Private Testing Feedback Needs to Stop

I agree with the last part,when i gave feedback about elite raids on another episode id have 2-3 people constantly that didnt test it come and discredit my feedback which led to the dev not fully take my feedback in and that raid ended up being 4 man completed a week or so after its release (with previous episode stats).

While i agree with obsidianchill and i think hes the best one to Test and id trust him always but for me it seems like the design of these elite raids are heavily dps centric (on purpose).The dps centric design benefit the buff trolling,eog spamming, solo tank whos „job“ is easy with 5 dps meta and offer little to no challenge to support rolls especially the Tank, this benefits the endgame leagues the most because they deal 2-3-4 times more damage then other endgame groups.

Even elite raids that were told to me in the DM by the dev to be tanked with 2 tanks ended up being solo tank thats surely not intented then plus with previous episode stats as always. but i will say the elite alert for this episode is really well done in Tanking difficulty,i havent tried the elite raid yet but i have high hopes i will also sub again if its challenging.

The mechanics are very, very simple in theory ... and at the same time they are not a good choice to play ...
Why? precisely because of the "color" mechanics ... it is very unfriendly to people who have problems with correctly distinguishing colors ... sometimes developers and testers forget that very different people, old and small, at their peak of physical fitness and with disabilities to varying degrees, play the DCUO , including people with different forms of color blindness ... therefore this type of mechanics should be duplicated by alternative forms of notification ...

This is something that players just don’t understand. You can have every single person who plays the game. When the code is transferred over to the game there is always a chance a mew bug will happen. Coding isn’t as simple as we wrote this so we just copy and paste or copy and overwrite. Not only that. But there aren’t a lot of testers on the server either. So there will be bugs that just aren’t discovered. And this isn’t me “white knighting” for the devs. This is a legitimate issue. Every single person who posts on the test forums doesn’t actually test.

Now there is a difference between bringing up concerns of things you observed from testers and claiming things as facts when one didn’t actually test anything personally. Bringing up concerns is all well and good. I haven’t been able to get on test myself much for this dlc. But I’ve still kept track of the ally and a few bug fixes. But I won’t go in and claim anything about the content and things I don’t know anything about from first hand experience.

How did you know my birthday was coming up?

Not a sole would deny that the game lacks testers, I know plenty of players who go on test to do the new content to a) check it out and b) get familiar with mechanics but don't offer any feedback (which is fine that is their prerogative) and there are players that test and give feedback but when the hotfixes come out after their feedback has been taken don't test anymore and don't see if that has caused any more issues. FFE was a good example of this, there was decent amount of feedback for FVE and that turned out ok but no one was running FFE and that turned out to be a disaster at release. If I could clone myself 7 times id be in a good spot but the most feedback provided on the forums will be feedback that can be done solo or even 2 players. You or I could spend all night testing trinkets or allies or artifacts or open world missions and provide a mountain of feedback like Penryn and others do but when it comes to needing 7 others to que and reque elite continuously its frustrating.

That's a shame because I bought a 500 gaming computer from Amazon and if I'm spending that much like a console would cost then I should be able to play games fine but that's not the case with DCUO. I was lagging so bad, could barely run the game. I even googled what games I could play on my desktop and it said DCUO could barely be played like minimal. Pfft... I'll stick to my PS4.

Heaven forbid a playerbase that has a variety of different thoughts and opinions and preferences.

Yeesh.

Opinions and preferences =/= excuses to make everything around them.

So, whats your point? They can easily sift through that feedback and focus on the relevant stuff, I do it all the times with forum posts.

This is actually an awful take.

1) People are sophisticated enough to care about multiple issues at the same time. Wait until you witness someone walk and chew bubble gum simultaneously. It's magical. So they can care about these issues AND still have valuable testing feedback.
2) Caring about any or all of these issues you listed doesn't somehow disqualify someone from being able to provide valuable testing feedback.
3) Testing is done to provide feedback on a variety of concerns including; difficulty (too easy OR too hard), bugs, exploits, general appeal, adherence to IP, and so on.
4) Since the target demo of this game is not the elite or hardcore player, (because the IP appeals to such a wide demographic with varied ages, skills and so on), their feedback on difficulty is less valuable to the feedback process. Meanwhile the avg player's (who is more likely to be concerned about all of the other issues you listed btw) feedback has greater value to the process. The more of an "elite" or "hardcore" player you are, the less meaningful and relevant your input is actually because you're more disconnected from the experience of the avg player.
5) Re "my whims" this is funny because the game is designed and balanced around the avg player not the elite/hardcore player so the only people whining about the game not being designed around them are people in the elite/hardcore community who think the game is too easy and are here to gatekeep difficulty and talk down to the rest of the community.
6) not caring about those other issues you listed is an indicator of how out of touch you are with the avg player if you don't.

The premise your post is based on is that testing is intended to make sure that the game doesn't become too easy. That's not what it's designed to do and is pretty much a mask-off for your own biases and anyone who thinks like that or agrees with you shouldn't be testing because your own agenda pollutes the results of testing. You're proving OP's point.

I don't have a problem with feedback, as I said by all means post feedback, but in the public threads like everyone else. I have a problem with someone like you who openly insults everyone he doesn't agree with and then goes and back channels with the devs to try and get raids made in his warpred warped viewpoint.

Actually its a public test server. Anyone with a PC that meets the minimum specs for this game can access the test server. Its called Public Test for a reason.

A few things here, first I get it, people will attack players in the public testing thread to prevent that persons feedback from being heard, something that a user "NotObsidianChill" and his friends have done before, then they started PMing feedback. And as far as the attacking of other players in that thread, thats something the community manager should take care of, after all, thats his job.

