Staff testing? Why not community feedback? c:

[Sophie]

"Staff testing" simply hasn't been working as of late. The staff team is only so big, and outside of the two or three testing sessions hosted by an admin, little to no testing actually occurs. It exists solely to find obvious game-breaking bugs, but otherwise doesn't do very much. We shouldn't just be testing for the obvious bugs, but also finding bugs that aren't as explicit, or looking for ways to make the game better. I wholeheartedly believe that if the criticisms surrounding Creative were taken into consideration, it would not be a dead game. How can games be released if we don't know what the community wants?

Staff testing Community testing
I propose allowing other members of the community to test games, in a much longer process that aims to make upcoming content as enjoyable and as replayable as possible.

Stage one - Staff testing
Allow staff to test the game before anybody else, to ensure that it's actually functional. This is what we currently have in place. This stage should last only a day, or perhaps only a couple of hours. That is why the current process is available only to staff, right? I assume at least, it's so that massive holes in the projects are kept discreet, else it would be embarrassing to the server and hurt its reputation.

Stage two - Community testing
After testing to ensure that the game is functional, there are two options: either give everybody access, or just a select few. These could be friends of staff members, the top 100 in certain games, forums members, or the top 1,000 players overall (server level). I like the latter idea the most, though doing all of these things couldn't hurt as well.

Those who are given access will be able to try out a watered down version of the game for about three days or so. For example, let's say Skywars was not yet on Cubecraft, and was about to undergo community testing. There might be three maps to play on and no vote options. Though, a disclaimer will be in the lobby stating that there will be far more maps, as well as more features, in the main game. Essentially, it would work like a beta test.

In community testing, players will not earn anything. However, there will be rewards after the testing is over for those who excelled at the game. For example, those who get say, 50 wins in Skywars might be given 10 cubelets, or those who played for at least fifteen hours could perhaps be given a diamond helmet cosmetic, unlocked only by participating in community testing. This will incentivise people to play a lot more, thereby helping in the feedback stage.

Community feedback
After community testing is over, allow players to suggest new features, report bugs, and propose tweaks and changes to the gameplay that will ultimately make the game more enjoyable. Then, have developers spend the rest of the week putting this feedback to good use. They could use it to add a sweet new kit (i.e. a Speed I kit), remove something nasty (i.e. the old team balance in Blockwars), resolve imbalances (i.e. Hardcore TD), or to add a hot plugin (i.e. Creative world-edit).

This system would result in games being delayed by perhaps a week or so, but would overall, make released games a lot better in quality.

Opinions? :0

 

[Despacito 2]

Cubecraft Research and Development centre, aka Beta Lobby, aka Prototype Lobby.
Please do it Cubecraft. +1

 

[A pigeon]

Cubecraft Research and Development centre, 1

TM Sylvaly 2017

"Staff testing" simply hasn't been working as of late. The staff team is only so big, and outside of the two or three testing sessions hosted by an admin, little to no testing actually occurs. It exists solely to find obvious game-breaking bugs, but otherwise doesn't do very much. We shouldn't just be testing for the obvious bugs, but also finding bugs that aren't as explicit, or looking for ways to make the game better. I wholeheartedly believe that if the criticisms surrounding Creative were taken into consideration, it would not be a dead game. How can games be released if we don't know what the community wants?

Staff testing Community testing
I propose allowing other members of the community to test games, in a much longer process that aims to make upcoming content as enjoyable and as replayable as possible.

Stage one - Staff testing
Allow staff to test the game before anybody else, to ensure that it's actually functional. This is what we currently have in place. This stage should last only a day, or perhaps only a couple of hours. That is why the current process is available only to staff, right? I assume at least, it's so that massive holes in the projects are kept discreet, else it would be embarrassing to the server and hurt its reputation.

Stage two - Community testing
After testing to ensure that the game is functional, there are two options: either give everybody access, or just a select few. These could be friends of staff members, the top 100 in certain games, forums members, or the top 1,000 players overall (server level). I like the latter idea the most, though doing all of these things couldn't hurt as well.

