[Feature] How about putting patches on the Test server BEFORE the live servers ?

Discussion in 'The Veterans' Lounge' started by Angahran, Jul 22, 2021.

  1. Elyssanda Bardbrain

  2. Act of Valor The Newest Member

    "I am mad about rat ears" is a funny thing to read when you think about it.
    Gyurika Godofwar likes this.
  3. Barraind Grumpy Old Bastage

    I didnt think to look at rat ears because this has not been a thing I have cared about at any point in my EQ career on any server I have played on, and assumed if anyone thought it was super cereal important, they would have looked for themselves.
    Gyurika Godofwar likes this.
  4. Tatanka Joe Schmo

    Unless, of course, they didn't know they would need them before the patch. Which is what I think was posted. They started a new quest after the patch, and that quest needed the rat ears.

    Seriously, I think people are too forgiving to the development process. The point of a test server for end users is for what was sometimes called systems test. How does the whole system work when everything gets put together. Simple things like unit and feature tests really should be done by development, since they only have a very small scope of change to check. Make sure THOSE work, THEN turn it over for users for the more complex testing.
  5. Skuz I am become Wrath, the Destroyer of Worlds.

    Here's a radical suggestion:

    Before you come to the forum crying & whining "Waaaaaaah, bugs have not been found on the test server" go on the test server in that week the patch is available and actually test the damn content that matters so much to you yourself, stop expecting other players or devs to do all of your testing for you.
  6. Tatanka Joe Schmo

    That's where you screwed up
  7. Skuz I am become Wrath, the Destroyer of Worlds.

    Not at all.

    If you want a patch tested, go test it yourself. That's the purpose of the Test Server.

    If I see something in patch notes I want to see tested, I go test that crap.

    If I find a bug I report it, but I don't go whining the test server players failed to find it, the devs do run tests on their internal server but they know that often they miss things that's the whole reason why they put them on the test server first before live.

    It isn't the devs fault or the test players fault that some things slip through, but if it is so big a deal to you that you gotta come to the forum to bleat about it then go and get involved in the process instead of passively expecting other people to do everything for you.
    Gyurika Godofwar and Barraind like this.
  8. Tatanka Joe Schmo

    You are just wrong. Give up.

    Replace "you" in your drivel with the people who actually wrote the s/w. THEY also have a duty to test and verify fixes/changes (i.e, they have skin in the game). When complex interactions occur, sure, things can slip through, and that's why you put it in front of 100s/1000s of people. But for the very basic "turn off this button" kind of changes, sorry, it's the devs and internal testers who should be on the hook for that.
  9. Skuz I am become Wrath, the Destroyer of Worlds.

    They do run preliminary tests on it, what part of that are you failing at understanding?

    They can't test it 100%, they cannot recreate every single scenario or predict every possible outcome of a change, nor can they reproduce what 1000's of players will do in a live server environment.

    EQ is old, it doesn't have some extensive company QA team with hundreds of testers, it doesn't have a simulation environment that can run exhaustive checks on all the variables.

    It relies on players to find a lot of issues.

    Your expectations are simply unreasonable, how do you know that some simple thing was checked and it simply did not show up on the internal server? You don't, you are just assuming it must.
    Gyurika Godofwar and Nennius like this.
  10. Tweakfour17 Augur

    Skuz likes this.
  11. Yinla Ye Ol' Dragon

    Test these days is as much use as a chocolate kettle. If they cannot pick up a bug such as the negative dot damage that has now gone live with the heal changes. There really cannot be that many people playing on test.

    Test should be picking up stuff like that that happens to every day stuff. Unless no one uses dots on test which I very much doubt.

    I can and do test stuff that I'm concerned about, but not things that are a biproduct of a change.
  12. Zanarnar Augur

    I argue that they don't. Things like this are happening more and more often and literally ANY testing would have shown the issue.. any at all. Like with most of the RAIDS in classic on Mischief they just changed things and assumed it would work as they intended. IF they had spawned a single instance of hate, fear, and sky and just took 5 minutes in each zone to kill a respective number of things, the broken drops wouldn't have happened. (I don't mean go kill every mob in every zone but a sample? sure. And the raids? Its not like classic had 50 of them.)

    If the dev who made the rat ear change had logged into the server and actually checked a merchant, they would have noted there were no rat ears for sale at all, regardless of server expansions.

    They made specific changes, for which they need to look at those specific things and make sure their intended changed worked. The fact that its not getting done more and more often is .. disheartening after finding out EQ is actually on fairly solid footing financially.

    The dot thing is another extremely obvious example.. hay I changed the dot reporting code, maybe I should log in and cast a single dot to make sure it still works.. nahh it'll be fine! /s

    These aren't edge cases, they aren't 1 in a million bugs, they aren't side-effects from other changes... they are smack your face obvious problems with intentional changes.

    (Also.. odd that none at all on test cast a dot in that week it was there. Maybe some changes were pushed live without going to test.. not sure as I don't play there either.)
  13. Malpheroth Elder

    I can’t believe you guys are suggesting that fixing bugs isn’t part of the service we are paying for, that players and not developers should be the ones doing the testing, or that adding bugs to the game is not a problem. I understand that some oversights occur but the op is right in that it would take only minutes to check and clearly the developers are altering game code without doing any patch testing at all.
    Raptorjesus5 likes this.
  14. kizant Augur

    Andarriel, Tweakfour17, Ssdar and 2 others like this.
  15. Skuz I am become Wrath, the Destroyer of Worlds.



    Nobody is saying that.

    But if the amount of testing is not enough for you and you want it to be more, then roll up your sleeves and take part.

    Sitting on your backside doing nothing but complain is clearly working out well so far.
  16. Waring_McMarrin Augur


    The op is complaining about patching to the test server which is for players to experience and help test upcoming changes. Devs and QA do a lot of their work on internal servers that they control things on.

    There is a reason that the test server has a lot of benefits that other servers do not.
  17. Angahran Augur

    What 'amount of testing' ? Apparently the 'amount was zero.

    How difficult is it for, when a DEV decides, "I'm going to remove rat ears from all merchants until expansion XYZ is available on that server" for them to 1) make the change and 2) take 5 minutes to log into a server and see if the change actually worked!

    You don't just make a change and release it to a production environment and assume it will work because it was a 'simple' change and don't bother testing it.
  18. Skuz I am become Wrath, the Destroyer of Worlds.

    If you know it was zero testing how about showing us how you know that?
    If you are just going to make assumptions you are wasting everyone's time.
    Barraind likes this.
  19. Tatanka Joe Schmo

    They clearly didn't.

    I'm out.
    Angahran likes this.
  20. Viper1 Augur

    This is why you hire paid testers/QA/QC (or outsource it to companies that do software testing) to develop and run a battery of tests on your product for each update to verify it's all working correctly. Then you actually have to act on the results of those tests and implement fixes (and then retest the fixes) before you push it to the production environment.

    Ofc, it's just easier to treat your paying customers like free labor to do your testing for you, allowing you to just ** out w/e you want to the production environment. If it doesn't work "sorry, we'll fix it for next month, blah"