With U13 well on the horizon, its appearance on Bullroarer for testing is coming very soon. In light of this, Sapience has posted a thread detailing a couple of changes to how testing on Bullroarer will be conducted for this year.
Starting with our next update, some changes are being made about how Bullroarer testing will happen.
- Bullroarer will only be open during weekends. Typically from Thursday through Monday barring any delays or adjustments the team wishes to make.
- Before each new round of testing all threads in the Bullroarer subforums will be locked. This is to help cut down on necroposting to threads and other distractions from the current test and feedback requests.
Depending on when the server comes up and goes down, we will be losing about two to three days worth of testing opportunity. This could be perceived as a reduction in the amount of raw testing being done per round and per update, and at this stage it may well prove to be so.
That said, there is also the second change to take into account. Instead of following the very loose form of testing normally being done, at the end of each round all threads made during that round and prior will be locked. This keeps the feedback focused on a select few threads rather than having them spread across the entire Bullroarer sub-forum.
I am very much a supporter of the second change, as I have long felt the public testing for LOTRO has been rather ramshackle and chaotic, especially compared to the various Betas. I am still not convinced cutting the testing time is a good idea, as while pruning the threads may result in more efficient testing, the significant amount of time lost will impact those who are already providing in-depth feedback. We shall have to wait and see.
Fortunately, we shan’t be waiting long.
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Pros:
+ More players will be likely to test at the same time. This increases the odds of getting support from other testers. For example, “Is quest X broken?”
+ QA staff can more easily segment their tasks. For example, they could spend Monday categorizing bug reports, Tuesday reproducing them, and Wednesday forwarding them to developers, instead of having to do all these things on an ongoing basis.
+ Developers may interact more on the forums if they feel they can focus players on only the kinds of feedback they want to hear. Especially if they know they can read it once on Tuesday and just move on.
Cons:
– Fewer employees will be around during testing. They’ll be less likely to observe bugs occurring in real-time. Players will get less direction on whether or not something is working as intended.
– It will be harder to follow the evolution of bugs or features if forum threads are locked following each phase of testing. Valuable context may be lost, especially for players who can’t participate in every phase of testing.
– If you typically work weekends, you’re out of luck.
– Having to do things on Turbine’s schedule starts to feel more like an unpaid internship than a self-motivated volunteer effort.
Sapience has since clarified that forum threads will be locked after the entire patch or update is finished testing, not after each weekend. This makes much more sense to me. And since it means the whole forum won’t be deleted outright as it has been periodically in the past, this makes this a definite pro instead of a con.