Storm: “Our QA is One of the Best”

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Source: http://world-of-ru.livejournal.com/3591257.html

I’ll just leave this here. It’s from a non-public section of RU forums for testers.

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Question: “Mikhail, how many people work in WG Quality Assurance department? If it’s not a secret, of course.”
Storm: “I can’t tell you exactly, we are actively expanding. I consider our Quality Assurance department to be one of the best in the (gaming) industry.”

Right.

99 thoughts on “Storm: “Our QA is One of the Best””

    • Since we dont know how many of the bugs etc their QA finds, and we dont know how many are in a normal Patch BEFORE they get their hands on it, we know very little. And to be fair, the M53/55 Bug was the first major one i know, and i am playing for a year or so know (since 8.6 or 8.5 i guess?)
      And since you know that WG promised a whole lot for this year (havok etc etc), but did not manage to introduce all that stuff to the game, maybe the QA had to stop them because their were like a billion bugs in it, and so they decided not to bring it out, knowing what a shistorm was coming…
      And since i play i never saw a Bug in game. There was never any little thing in a battle that was not supposed to be there in the first place.
      So i guess they are ok :)

      • There were at least 2 bugs like the one with M53/55 and several smaller ones before. And we don’t even talk about different types of bugs, just the model f*ck ups.

        • well, it’s not like WG they have lots of Content to check against (do you compare it to Blizzard ? yea right… it’s the ratio of content to bugs and WG is very “special” in this regard, and truly their QA is “special” and unique.

      • @Hans Hubertus: Already forgotten the famous lags (OK, WG stated it wasn’t a but but the olympic games)?

    • I can’t speak about EA (though I am aware of their reputation) however my experience with Blizzard was very pleasant. I had my Diablo 3 account stolen a few years back and they were very quick to respond with account verification, password resetting and ultimately an account rollback. Whoever stole my account messed stuff up pretty bad but after Blizzard helped out everything was back to normal. Now WG on the other hand… Let’s just say Storm is making some bold statements to say the least.

      • They assure quality by the bucket loads – now they need a deliver quality department.
        Was a happy gamer til 9.4 – everything seems to be running right but its like i am lagging whenever i try to aim at anything.
        Re install – run vanilla – no change. Currently playing Warthunder until 9.5 or fix.

  3. Considering how ultra bugged some games from big studios are even after a ton of patches, some even unplayable, WG actually doesnt fuck up thaaaat much to be honest ..

    Im playing since 4 years now and never had some major issues with the game i couldnt trace to some bad graphics driver or something. Sure there are some bugs, but not gamebreaking bugs.

    • Not game breaking? Imagine how many players had their tanks destroyed because they couldn’t hit f*cked up M53/55 turret ;)

      • Oh please, that’s nothing compared to what can happen. I will give 2 examples.
        1. I am currently playing Firefall a lot, and it has a lot of problems with sounds since always (3+ years). Sometimes most of the sounds stop playing leaving only few cues and/or other tracks are looping. Imagine in wot whenever you drive near one of your allies you can hear its gun firing every second and it doesnt change untill it actually fires.
        2. Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance had very nasty exploit where you could buy expensive upgrades to your armored command unit for the price of cheapest upgrade availiable. It was possible to buy big ass laser beam which costed about as much as 1000 basic tanks for price of 20 tanks.

        So yeah, M53 turret compared to these bugs is laughable.

      • I aggree with Corvi, calling this arty bug as gamebreaking is an exaggeration. I’m imagining how many players found themselves in such situation and i think its really, really damn low number.
        How often do you see this arty?
        How often do you aim for the turret instead of the hull?
        How often does your shell go towards the turret instead of hull or nothing? Hell, it even may fly too high and hit the phantom model.
        How often do you get killed by THIS arty because you aimed for the turret and it flew that way?
        See how many variables are there? It might be annoying, its kind of funny, but not gamebreaking.

        • My clanmate lost Pool’s medal because his shot went thru the arty… and someone else killed it… He (clanmate) was angry as hell…

      • True its not game breaking…
        BUT, a good QA team would push for a small content patch within a few days (or quicker) of this bug being fixed.

        Doesn’t the bug still exist?

