Hi everyone, I appreciate the stress Asobo must be under - my guess is they were directed to release the game early, before it was ready. I did see the developer Q&A yesterday, and I also understand that a monthly patch cycle isn’t allowing them enough time to do the types of testing that needs done prior to release.
My wish is that they would incorporate back alpha/beta testers from the community. I’d do the following:
- only include testers that actively submitted bugs - with good documentation
- divide up the testers into teams (or allow testers to opt into a team), each of which is responsible for testing something with every release:
- Have a small team of 3 or 4 real world pilots test one plane model that they have actual experience with. This means you need 30 or 40 small groups to cover all the planes
- Have a small team each test a given avionics system. Again…people with real world experience.
- Have a larger group of people (50-100?) with varying hardware specs each responsible for just flying for a few hours and noting any crashes, performance issues, etc.
- Have a group of people with various controllers each responsible for clearing out their controller assignments and redoing from scratch. One or two controllers each is plenty.
- Maybe groups of people who live in varied geographic areas fly around their local areas and note scenery issues
- Maybe groups of people who know airports validate airport layout, looks, proper runway / taxiways, etc.
- Other small groups testing whatever else needs tested - but always limited to only requiring 1 hour tops per release to regression test their specific area
I feel like with a system like this, you could do a much more thorough job of testing - and it wouldn’t be burdensome to the testers if they only have to spend an hour each time. Just carve up small teams of 3 or 4 people with real world experience in the item being tested, and ask them to test it for every release.
I also hope Asobo comes to the decision that it would be better to hold a release for a week for a hot fix than to roll patches out with bugs…things like the controller sensitivity screens not being available, the VFR map crashing the game, etc. shouldn’t (ever) be released.
Just my thoughts. Seems like a relatively easy way to get things tested quickly, in preparation for more thorough integration testing (which I’d leave for the Asobo test team to do).
Scott