[TRENCHES] Thursday, March 12, 2015 - Breaking The News
LegionPerseus VeilRegistered User, Moderator, Penny Arcade Staff, Vanilla Staff vanilla
Breaking The News
http://trenchescomic.com/comic/post/breaking-the-news
The Long Bug
AnonymousWhen I was still a fairly new tester, I was working on a fighting game based off of a prolific anime series. My team was doing simple gameplay testing: playing over and over until we found an issue, writing it up, rinse and repeat.
The game boasted a playable roster of 70+ characters, and naturally there was an achievement for playing with all of them. I decided to make sure it worked. Cue a day and a half of playing through all of the campaigns, then playing single matches with all of the other characters. At the end, I wasn’t awarded the achievement; after some experimentation, I found that some characters had to be played twice to get it to work. I was briefly pleased with myself at having the patience to track such an issue down. Then I remembered one line in the required bug report:
“Reproducibility: X out of 10”
I shrugged, figuring there were worse ways to make a living. By the end of the process, I had gotten pretty good at the game - it now only took me 6 hours to reproduce! I finally got my 10 repetitions, wrote up the bug report, and went home for the day, looking forward to doing something (anything!) else the next day.
When I got in the next day, I was informed that we had a new build, and everyone needed to do regression testing on the issues they had previously found. Cue head-to-desk.
Posts
Probably can't see him going into blowjobs to such degree, though. Maybe giraffe ones.
Perhaps Trenches should avoid the gutter in the future.
As to the tale: As bullshit as that achievement requirement is (Characters needed to be run though campaign twice...WTF?) shouldn't the tester have known he would have to check at least the next build the same way to see if it was fixed? Seems like a core part of the job.
Ehh, I don't know if he is being derogatory about it.
http://trenchescomic.com/comic/post/decent-proposal
Came to see if someone was huffing about this. And, hey, turns out political correctness is extremely predictable.
There is essentially no chance that a (probably low priority) bug filed at the end of the day will be fixed and into the next-day build. You test when the dev marks the bug as "fixed" not when you get a new build
Usually, but IIRC with some builds the devs change so much they don't even bother to look at the bug reports beyond a few major issues that may cover a broad spectrum of problems. If more features are added or removed that could: cause the bugs to be fixed, undermine specific fixes, or cause extra problems. Hence the need to start the bug hunt from scratch every so often.
Sounds like this was likely the case. The build they got probably had some substantial differences, and they wanted QA to verify that everything was fixed. Otherwise management is just being sadistic.
Just set all the "have you completed this game as character X" bits to 1 and see if the achievement pops. That's like 15 minutes with a memory editor. You'd still need to verify that completing the campaign appropriately flipped the right bit (since you mocked that out with the unit test), but the base functionality would be verified.
Agreed. This bothered me too. And the obligatory 'complaining about people complaining about this' is bothersome too.
Legitimate criticism: I can def. see the intent of this piece as Isaac running his mouth(as another poster suggested), and being homophobic. With Cora pointing out that character flaw. It reads like too much of the joke is on 'haha Capcom is gay' instead of 'haha Isaac is homophobic', however. Cora ends up setting up the joke, rather than calling out Isaac after he set up the joke.
I'd rather the takeaway from this be "oh so that's how to make more people get the joke next time". Just a thing that bothers me(and some other people), and having actionable criticism ignored because it's 'politically correct' is frustrating.
However, the crafting of the joke is sort of faulty. First of all, you can't really give a "blow job" under the usually understood definition to anyone but a guy, so Cora pointing out he said "guy" is almost superfluous.
Second, Isaac's blow job simile is so tenuously connected to the topic they were talking about that the whole thing seems forced - like making a comic with dialogue involving a blow job was clearly the goal from the start and it shows.
And when the character's name is Isaac Cox, using a joke like this at all seems sort of redundant, unless you try to tie the two together somehow - like, I don't know, have Cora say something like "A person named Isaac Cox should probably avoid using this type of metaphor."
Although it's been so long since the comic started when they made a point of making sure we were aware of his name, and the comic has changed creatives so many times since then, I guess it's possible Ty literally forgot about it...
Good point, I misread it. I stand by the rest of my post though.
Political correctness is irritating because it's political correctness, not because it's predictable. I would like to live in a world where people were so vocal about their irritation with political correctness where ever it arose that it became predictable, but it baffles me that you suggest that this is that world.