Those who are given access will be able to try out a watered down version of the game for about three days or so. For example, let's say Skywars was not yet on Cubecraft, and was about to undergo community testing. There might be three maps to play on and no vote options. Though, a disclaimer will be in the lobby stating that there will be far more maps, as well as more features, in the main game. Essentially, it would work like a beta test.

In community testing, players will not earn anything. However, there will be rewards after the testing is over for those who excelled at the game. For example, those who get say, 50 wins in Skywars might be given 10 cubelets, or those who played for at least fifteen hours could perhaps be given a diamond helmet cosmetic, unlocked only by participating in community testing. This will incentivise people to play a lot more, thereby helping in the feedback stage.

Community feedback
After community testing is over, allow players to suggest new features, report bugs, and propose tweaks and changes to the gameplay that will ultimately make the game more enjoyable. Then, have developers spend the rest of the week putting this feedback to good use. They could use it to add a sweet new kit (i.e. a Speed I kit), remove something nasty (i.e. the old team balance in Blockwars), resolve imbalances (i.e. Hardcore TD), or to add a hot plugin (i.e. Creative world-edit).

This system would result in games being delayed by perhaps a week or so, but would overall, make released games a lot better in quality.

Opinions? :0

I realky dont know if the staff have any idea about what they're doing tbh. ;-; tower defenseeee. They should recruit skilled people to be game testers

 

[MagnificentSpam]

You can make mad $$$ if you open the beta server for ranks only. First the obsidian players can play, some time later the Emaralds and so on. Everyone will want to have a rank and if it's a separate server it's even EULA compliant.

This could help so much with balancing. After the game is released it's hard to change things. But durng the testing phase you can just change things on the fly without worrying about breaking the game. You can see what strategies people are using and buff/nerf elements of the game accordingly. And of course, more people playing makes it more likely to find bugs early on.

 

[A pigeon]

You can make mad $$$ if you open the beta server for ranks only. First the obsidian players can play, some time later the Emaralds and so on. Everyone will want to have a rank and if it's a separate server it's even EULA compliant.

This could help so much with balancing. After the game is released it's hard to change things. But durng the testing phase you can just change things on the fly without worrying about breaking the game. You can see what strategies people are using and buff/nerf elements of the game accordingly. And of course, more people playing makes it more likely to find bugs early on.

Mad money , sure , but most obsidian ranks are childeren who asked their parents for money. They should select active people , leaderboard people and forum members who are critical of cube to provide insight. They already make mad money. So many obsidian ranks

 

[Sophie]

and if it's a separate server it's even EULA compliant.

WAIT, REALLY??

 

[Despacito 2]

WAIT, REALLY??

Yeh.

 

[Sophie]

Mad money , sure , but most obsidian ranks are childeren who asked their parents for money. They should select active people , leaderboard people and forum members who are critical of cube to provide insight. They already make mad money. So many obsidian ranks

Perhaps have a phase 1.5, where ranked players get to test it before everybody else? After all, more revenue means more builders, developers, staff, etc.

 

[MagnificentSpam]

Mad money , sure , but most obsidian ranks are childeren who asked their parents for money. They should select active people , leaderboard people and forum members who are critical of cube to provide insight. They already make mad money. So many obsidian ranks

But those children are the target audience so it makes sense to balance the game for them

WAIT, REALLY??

I think so.
https://www.cubecraft.net/threads/cubecraft-beta.178583/#post-736165

 

[A pigeon]

But those children are the target audience so it makes sense to balance the game for them

I think so.
https://www.cubecraft.net/threads/cubecraft-beta.178583/#post-736165

They'll ruin it though. They'd do a worse job than modeeators do at testing

 

[HackersDontWin]

They'll ruin it though. They'd do a worse job than modeeators do at testing

The more players = the more bugs found. Of course some players might just not report the bugs and some will rage at them but if you rage at them, what would you expect from a "Prototype" Lobby?

I also like the idea of giving Obsidian/YouTuber/Staff ranked people to be the only ones to enter these games before anyone else and I'm not saying this because I am Obsidian rank myself but because the actual rank isn't much different from Emerald itself (Obsidian does have a few more voting features but it would be nice to see the rank have an extra row in the store where all the boxes are "x"'d out except for the Obsidian rank).

