying glass icon. There's your search feature. ^_^
Foradain, Mage of Phoenix Rising.
[url=https://cityoftitans.com/forum/foradains-character-conclave]Foradain's Character Conclave[/url]
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Doh! I feel silly. Thanks for pointing my eyes up there for that. :>
And I agree, I personally feel a full-version test server provides a more accurate and meaningful environment for testing. As the saying goes.. in theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, however...
Rather than deleting the parts of the Test Server you don't want to know about (think about it) ... it would probably just be way more effective for the Development Team to actually just SAY flat out "we're interested in stuff over here {hand wave in direction} so let us know what you think of it" so as to point in a useful direction even though people will tend to scatter anyway no matter what you do.
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I'd have to agree with what Foradain and Redlynne have said here. Doing incremental testing might be fine for initial alpha testing but ultimately it'll be more useful for everyone if the CoT "test server" remains as a full-blown identical copy of the entire game.
The concept of doing any kind of "spot" testing after you've already got the full game launched is actually kind of dubious at best because no matter how careful the Devs are at setting that up you're still dealing with multiple baselines which means you're never really testing the actual full game at that point. All you'd be "testing" is a "test" version of the game which means that bugs that exist under one baseline might not exist in the other and vice-versa. It's really NOT the ideal testing situation for anyone involved.
Like Redlynne said if MWM ever wants us to focus on a particular subset of content for testing they could just say "please test out such-n-such" and trust that most people will pay attention to that. I'd rather we test anything like that using the full game baseline than have the Devs think their piecemeal build works then realize it actually doesn't when they try to merge it back into the main baseline.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
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And if "Play at my own D***ed pace Bob" goes off into his own little corner during the playtest to try out five different build variations against that ONE mission he keeps failing, he isn't really hurting anything, and may STILL discover something important for the Devs.
Native of Triumph - Victory - Protector - Gladden - Dwarrowdelf - Tribble
Broad spectrum geek and Shadowy Advisor
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Bottomline you don't always find bugs where you're [i]meant[/i] to be looking for them. As you say if someone "off doing their own thing" on the test server finds a bug that has nothing to do with the latest content the Devs wanted to test it's -still- a bug that was caught.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
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We might do something like that ourselves. I don't remember if we've discussed it yet or not.
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