So I am doing my mid winter BBQ and I have yet to decide what is going to be inside my one of my two bacon explosions. I have decided that I will leave it up to you the good citizens of DDO to decide what will be inside the bacon wrapped awesomeness. For those who don’t know what a bacon explosion is but wish to suggest something I have included a few pictures and a description. I will post pictures of the aftermath of my favorite choice and if there are two good choices I will put the one I already planned on the back burner for now.

Bacon Explosion: is a bacon weave wrapping a ground meat and cooked (smoked in my case) to meaty perfection.

PICTURES!

So a while ago I asked the community to ask me questions aout me,qa or ddo in general and I would answer them to the best of my ability. So questions asked I now have answers.

Why do blindness effects always seem to make my client crash?

It is a known issue and it is being worked on.

How long does it take from a player bug report to a bug being releaed to live.  Example if there’s a really nasty server crashing bug how long would that take.  Another example would be just a less critical bug like for example the supreme cleave bug. How long does a release take?

I go over the new incoming bugs every morning and look for things that scream test me now while the rest of my team will work on the list as a whole. Typically no more than a day or two (three possibly if it came in over the weekend). Release’s time scheduling is not something I’m privy to and if I did tell you I would have to kill you. =P

Do the Mournlands testers have a QA background, a design background, both, or neither?

We do not require them to come from any background as it is a voluntary and tough gig. The community there has been built up from community members and turbine referrals on a set of guidelines we are looking for in a person for mournlands (being a fanboi is not one of them).  We are not looking for the best “testers” to break stuff but a better feel as how the DDO community would enjoy the next update.

Seriously, we wonder what the process is for allocating and prioritizing the bugs.
Do you pick by:
Most complaints, Biggest impacts to users, Biggest global impact, The ones Borror0 complains about the most, Do you use a dart board (Actually had a QA group that did that!). How do you track bugs?

There are multiple meetings every week on new bugs that were entered and the executive team, the heads of development team and the heads of qa and maybe a few others get together and do one set of prioritization taking the suggested level of the bug from the person who entered the bug in our super modern super fancy bug writing program.  After being fully prioritized thae group of people ship it off to a dev and it goes into their I should fix this list. Also who is this Borror0 you speak of?

If you are allowed to say, what was your favorite bug that you caught before it went live? Like, did you catch a bug that caused all kobolds to be Mr. T?

Early in the development of relaunch/the update formerly known as MOD 9 the quest Weapons Shipment on hard and elite would spawn kobolds instead of Warforged Titians, I found this quite amusing at the time.

What’s the dev/test ratio like at Turbine? Related question: How much of the testing is outsourced to “Army of teenagers jacked up on caffeine and sugar” versus “People who actually know how to test”?

Enough.  We do not outsource any testing and have not since I started working in QA nearly two years ago. It’s the same group of people who bang on ddo with hammers everyday.

DDO QA
404error

This is just a quick mini update with mostly questions and requests. Part 1 of this miniseries I mentioned I would do a QnA on this blog so here is my request for questions from you. Just comment on this post with your question and when I do part 2 I will answer as many as I can.

Also I have heard that DA(Dungeon Alert) has been not working like it used to. I have not gotten enough information on what you the playerbase has seen as changed so a little more information would be helpful. Also where DA “jumps” a level for monster spawns should be included since it would be ideal to get those to a minimum. If you have any insight into these issue comment below.

Thank you for any responses
404error

Hello one and all,

This week’s House of Errors will focus on the bug submission tool for a bug submitted to Dungeons and Dragons Online.  I will breakdown each part and give a quick explanation of what each part is intended for.

Type of Bug

For this section of the bug reporting tool this will help us filter general types of bugs quickly if we need to root out a specific issue. Use your best judgment when selecting this when reporting your issue.

Description

This part you should give a short description of your issue.  This will assist the QA person understand what your specific issue is at a glance and know if they are familiar with the issue or not.

Consistency

How often have you seen this issue occur. If more than once let us know roughly how often.

Summary of the Issue

Give us the general details of the issue you have been seeing. This includes where, how, when, and possibly why. Names of the dungeons, monsters, feats, etc. are best placed here.

Steps to Reproduce the Issue

If you have an idea on how this issue occurred place a step by step reproduction on how you think it occurred. If you have no idea how this happened then there is no need to fill in this section.

Character Details

If the issue is directly related to your character put the characters information in this section.  We may need to copy the character to our internal servers to examine it more closely.

Attachment of an Image(Forums only)

If you are submitting the issue  on the forums and you took a screenshot of the issue you can attach it at the bottom of the bug tool.

Important Bug  Writing notes

If it is not related to your character type /loc into a chat box and hit enter. The information that comes up afterwords place that in the Summary section of the bug.

The names of EVERYTHING is extremely important. Please make sure you include the names of the names of the dungeon, the monsters you may have been fighting and their mothers if possible.

Be as clear as possible.

Part 2 I will rip apart 2 example bugs and do a little QnA session.

Hello one and all,

This is the first week of 404’s house of Errors. This blog post will be DDo QA’s new bug house and a weekly(ish) update on bug fixes and known issues. I will talk about the current known issues and if they are going to be fixed Soon ™ or at some point in the future and give some detail if possible. Without any further delay the current NEW known issues.

Spells

• Implosion is currently not being dispelled by a beholders anti-magic.

Monsters

• Bezekira attacks are getting concealed when attacking players.

Public Areas

• Valden Fey in the Marketplace can get stuck on physics in the market place..

Quests

• The Reavers Fate~Sometimes the reverse-gravity effect will stay on longer than it should.

• The Kobolds Den: Rescuing Arlos~Arlos ar-Kerran can get stuck on crates and other objects making the quest uncompleteable.

Adventure Areas

• Pride Leader Xilic currently is not counting to the rare spawns total for Ruins of Gianthold when killed.
• Some mummies in the Sands of Menechtrarun are named “base”.

PvP

• Sometimes while in a PvP arena you may get stuck inside.

If you know of any bug and it is not on this list or in the unlimited launch known issues list you can either submit a bug or post it here.