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Another Biting the Hand column has been written by Jessica Mulligan. This time she tackles the testing of online games, or actually the lack of testing them. As examples she uses the major disaster World war II Online (as far as launches go) and the upcoming launch of Anarchy Online.And if you've ever worked QA on a MMORPG, you know the following dirty little secret: some game systems bugs are so deeply buried, they may occur only once every few million or tens of million commands processed by the server. Or only when exactly 1,531 simultaneous players are logged in when an orc spawns in exactly the right place, or only if six +8 Blood-drinker axes initiate combat on the same NPC at the same time tick. Or only when a monster has been surrounded with flour bags to immobilize it and 50,000 gold pieces are then dropped on it. You get the idea.The upshot is, there is just no way to test all the possible conditions inhouse. That's why we open our games to external testing and try to encourage a thundering horde to participate. Not only do you get load testing to see where the cracks in your software and hardware are, you get to pick off some of the more hidden, elusive bugs, too. But not in six months, when over half that period includes less than 2,000 testers, which seems to be the norm right now. With 30,000 to 50,000 testers pounding on the game for six months, you'll catch the most readily apparent bugs and anomalies and still have time to fix them and test them (as well as the new bugs you created with the fixes) in time for launch.
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Don't forget to test your online game