The most important reason of why I like the most is because if Cube were to pull this off, it will look like staff is trying to be more "in contact" with both community members and non community members which in my eyes, they lack on.

Hopefully we get to see this happen one day :)

 

[Intoxicating]

To be honest, the concept is there, but the proposition seems weak and poorly executed. You've been indecisive which makes this idea hard to want to follow.

I, personally, don't really know how often testing sessions do happen to occur so going off of what you said, I feel like it would be a better opportunity for the Cubecraft staff team to work co-operatively if they were to hold more regimented and routined testing sessions so that people can attend. However, I do think a subsection of staff, and community, could be useful for helping to ensure that the game is balanced appropriately, and the gameplay style works and fits with the other cubecraft gamemodes. This could be application based, much like the Helper or Builder application, in which both staff and players alike can apply to help participate within testing sessions for random upcoming features. Obviously, this would have to come with a lot of agreements between the staff team and players, and there must be rules in place to ensure that the players representing the community are not to leak any sensitive information regarding anything they've participated in as else they will receive consequences accordingly.

Additionally, an application would be beneficial as it would allow the Cubecraft team to ensure they are selecting players with good overall gameplay knowledge so they do not go into testings blind without any information on how the gamemode works, the gameplay style etc. This would also enable them to get the best people suited for the role, so in my opinion, this would be an incredible opportunity for more cooperative work between the community and staff which would also allow for better communications.

 

[Fristey]

They just have to choose people of the community that are really active and got skills, Mods are just testing it and don't even know what they're doing, so i really like this idea.

 

[Unfearful]

"this would be an incredible opportunity for more cooperative work between the community and staff which would also allow for better communications."

Haha, wait.. what? The 'staff team' and the word 'communication'? Don't make me laugh :")

 

[MagnificentSpam]

To be honest, the concept is there, but the proposition seems weak and poorly executed. You've been indecisive which makes this idea hard to want to follow.

I, personally, don't really know how often testing sessions do happen to occur so going off of what you said, I feel like it would be a better opportunity for the Cubecraft staff team to work co-operatively if they were to hold more regimented and routined testing sessions so that people can attend. However, I do think a subsection of staff, and community, could be useful for helping to ensure that the game is balanced appropriately, and the gameplay style works and fits with the other cubecraft gamemodes. This could be application based, much like the Helper or Builder application, in which both staff and players alike can apply to help participate within testing sessions for random upcoming features. Obviously, this would have to come with a lot of agreements between the staff team and players, and there must be rules in place to ensure that the players representing the community are not to leak any sensitive information regarding anything they've participated in as else they will receive consequences accordingly.

Additionally, an application would be beneficial as it would allow the Cubecraft team to ensure they are selecting players with good overall gameplay knowledge so they do not go into testings blind without any information on how the gamemode works, the gameplay style etc. This would also enable them to get the best people suited for the role, so in my opinion, this would be an incredible opportunity for more cooperative work between the community and staff which would also allow for better communications.

I think it would be better to have a few hundred people playing the new game for a few days 24 hours. A small set of selected players won't find as many bus or imbalances in the game. Those don't even have to be the ones with good gameplay knowledge. You'll want some of those to decide if things are balanced, but the game has to be accessible for most players, for example a UHC game for only experienced players can look different from a UHC game targeted towards the cubecraft community.

 

[Sophie]

Additionally, an application would be beneficial as it would allow the Cubecraft team to ensure they are selecting players with good overall gameplay knowledge so they do not go into testings blind without any information on how the gamemode works, the gameplay style etc. This would also enable them to get the best people suited for the role, so in my opinion, this would be an incredible opportunity for more cooperative work between the community and staff which would also allow for better communications.

As neat as this might be, it simply wouldn't work. So few people would qualify that finding a game would be near impossible, and the staff having to shovel through all the unqualifying players in order to find the few good apples on the tree would be a waste of time.



I like the idea of giving certain donator ranks access before anybody else, since it has the potential to make the Obsidian rank worth buying.