        • Usual ETA for quickpatch in big online games is usually 1 – 2 WEEKS. Even Diablo 3 right after release (when it needed the patches the most and it was clear it’d need some, no game is flawless after release) took 3 days to quickpatch ONLY the gamebreaking bugs (invulnerability in fights, etc). And that was, at the time, mostly single player game.

          Broken model? I’d estimate 1 – 2 weeks, if not until the next patch. But with the number of bugs I think there’ll be a hotfix patch in upcoming week or so.

        • Keep in mind that even small patchest cost money. They cost money in terms of bandwith. If you would push little 50-60 mb patches every week, imagine how much data that is if millions of players download those patches. It all puts strain on the network, the datacenters and servers.

          Now you have to wager. Either you fix a little bug that probably poses a porblem once every 200 games, or you potentially break the game for 1000 players becasue something went wrong with their autoupdate becasue of system configurations or whatever. Thats again something that would stress support team and so on.

          You see that fixing such things is not always as easy as you might think.

      • they would patch but their sw delivery system is kind of legacy, each production version is a dangerous process that is risky… unlike their competitors that can patch every week with risk involved at all…

    • Glad you have been lucky with the patches so far, let’s see how long that takes to change. ;)
      Also, maybe ask the players with SLI setups how much they like the most recent patch. Or the players who have been playing the game for years with their Mac’s in a Parallels Windows environment and suddenly… can’t. I’m certainly REALLY (not) happy with the most recent patch. Not being able to see anything in the game is something I’d consider game-breaking.

      And the thing is, it had been reported on the testserver forums and did they fix or even acknowledge it in time? Meh, fuck that. Not game-breaking enough. :D

      • SLI setup? Still perfectly playable, albeit a bit worse. Not game-breaking, and will probably be fixed.
        Macs were never officially supported and devs have no need to check how they work there. It’s like crying that they broke your fav mod – they don’t care.

        • You consider huge black squares that take up the whole screen and flash like crazy on pretty much any map playable? Oh sure, enjoy your epilepsy.

          And wait, are you working for WG that you are using their “excuses” to justify breaking perfectly working setups all of the sudden with a random patch? Since I can’t explain it otherwise.

          Also, it’s not only the “unsupported Mac’s” which run in the “invisible everything” problem, there have been some reports of ppl with perfectly fine “Windows PC’s” that have the same problem. Sure, they might run on relatively old graphicscards and stuff like that but… isn’t that like 90% of the russian playerbase like we are always made to believe?

          But ah, why am I arguing/fighting against windmills here… waste of everyone’s time anyway.

      • Guess what, im playing on my iMac for 2 years, been playing on a Macbook before that for 2 years. I even migrated my old windows partition from the MB to the new imac and not even that broke the game, despite a completely new driver environment.

        I have never performed a clean install of the game, im updating since something like 0.4.x

        Thing is, if you dont screw around your game, it will work. I can bet you that most players who have issues did something to their pc’s or the game that broke it.

        • @Corvi:
          If you are playing via Bootcamp that obviously works, what they broke was Parallels and some other configurations they don’t give a shit about. I do not want to reboot my computer to play a game. I got most of my vital programs on MacOS.

          @iMrMalibuZ:
          I am using that as of right now. Unfortunately it is pretty damn unstable for me. It tends to crash after a few games, sometimes in the middle of a round which is not exactly great as you can imagine. Not sure if its some of the mods or the high quality settings I choose, it was running a bit better today after I lowered some settings.

          Thing is, this all is not an option for me, really. Booting into windows or using the wrapper. Before it was just a brilliant setup for me since I have 2x mouse and keyboard connected to my computer with two monitors. 1x Mouse and Keyboard are exclusively connected to Parallels which is fullscreen with windows on one monitor and the other mouse and keyboard is connected to the MacOS part aswell as the other monitor. So I could do something completely different on the Mac side while playing in the Windows VM. This also made streaming via Twitch a bliss since I could just capture the Windows screen with its sound without fiddling around… no silly playing in windowed mode or whatever. Now… well, now it kinda sucks whatever of the remaining options I use. I just hope that they somehow fix this as well with the coming SLI hotfix… I can only dream. :D

