It seems as if Fan Faire was only last week, so it’s hard to believe that it was in fact almost two whole months ago! Since we got back there have been two game updates, although really only one from our point of view – the changes that went live in Game Update 48 had all been done and checked in by us before we ever left for Fan Faire. Since we completed the changes for Game Update 49, we have been hard at work on the upcoming expansion, The Shadow Odyssey.
We were working on it long before this of course; an expansion the size of EQII’s expansions takes at least a year, and I know that the early work for the NEXT expansion has already begun, even before we have launched the current one. However, up till the content for Game Update 49 was checked in, we were still thinking about other things at the same time; once that deadline passed we could all focus purely on the expansion.
Beta testing is underway, and the folks who attended Fan Faire and got their beta invitations are running around in our new zones exploring, testing, bug reporting, and occasionally dying in unexpected ways – but such is the joy of beta, after all! Their feedback is extremely useful to us. Of course our QA team does a great job of testing things, but sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s fun or not, or what may be confusing, until you see a significant number of people trying it out. Also, of course, at this point in the updating cycle QA hasn’t always had time to thoroughly test all the changes we make before they get pushed to beta server, or even if they have we might not have had time to fix the bugs, and having large numbers of people poking at it is certain to uncover any bugs that haven’t been addressed yet!
The number of ways that people can find to break things is a never-ending source of surprise and amazement to me. I’m always impressed at how many ways our QA team finds to test things, and yet when the content goes to test or beta server (or even live, in some unfortunate cases) there will often be some determined player out there who just somehow manages to find a way to do something nobody expected at all.
My favorite example of this was probably a bug report I received from the tradeskill epic quest line, in the scholar instance. This step of the quest has you zone into the Library of Light in Maj’dul, where you have to dodge annoyed djinn librarians in order to search the shelves for scraps of some old halfling crafting notes. Once you have found all the scraps of paper, you use a scribing desk and a bookbinding recipe book that you pick up on the far side of the library to bind the papers into a readable scroll which you take back to the quest-giver. I carefully made this final scroll “no destroy” just to be sure nobody would delete it and then get stuck on the quest after leaving the library. The librarians are very high level and very irritable and will kill you if you get too close, so you can pull heavy books from the bookshelves around you and throw the books at the librarians to stun them temporarily. The stuns last for about a minute and give you time to get past.
This was my first time making a quest this complicated, and so there were a lot of new things I was doing for the first time, and I tested all the stages pretty obsessively before sending them off to QA for testing. Optimistically, I hoped to avoid getting bugs back. And I had tested this instance through from beginning to end and hadn’t found anything broken or not working.
The bug report I received read thus: “If a player doing the library instance for the epic quest deletes the quest after scribing the recipe, then repeats the quest and crafts the scroll before completing the step to obtain the recipe, they will become gated. Because they crafted the recipe before the quest says to craft it, and the item is lore and no-destroy”.
…Which just goes to show that no matter how well you think you’ve tested a quest, somebody else can generally always think of a new way to try and break it that you never even thought of!
My second favorite example of an obscure bug that slipped past both me and QA is probably what we could call “the case of the disappearing pants”. The tradeskill faction merchant in Freeport has always sold a set of casual clothing which looks like a nice cloth tunic and leggings (or skirt, on females). I made this outfit available to the other evil cities, and I wanted to give a similar version to the tradeskill faction merchants in the good cities for players to buy, so I put in an art request asking if it was possible to have a lighter tinted version of the outfit made. This wasn’t a high priority of course, but after a few months one of the artists found time to take a look, and retinted an unused version of the darker set into a very nice lighter colored version. I tested it out on a number of my test characters – usually a halfling, but often I use a ratonga or a half elf too, and I checked both the male and female outfits looked correct. QA also checked it out and didn’t see any problems, and so the outfit proceeded to Test server.
At which point it was discovered that the new light tinted leggings of the outfit looked perfectly fine on all females, and also perfectly fine on male barbarians, high elves, dark elves, half elves, wood elves, halflings, gnomes, ogres, trolls, ratongas, erudites, sarnak, iksar, kerra, fae, arasai, and dwarves … but on human males (and ONLY human males) they actually turned the wearer’s legs invisible! Apparently this was the one single appearance in about 36 (actually much more, counting SOGA versions) that didn’t work, but coincidentally nobody had happened to test it on a male human.
It wasn’t so much a problem for players, since the player-wearable items were only brand new and nobody was wearing them yet, so we could just pull those off the merchant until they were fixed. However, a number of NPCs around the world had apparently been using these leggings, and in all cases where the NPC happened to be a human male, they were now suffering a rather strange case of entire lower body amputation.
Unfortunately, art changes are much more difficult than design changes to push in hastily, and it wasn’t possible to fix the human male leggings before it was time for the game update to go to the live servers. As a result, Jindrack ended up getting a bug report and had to search through all our NPCs to find out which ones had outfits using these leggings, and replace them temporarily with other leggings. This was in fact the first time that I heard of the bug, when I started seeing him checking in a series of outfit fixes with header comments like “Further adventures of changing pants.”
Apart from the entertainment value we all got from reading Jindrack’s update notes as he apparently went around Norrath changing people’s pants on every continent, this bug definitely highlighted to me how hard it can be to test every possible thing that could go wrong with what seems like a fairly simple change.
So now we are in the last countdown to the expansion launch, and trying hard to avoid any other such peculiar bugs, and trying to second-guess ways in which people might be able to break or otherwise have problems with any of the new content that we have put in. No invisible pants so far this expansion, though there have been plenty of other interesting issues, and no doubt many more to come. Hopefully the folks on beta are enjoying their beta testing despite the occasional interesting bugs, and with their help and QA’s hard work we can get it all tidied up in plenty of time for the launch!
Emily “Domino” Taylor