 

[CommunistCactus]

@rubik_cube_man

 

[johncoles]

While the core idea is one I agree with the simple logistics of selecting and then getting players to test games with us is just unimaginably complicated. There's two ways we can go about this from my point of view.

• Play Sessions/User Group Testing
This is where we would get all the players that would be testing a game to play at a specific time. This would likely yield us the best data as developers would be involved for the whole time rather than reading logs or reports after the fact. The difficulty here is trying to get a large number of people to commit to playing at a certain time.

• "Open" Testing Lobby
I say "open" as it would likely be a more restricted option, as mentioned throughout this topic either by rank or skill. This would remove the issue from above but creates new ones. Getting high quality bug reports from member of the public can be challenging especially when they can be quite young. There would also be the EULA to consider with this as we would technically be restricting access to an area of the server.

Now a few other comments that are sort of related o_O

• Bug reports
Currently bug reports are done here in the forums but this will be changing soon. I've been working with @andyschofie (he's been doing most of the work TBH) to make a new bug report system that is simple to use for the community but gives us the detail that we need to hand a report to a developer. It's a big change from essentially a topic where people can just go "it is broke. Cube is dead. RIP." to actually useful data.

• Testing
We've been changing internally how our testing flow works. We currently have a member of staff who works from the office who just tests. Currently they are working on the new Bedrock network making sure that it has no major bugs. In the future I would like to expand that to a team who can do testing for all our output. If we were to grow such a team then doing "User Group Testing" becomes a more achievable goal.

We're also now having an extra round of testing which is our office testing. We now have 14 people in the office so testing large group games is much easier. It also allows us to do a quick test with a full game to see if some specific issues have been solved.

I hope that reply is useful in some way and wasn't to "Testing" to read. Thanks for your ideas though! <3

 

[MagnificentSpam]

There would also be the EULA to consider with this as we would technically be restricting access to an area of the server.

You could make a new server, beta.cubecraft.net for example.

What counts as a server? Are proxies one big server, or lots of smaller ones?
A server is something a user connects to with their client. The user is on a different server when they leave one and manually join another (in the multiplayer screen). Virtual servers and proxies make no difference; to the client it’s the same server.

https://mojang.com/2014/06/lets-talk-server-monetisation-the-follow-up-qa/

Getting high quality bug reports from member of the public can be challenging especially when they can be quite young.

They will probably tell others about the bugs they found and they can reproduce and report them. Also with your new report system it will hopefully be a bit easier to make bug reports. Especially the fact that we can't see other people's bug reports is pretty bad. I have seen some bugs that I didn't report because they are so common that you probably are aware of it already. But that might also be why some bugs that would be extremely simple to fix such as the map opening in the skywars lobby or the corpses in SG being invisible never get fixed. You should have the option to vote for and add new information to existing bug reports. That way it doesn't really matter if the original report is of low quality, others will try it and add more information eventually.

 

[johncoles]

You could make a new server, beta.cubecraft.net for example.

https://mojang.com/2014/06/lets-talk-server-monetisation-the-follow-up-qa/

They will probably tell others about the bugs they found and they can reproduce and report them. Also with your new report system it will hopefully be a bit easier to make bug reports. Especially the fact that we can't see other people's bug reports is pretty bad. I have seen some bugs that I didn't report because they are so common that you probably are aware of it already. But that might also be why some bugs that would be extremely simple to fix such as the map opening in the skywars lobby or the corpses in SG being invisible never get fixed. You should have the option to vote for and add new information to existing bug reports. That way it doesn't really matter if the original report is of low quality, others will try it and add more information eventually.

Oh there are solutions to all the problems I listed, it's just a matter of where we decide to place development time. Creating a new server is not quite as simple as making a new subdomain (I wish it was!).

Bug reports are an interesting thing. On the one had making them public would stop duplication of issues but on the other people could abuse them. Again it's about finding the balance and isn't something we'll get right on day 1.

In general once the new system goes out it *should* be easier to handle duplicate bug reports. I would say that it's better to get 30 reports of the same bug rather than everyone assuming that someone else will have reported it! :P