      • yea you know i play on an iMac
        Guess what, since they released a mac-version of the game there is no reason to use parallels. you can use everything you did on windows on mac now. I use a mod pack with xvm, zoom mods, duke nukem voice pack, hit log, damage counter, wn8 on the run calculator and a reload timer for the enemy that hit me last. Why would you bother firing up parallels anymore?
        Just an Idea tho ..

        heres the link for eu: http://worldoftanks.eu/de/content/soft/pc_programs/1312/

  7. They are certainly not the worst. Compare WoT to any Paradox-game for example… Or Civ4, which still has several serious bugs after almost 10 years (which of course won’t be fixed since the game is so old).

    • Could you name these Civ4 bugs? I am still playing it with mods (rise of mankind – a new dawn and fall further) and I can’t say I’ve seen any. Or perhaps mods fixed what was broken in the latest release, beyond sword?

  8. WoT has been remarkably stable and runs pretty well on my side. Gameplay remains solid, which is my focus. I live in a fairly remote Northern town in Canada. Just my experience.

    • Sure its not hicuping – BUT, it could be better if WG wasnt so lazy.
      Optimise, finally balance damn tanks, fix goddamn MM hicups, remove troll platoons, CHAT 2.0!!!, etc.

      • I had to reply as i saw the chat 2.0(or a chat upgrade in any way).
        Playing since the beta and they first promised there to implement a better chat system lol… been long time waiting.

        • I saw worse chat systems :D
          What I want from it isnt very mucho:
          - SHOW if player is in battle
          - able to chat with PM while in battle (hangar battle and battle battle).

          THATS IT! Fookin frapucino, WG aint going do it w/o fail 4sho…

  10. HAHAHAHA !!!

    Thanks for sharing the joke. This must be recorded. QA in WoT is the worst in all MMOs I played so far.

  11. To be honest, they are not doing THAT bad of a job compared to other big games.

    On the other hand, things like the latest arty-hitbox bug or model-hitbox bugs in general seem to be happen quite often lately. Easiest way to prevent this is setting up automated tests, which is a pain in the ass initially, but quickly pays out (my company is enforcing them for 2 years now, and although nobody liked it in the beginning (it means extra work for devs that could be used to implement new features), it REALLY helped increasing the quality. A lot. Devs are not trustworthy, I have to admit).

  12. Anyone played ArmA3 online? Cows and rabbits falling from the sky and your screen turning into a news feed of “you’ve been hacked” not to mention removal of all weapon hacks and invincible players.

    Slight issues with hit detection and updates aren’t that bad, this game has never fully broken in all the years I have played it.

      • Gold ammo was always there, people can still miss with it, bounce or have it eaten by tracks or spaced armour. Its nothing like putting 30 shots into a guy with no armour, who carries on regardless.
        I think it’s currently post beta as it costs enough to buy. Tank warfare can be fun in it with true 1-2km engagements.

        • Of course was, like 0.1 percent of all ammo shot in battle. Now? 10-20.
          Not to mention – FUCK THAT E100/MAUS – *pens turret frontally*

  13. Mhm… actually WG team is not that – they are making some mistakes – but who doesn’t. patches are going pretty fast, NO GAMEBREAKING bugs or even if they appear, they can fix them pretty fast. We cannot receive all in one piece – all tanks (EU line, FR heavies, UK td/meds), hd tanks, new maps and aaaaaalll other stuff (chat 2.0 and etc) – day has 24 hours and week has only 7 days – they have their priorities and they do on their way – even it is not that clear and smooth. WG is not a bad company, just sometimes…some ppl..just screw up;)

  15. Of course it’s one of the best.
    They are using a 10 year old engine for 5 years now ffs. Not much room for error there.

    Let’s put it into another perspective – in my time playing games I only met developers fucking up models (because hey, that’s the only thing ‘new’ in WoT lately) only a handful of times. How many models were messed up in skyrim for example?
    Or in lol, I met one collision box messed up in 4 years now.

    So yeah, be proud of the awesome job your QA does. You are doing nothing new or groundbreaking, you still manage to fuck that up more than any other company I know of. Great job!