Private feedback should be for serious exploits and the like. Any sort of general feedback should be put out in the open. History within this game has taught us that even if it starts off well meaning, it will be perverted and eventualy lead to highly skewed feedback amost a favored few that seeks to futher an agenda of personal gain.

If you believe in the feedback you are giving, put it out there. Defend it. If you can't, then maybe it's not in the best interest of the game or even a good idea at all.

Do what the devs tell ya to do for feedback. But also follow basic stuff like finding an exploit vs if an enemy needs a chevron as to how to post it. If you want to have your own say in the feedback, then I’d say participate and leave feedback.

So in other words because you spend hours of your time, which btw is a conscious choice you made, you think you should be the arbiter for all feedback and you should be the one that deems it all worthy of consideration?

I think everyone should be skeptical of any feedback from ANYONE that is sent privately. Especially since one of those people has a well established history of exploiting things himself (on live server) then claims its all done for testing so you can report it. You exploited the artifact glitch (the first one), then when called out on it, claimed it was for testing purposes...even though that easily could have been tested on the test server. You told people how they were no good very bad people when they sold Detectors or caches to the broker for 100s of millions during the last money glitch, BUT when you buy phoenix, void, and NSF mats from the broker when they were going for 30-40M/mat then sell them later for 100s of millions or billions, then thats perfectly fine. So its very wrong and bad for someone to indirectly benefit from a exploit, but when you do the same thing, no problem. You also admitted to directly exploiting replays during the linkdead glitch, but that was done for testing right? "I said I used the replay badge glitch along with 1000's of other players...." An actual quote from you, but then you say others are bad when they sell things to people who did the actual money glitch. So when the vaunted ObsidianChill can exploit something, but no one else can. See the double standard? I doubt you do, because your head is shoved so far thats its coming out of your head again.

Usually when the actions are taken by the Community Manager, the damage is already done. There has also been incidents that the moment the players makes a new post, they get dog piled. I don't know how long you've been around testing forums, but trust me, there have been incidents that go beyond just the CM handling it.

As for your concerns about any particular gaming influencer, there isn't a whole lot we can say or do. You can always report incidents that may prove an issue of concern by PMing a developer and/or Mepps with documentation of what they said. But in the end, the Developer will be the ones to choose on whether or not they will take feedback from you or the other person.

Also, there have been incidents of the developers completely ignoring any and all feedback and push everything through, which is really the biggest reason why there are a lot less testers. It demoralizes.

Testing requires time from the player. It is free. There is no compensation. When a toxic response to their feedback happens. The tester either takes it to PMs or stops testing altogether.

In the end of it all, it really comes down to more on how the devs handle it. I'm with you on balance of content. We had a problem with STU Throne Elite at launch that could actually have been avoided if they didn't take the testing feedback that was mentioned.

But heaven forbid to actually talk about balance of Elite content, because filthy casuals want everything given to them. </paraphrasing>

I agree that many people don't actually test, and just post what they want done, I see it all the time. But thats where you have standards set up or someone post a video to show what they're talking about, the exact circumstances in which a bug/glitch was relicated. But they shouldn't just default to feedback through PMs, because then you have a transparency issue, the integrity of the feedback and the player, etc. The problem is you have people in these so-called "top leagues" with a rule in their discord to not upload any videos while testing, not post in the public thread and ONLY PM your feedback to the devs.

Oh Man, PvP fixing update. That was amazing time...

There's not really anything fundamentally wrong with submitting feedback in private as everyone is capable of creating a private message, essentially submitting private feedback is no different than what you put on their surveys, which has the potential to be just the same.

However, obviously, submitting feedback in private could raise questions as to motive or moreso that the person sending the private message wants to avoid scrutiny, that's fine but there's a risk in that if people were to find out about what was said, which is probably unlikely they might look upon it unfavorably.

I think from a healthy testing perspective, if people are testing it's useful to positively engage with the devs and subsequently the community in an open and transparent manner, which is why the testing threads are created in the first place, but that doesn't mean there couldn't be an appropriate time and place for more private feedback that might have an opportunity to be more focused.

I think at times we've all been guilty of attempting to rail-road our views, not just "Dude with a YT" and I'd know because "Dude with a YT" has called me names more than once (Don't worry Dude with a YT, it's cool ). Often however the fighting in feedback is simply because of miscommunications and comes from a shared place of passion, despite not having an agreement, we all just need to work better at knowing when to walk away from an argument that is obviously objective and I understand there's a level of irony in me being the one pointing this out

The few things I would say about testing is that I think people do need to focus a little more on overall general game bugs and the like rather than the disproportionate level of focus that goes towards "elite content difficulty" which has become all but an unhealthy obsession. Penryn generally tends to do a good job with this.

"Dude with a YT" I mean ObsidianChill is right though in that the people listened to the most are the people that are vocal and actually testing and giving up their free time. Now that isn't to say people giving up their free time deserve "bonus points" because everyone has different priorities (and to some extent this also highlights why Dimensional Ink should have better in-house testing that doesn't rely on players who have biases) but if you're passionate about it then jump on test.

The only other thing I'd highlight is that I think any player who plays is entitled to give feedback irrespective of whether they're testing or even playing the game more widely for that matter, it is perfectively viable to at times give feedback based on observation, those people should keep communications clear and the people testing shouldn't get so defensive about being scrutinized because their feedback will always fall or stand based on the merits alone.

Anyway time for Coffee with a hint of caramel.