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Servancour

Game Designer
Paradox Staff
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Mar 15, 2012
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Greetings, fellow crusaders!

In this Dev Diary we’ll give a brief insight in how the CK2 QA team works and functions.

The team consists of myself (Servancour), PeterSkager, rageair and Leo Larsson. I’ve been here the longest and have been at Paradox for close to two years now, and so far it’s been a blast! We’re a close-knit team and work very well together, each and every one specializing in different types of gameplay.

As a team, we work very closely with the developers and attend all sorts of meetings to ensure that we stay up to date with the game. When you work with QA you need to know almost everything about the game, from overarching design to the smaller details of specific features. It’s challenging but also very rewarding.

While our primary responsibility may be to test the game, it’s not the only one. Many believe that the life of a QA only consists of reporting bugs, but it’s actually much more than that. We’re responsible for ensuring the overall quality of the product, by providing constant feedback, voice concerns where needed, comment on design and suggest improvements in order to make the game both better and more accessible!

Something we do every now and then when there’s new features to test is to simply play the game in order to get a feel for how to play with them. We usually test a variety of different scenarios, with varying start dates and setups, where we play for anything between a few years to several centuries. Sometimes we play for just a few hours, other times we have the campaigns going over the course of a few days, all while we gather feedback and impressions to the developers. This type of testing allows us to get a more accurate representation on how the game actually plays to find issues you wouldn’t find in a few minutes of playtime. Sometimes we even start using the same scenario just to see how far we can deviate from each other as we use very different playstyles. We believe that having many eyes on the same problem yield the best results.

We’re extremely passionate about the game. Each and every one of us here at the CK2 QA team has played the game for anything between a few hundred to several thousand hours and most of it has been purely for our own enjoyment. I myself play the game regularly outside of work and in my latest campaign I started off as Charlemagne himself, culture switched to German and created the Holy Roman Empire! I’m almost done with it though, with just the last hundred years or so left before the end date. My current ruler is Kaiserin Amalia “The Hammer”, ruling over Europe with an iron fist!

This passion also motivates us to not only ensure that the game performs well from a professional standpoint, but also from the perspective of a player. This causes us to often go above and beyond our ordinary tasks! We at QA has, on occasion, contributed with content to the game. Often to ensure that each and every part of the game feels like a quality experience. For example; we’ve created events to enhance certain aspects of the game (see the Sky Burial and Master Wrestling event chains) and even created art in the form of the Nomadic CoA’s introduced in Horse Lords.

I hope you gained some useful insight in how we approach CK2 from the QA team, and that we work hard to give you, the fans, a product that you deserve. Since we at QA love quality of life improvements, I’ll wrap this up by showing you the following screenshot of a previous feature we are extending somewhat:

ck2_diary_screen.jpg
 
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How is it that you are allowed to keep your job after all the cheesy tactics are discovered by the players few hours after DLC release ?

Luckily people here understand things like math. If 10,000 people play for an undefined "few" hours, lets say 3, that is 30,000 hours of testing. For 4 QA working 8 hour days that would be ~2.5 years of testing. Which doesn't even consider that QA aren't testing the final version for the entire period, or that fixing one bug can reveal other bugs, unbalanced things, or exploits.
 
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@Servancour: Do you do any automated testing? If so, I'd be curious to hear about that.

How much of CK2 testing is done with automated unit/integration tests and how much is left to human QA testers?

At the moment, we don't do a lot of automated testing. But this is definitely something we are looking to do much more in the future in order help us out with some of the more basic testing procedures.

Hi @Servancour , thanks for the DD. I had a question for you: do you also participate in the initial discussions/planning about DLC's, or are you just on the end-side of this process?

We don't participate as much in making actual ideas for DLC's. Once we have an idea and some basic design in place, we start commenting on it and provide feedback and get more involved as the project progresses.

How can you start as Charlemagne and go through the entire timeline without getting bored? Serious question, I don't understand.

Who says I haven't? :p
Seriously though, I could have conquered the world two times over most likely, but instead I pace myself when I play longer campaigns. I set these small goals for myself to do every now and then. Just to break up the regular gameplay of expanding and do something different.

Wait, are you guys changing the colour of ERE again? :eek:

No, don't worry. I took the screenshot while I played on Linux. Some colors look slightly different because of OpenGL versus DirectX.

As for the screenshot. Don't read too much into the different kingdoms. I took the screenshot from our office MP campaign.

Also, if you haven't already, I can recommend reading Wiz's post-dev diary from Common Sense, in which he speaks about the bug fixing process.
 
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Well, to be really honest QA gets the worst from the community by right. After all, their work is to not allow bugs and glitches meet community.

Not really.
QA can only inform the dev-team and producers about problems, they have no mandate to cancel or post-pone a game.
If someone is to blame it's either me or the producer (or anyone above us in the chain of command).
 
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Why would someone continue to maintain and pay for 4 QA, while releasing closed beta for around 100-200 people would be better choice(imo) ?

Quality of reported bugs is the main reason. Beta testers are great, but they aren't paid to test and most of the time they'll test stuff that is fun. There are exceptions of course and some beta testers amaze us with the work they put in.
Paradox relied almost solely on beta testers up until V2 release (and then only as limited time contractors), EU4 was the first releases (as far as I remember with a in house team of QA). I'd say that quality has gone up since EU3 and HOI3 releases. QA isn't the only reason, but it's definitely one of the major.
 
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Thanks for the answer.

Have you considered mixing things up? Having some QA people plus additional(don't know how many people gets to test the beta) close beta testers? I am sure some people would volunteer for that. I am asking because some of the Horse Lords exploits/cheesy tactics were easy to spot on by the average player.

We have a closed beta for CK2 already and some 30-50 testers (I'm not up to date with the exact number). I think they're listed in credits for our expansions. Every now and then we hold open applications for becoming a beta tester. Often we select people who've been active in the bug forums.
 
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