    • Then go somewhere else, and take your trolling with you.
      Since you seem to be so anti WOT and WG with a attitude like that.
      Not sure of your motivations, don’t care.
      People like you do nothing for positive change, your a loud vocal minority.
      You can’t and won’t please some people, no matter what you do, WG is no different. This game is never going to be exactly what any individual wants, its a compromise.
      Yeah WG makes mistakes, but overall their track record is better than most.
      Never as fast as now, as many people seem to expect, but they keep making progress. They do fix things, try new things, and the patches are pretty regular. I’m happy with that, its realistic.
      Appy

      • Or god forbid people are on different oppinion than you. Preposterous!
        A lot of things please me in WoT. The changes for team battles, the whole CW stuff are in a great direction. Need a lot of work still, but the direction is really good.

        But saying they have great QA is like saying you are an English language grammare pro. It’s simply not true.

        So forgive me for not being a blind fanboi like you and eating up all the trash WG intends to feed us with. Because you know what’s cheapest to produce for a company? That’s right crap. If you don’t whine they are not in the least bit inclined to give value for your money.

    • Skyrim has lots and lots of broken models, just search the web a bit. Clips, broken models, you have it.
      LoL? That’s fake 3D, way easier to sustain. Not mentioning that they almost don’t change anything in the game, unlike WG (changing models, changing maps, changing physics). LoL? We change skins, you pay more, hahah.

      • My whole point is that WoT is old, the engine is old, people working with it are old and everything it does is well documented, known and expected. Same case with LoL for example – yet those guys somehow still manage to code new stuff without making an age-old champion’s collision model hover 3 meters above its head. Or when placing a tree on the map missing that you fall under the texture in the middle.

        Yep, Skyrim has lots of faults. Some are even not fixed yet. I do wonder however that the availablilty/visibility of them and more importantly the ratio of having a messed up model compared to the total amount of models are the same as well? Because in WoT tanks had higher than visual collision for one and a half year… Out of 90-100 models. Is it really hard to manage 90 models? Call your QA great when you mess up 1-2 of those every freaking patch? With error margins of several percents I would fire my subordinates, it’s ridiculous.

          • E3 mantlet ‘missing’ 300mm back panel at some points, one of the high-tier russian meds or clones (was it on FTR even a good time ago) was a bit higher then visual model. These are the minor ones.

            JT mantlet, JP mantlet, IS-7 hatch, Maus mudguard missing armor absolutely these are the major.
            E-100 mudguard underside still missing armor or at least it was in 9.3.

    • Just for your interest: LoL has at least one fix for skillcollisions per patch.

      and yeah … skyrim is still pretty broken if you play it without mods and only patches.

      both examples are pretty much examples of how QA should NOT be!

      • They are changing the SIZE of the hitbox – for balancing purposes. They are not having hitboxes lagging behind the champion by 5 meters. Quite a difference.

        Skyrim has a bit more models than WoT. Way more, you can’t even compare the scope of these two games. Yet WG manages to mess up at least one model per patch. Good job.

        • no, they do not change the size of the hitboxes! they adjust the fucking collisionrange so that it matches the fucking visible arrow for the skill, so that your skill finally hits where it should hit and not 1 meter in front! And this in EVERY SINGLE patch!

          Skyrim has more models? Yeah … sure … i guess then every turret, gun, camoflage per model counts extra? that gives us 20+ tiger 2 models alone! skyrim is just a huge variety of colors and equipment over the very few models. and just check how many of the few models are broken …

          dont just talk out of your ass to make wargaming look bad.

          • Uh, no.

            Models should be counted by polygons and surface. WoT has terribly childish models all-around. It’s a 10 year old game badly coded.

    • Go play Red Dead Redemption. That’s a genuine glitch fest.
      Or even Big Rigs racing to see what no QA looks like

  16. One would think that with all the money they have rolling in they could at least test the patches before sending them out. Each patch I see more players leaving the game and with new tank games coming out soon they are going to lose even more players.

    • Why would they? There’s an ample supply of apologists as per above to whitewash them out of the poor quality trash they hand out.

