Last Epoch Dev Provides Insight on the Bug-Squashing QA Process

mmorpg.com:

If you’re hoping your favorite developer “just fixes that bug,” it’s never that easy, and the Last Epoch team is here to explain why. Eleventh Hour’s Senior Technical Quality Assurance Tester, Anna Lyon, took some time on the Last Epoch forums to give a behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to pin down a bug and get it quashed. 

Those who are in game dev, or in software engineering at all, probably know some semblance of what this process is. But it’s good for the rest of gamers to learn, and for all of us to go through a recap, especially fresh from a game developer working on one of last year’s more successful live service launches. 

First, QA the team, of course, takes in bug reports. Lyon says they’re mindful of whether the problems are “local,” meaning they have to do with a particular user’s hardware and non-game, but from there, they can try to draw connections about varying bugs and try to find ones that are more frequent or able to be replicated and check player logs for hints. Yes, that means more, better-detailed bug reports are good for the team. 

Once the bugs are sorted and labeled, the Last Epoch QA team starts the bug replication process: “This is a complex step which takes a lot of trial and error using context clues from the error messages, screenshot, and what the player has mentioned in the report.” It’s not only the bug being present that’s important, but more so being able to recreate it, and there are far more tedious, time-consuming processes to undergo if that reproduction is difficult. 

When they finally figure out where the issue lies, it’s sent over to the appropriate team, which fixes the bug and rounds it back to QA to ensure the replication doesn’t happen again. And then job’s done! 

Lyon gets more into the nitty-gritty in the actual post itself, with brief literal snapshots of what the Last Epoch team sees as they work on the bugs. It’s an especially heavy duty as Eleventh Hour continues providing updates after its massive launch