Testing Incentives Program

Honestly, offering 5 COTO's for 4 hours of play over one release (~30 days) is not that bad a deal.

 

myrmecologists rejoice!

 

To be clear, I'm not talking about being handed free experience. Something like WoW's rested experience would be ok. You'd still have to earn experience, but perhaps get the first X amount at a higher rate. The Potion of Experience I was talking about would just be something like that, bought with COTOs like the rest of the potions we can currently buy for COTOs.

Backing up a little bit; give the Dev testers COTOs and they can spend them however they want, including potions and the hypothetical Experience potion.

 

It is really nice to award players for testing but this solves only one motivation issue regarding testing.

We have still the problem on QA that we don't know what is already in, what was fixed or added with a patch and that we need to grind XP to test skills from lvl 1 to 100. If those issues would be addressed it would make Testing easier.

 

I like the incentives, but to echo the post above me, participation in QA is lowered due to a lot feeling their actual input is ignored. Sure giving shiny things will help get more bodies in there, but it won't change the fact that things get pushed to QA, then feedback on them gets ignored, they go live, then miraculously get fixed the first day or two later with a patch when the public at large says the same thing the QA testers were saying.

Having more clear patch notes, and more relevant responses to feedback threads would go a long way to making players want to put time in beyond just earning their shinies, rather than just feeling it's wasted and they're only really there to do glorified breaking bug finding, which is only a small part of the QA process.

 

I'm going to participate in this and try to contribute where I can.

To be perfectly honest I normally don't think about downloading the QA build because I forget it exists. This is a good reminder!

 

Maybe, We could do the bug reporting as normal, placing into a either new forum section or continue to use the present approach, but a google document can be opened where we can edit or better yet just input allowed entries and put in maybe just the date/nameOfPerson/shortDescription/urlLinkTo/ and then 2 fields for Port's QA, one to acknowledge the bug has been seen and then one to be filled in when fixed. This will give feedback to the testers and keep all bugs in and easy to manage overall.

It would be quite easy to have someone take responsibility for hosting the google doc or similar and produce a web page that allows the entry of the above, with maybe access given to port to edit and show acknowledgement and completion....looks @Umuri

 

Skill decay is a concern. Can we put decay on disable?

 

I think Portalarium already log the bugs on Jira but this "player bug report" database you suggest would be good to avoid redundant bug reports. Nice idea!

 

If anyone wants to test in Dev+ but like Fister Magee cannot afford that pledge level, then contact Spoon through PM.

 

Excellent decision, I just love the idea of giving players some prominent bug-squishing brag rights in the form of cool stuff.

Just please be sure to address the concerns already expressed succinctly above by Sindariya and Umuri (emphasis added on things with which I couldn't agree more):

 

I will be glad to help where I can. The prizes help to give reason to take time out to try to reproduce and then to research if an issue has already been logged and to log one if it is not already logged for minor/iffy stuff that I may not have done before.

I am an ancestor level pledge so there is no bundle that makes sense for me to buy just to get access to help with the QA level testing. It seems like it would be beneficial if people who have a good track record of accurately reporting new bugs on live server could have a method of testing the QA server and a place to report QA bugs outside of the DEV+ forums.

 

Aye, I would spend more time on QA but leveling is so slow now that Im still hard core farming exp lol (only adv lvl 72, got to 82 before final wipe).

 

Now that we're in persistence - maybe QA could be opened up to anyone willing to test. I'll log into QA and test but I won't put in the time required to really grind down the experience beyond reporting crashes and submitted dumps. My QA access feels kinda wasted now, tbh. I'm sure there are plenty of people out there that would be more than willing to stop their leveling and grind in persistence and head over to QA because they like doing that and they're good at it.

I doubt I can give my QA access to someone else - but if I could, I would. Spending too much time in QA now that we're in persistence will leave me feeling conflicted about how I spend my time. That's the problem with having a big expensive Dev+ QA server access pledge - it means there's lots to do with all that big expensive pledge stuff in persistence.

 

I would love to test in QA since i am largely waiting to play but i don't want to spend another 200 dollars for the privilege. Either sell access at an affordable rate or open it up.

 

Yeah I just want get paid. Lol seriously though, how about something I can actually use, not look at. sheww enough already.

 

Too bad we can't link the active friends, whispers, and guild chat across live and QA.

It would be handy to stay connected and also have access to the teleport friends list.

 

@DarkStarr, would you be able to tell us in advance when you're going to take the snapshot from live that will end up in QA? Last time I logged into QA for testing this release I was totally broke and very badly overencumbered lol. Of course that's my natural state, but if I knew a snapshot were going to be taken I could clean up a bit.

 

that is worth it actually. Considering that the time spent out of the game to help make the game better for release means rather than spend the 5 cotos trying to better our character in live we gain 5 cotos to possibly help make the game better. This is definitely worth it. I would say this alone is payment enough. The other stuff is just cool fun stuff.

IF anybody is thinking about buying a bundle to get dev+ access they ought to count this 5 crown bonus per month as part of that bundle. If they do and plan on playing long term that 5 crowns per month turns into 60 crowns per year... a $60 additional benfit over whatever comes with the bundle. TOTALLY WORTH IT!

 

Rewards for actions are great but in QA how about the ability to set skills you are basically wasting players time and given them reward while forcing us to grind our skills to test stuff out.