      • Not apologizing for anyone,
        Just tired of all the negative vitriol aimed at WG, for every little thing, real and imagined. They do have a ton on their plates at any given moment.
        You do have some good points, and do have a right to your opinion.
        Maybe I’m being a bitch here, but it just gets tiring.
        Appy

    • And every Patch they win more players than they loose. What is your Point? So The Gamers are leaving pretty old games for never games? Well, i guess that makes Golden Eye for the N64 a pretty shitty game. Every player lost! Command and Conquer Red Alert? SHIT! Counter-Strike 1.6? Shit! Call of Duty Modern Warfare? Bullshit! Battlefield 3? Shit! Need for Speed 4? Lawl shit!

      Games lose players over time! Normal procedure! World of Tanks is stable … by times even growing!

      • I don’t know the size of the active playerbase of WoT, do you? If you do, please share, because until today my hunch due to the sudden change in SerB’s tone was that it started to dwindle. If you have numbers though to prove me wrong I’m anxious to know.

        They all-around started to take more heed to the playerbase, they recieved a big pile of dung instead of GJ (most prestigous award – according to them) this year, SerB is more careful with his ‘I’m the boss and I’ll tell you what’s what’ comment. Sudden shift in stances ‘no arty nerfs, not a democracy’-blam, arty nerfs next patch \\ facelifting of dated graphics, introducing physics when their mission statement clearly was ‘russians have toasters at home, let’s run this game on toasters’. They also switched focus from RU to EU and realized they will never be a force in US.

        Little things, but they don’t paint the ‘everything is rosy’ picture you do.

        I’m obviously just an outsider, I’m in no way affiliated with WG and don’t have hard numbers, but my experience with managing companies tells me that it’s not working so great as it used to. I might be wrong though, that’s why I’d gladly take any numbers.

  20. He may even be right. Most publishers out there have pretty much given up on QA control. So even a shitty QA is better than none at all.

  23. Not sure about being the best, but there actually are studios with worse QA than WG. SOE (PlanetSide 2) for example has legendary skills of completely FUBARing their game every microupdate where they were supposed to realign two textures or something. I can never understand how its possible to fuck up completely different and unrelated parts of the game when reparing something trivial. I blame not just poor QA but poor release and version management, because it looks like they just take a random version including a lot of “experiments” done by devs that should be on different branch and never meant to go live and they just roll it on live along with the one thing they actually somewhat fixed.

    I BLAME STRONKEREST MANAGEMENT

  24. I have to admit that despite the horredous balance, powercreep, horrible map designs (not all but most of them) and shitty optimization the game is pretty bugless.

  25. Pingback: Storm: „Naše testovací oddělení je jedno z nejlepších“

  27. Be safe, all available quality is assured to be top-notch.

    As for the ones comparing WG to EA, it’s like choosing between stepping in a dog turd or hare shit. Being smug about it makes WG the most moist of the two.

  28. WG maight not have the best QA, but look at gajin… The tanks and the maps are truly gamebreaking…

  29. Actually, compared to most F2P games companies i had claims and tickets whit (nexon, Alaplaya, Bigpoint, Riot…..) WG support was actually the only one that answered my questions whitout lie and DID something to solve my problems.
    So for me the Storm said the truth.

  34. The fucktards who play this piece of shit game deseve to be trolled like this… They’re ruining shit every month/week/day but fucktards still play their game…

  35. M53/55 model bug isn’t that bad.

    It’s not game-breaking.

    USA tier 9(sometimes preferred over the tier X) cancer already broke the game…

  36. I think their QA is ok.I rarely had any problems, especially with new content.
    Normally when a new patch is tested, the new content is the focus of the tests so if someone messes in the new patch with one old tank which has been tested countless times before it is entirely possible to miss it.
    Furthermore, all games have bugs, some are deemed insignificant and never fixed, others get identified in one patch but due to tight launch deadlines might take a few patches to get fixed.

    So the problem with different old tanks having holes in the armor is not really QA’s fault as those are not actively tested from patch to patch. If that were the case it would take forever to launch new patches.

    Also about OP tanks getting into the live server, that should be the balancing department’s job and less QA’s as it’s not really a bug, so at most they can only send a suggestion related to the gameplay. At least that’s how it was where I worked.