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

The patch was "- Rat Ears will no longer be available for purchase from merchants until The Serpent's Spine is active."
Rat Ears were NOT available on live servers, where 'The Serpent's Spine is active.'
Therefore NO test was done to ensure that Rat Ears WERE available on merchants after The Serpent's Spine is active.

It's not rocket science.

Well done spotting the difference.

1. What do you know now that you wish you knew when you started?

Working on EQ has been more challenging than I realized. I definitely felt out of my element working on a codebase with millions of lines of code, when in school I had worked with a few thousand at the most. Things that sound like they would be really simple to do are sometimes really complicated in EQ.

Considering we have players actively playing on the test server each day and there appears to be no reports of the DoT messaging bug I would question that. How could that have gone unnoticed by anyone who was using DoT's on the server?

It's an XP quest like orc belts, etc. It wasn't a big deal before because you couldn't carry enough to make it feasible. Now rat ears stack to 1,000 because they are used in baking as you say. I've not done it, but I guess you could get to level 15 for 600-800 plat roughly and not much of your time.

Here's how it is supposed to work:

1. Requirements come from game developers.
2. Programmer codes the feature or fix per the requirements.
3. Programmer tests his or her own code extensively before turning it over to QA.
4. QA tests the code according to the test plan.

Here's how it appears to work at DPG:

1. Requirements come from game developers.
2. Programmer codes the feature or fix.

The end.

Seriously. There is no question the entire dev process at DPG needs an overhaul. These introduce bugs happen every patch. Marks for consistency, though.

You work or have worked there? From what I understand they do test their code and they have QA testing as well but that doesn't mean that things still can't go wrong.

As nobody who plays on live and test noted it happening on test, theres a pretty simple explanation.

Not everything translates 100% from devtest to test to live.

Thats always been the case, and will likely always be the case.

Speaking as someone who plays semi-regularly on Test, I have to say there are some broad misconceptions of how that server operates.

The overall population is very small; I won't guess how small, but certainly never enough people to open more than one General chat channel. There are a couple of actual raiding guilds on Test, and they form the majority. They are testing the changes made to current endgame content as the devs work on troubleshooting lag issues (which don't seem to appear on Test because the pop is small). There are also players like me, who either individually or in small groups, run through various lower-level content segments. For example, I box three or four on Test even though I never box on my Live server (Vox), and I run sets of toons through hotzone quests. (Right now I have a new group I'm intending to run from 1-85 via the Hero's Journey line; I'm doing this because there have been so many recent complaints that it breaks down in the 65-70 range, and I want to be able to show it still works as designed.) I can't emphasize this point enough: Players' time on Test is limited, because pretty much everyone there is playing at least one main on a Live server. The people who are testing on Test all have bigger-picture tasks in mind and aren't going to comb through each month's patch notes and say "I have to stop what I'm doing and test this or that bullet point."

The game is huge, and there is no way a small number of people can cover it all, particularly since the testing emphasis is and has always been on current endgame content. I can't speak to the question of whether or not the DoT issue in the latest patch was or was not noticed by anyone on Test, since my guys are not in content where that would show up. However, I would not jump to the conclusion that it was missed, because in my experience the guilded Test players have lines of communication with the dev team separate from the public bug report list. If I thought about, I could come up with numerous anecdotal examples of things that were caught on Test but couldn't be changed before the patch went Live, and then the dev team had to decide whether to hotfix or let it ride for the next month. The DoT thing has already been hotfixed.

Rat ears is a special case because it was driven by a TLP issue. Test is a so-called "blue rules" server, so it has no AoCs, no free trade, etc. NOBODY is testing TLP-specific code changes on Test because none of us knows how the server rules delineation (look it up if you need to) works in the code. One of us could spot something and post it in the bug forum, only to be told by a dev "working as intended". While I personally think the rat ear "bug" couldn't have hurt anyone much, since there are so many other ways to quickly farm them, it is a valid point of concern that the Test server isn't designed to test the TLP platform. It would never in 100 years have occurred to me to look and see if rat ears were or were not available on a vendor.

TLP-driven changes sometimes break things on Live, and vice versa, and that's just how it is. Please stop arguing about whose responsibility it is to test for that, because the answer is none of us; they don't have enough resources available to anticipate every issue, and neither do we. Welcome to the gaming hobby.

Test has AoC's.

Well, test usually has AoC's, anyway.