Quote Originally Posted by Packetdancer View Post
I think they could stand to change up their test process, no question. However, it is startling easy for bugs -- even ones that show up quickly in the hands of players -- to sneak through at any game company. Largely because most game QA -- indeed, a breathtaking amount of software QA in general -- ends up being done by testing "does the thing work if we do <steps expected to work>", sometimes with variant steps, rather than "does the thing break if we do things that, by all rights, should not affect the thing we're testing".
This! So much this!

My team is one that tries to test what's expected and then the corner cases, even some really weird things. We try to think like our internal users and external customers. And then we have "How would Dave break this" cases. This is one of our users that we love using in QA because he *always* finds something we miss. So we test as many things trying to think like him. And then we bring in Dave and he finds something we missed. And even then sometimes a bug slips through because maybe we couldn't get back to x or y point. Not to mention as we make things more interconnected to give ease to users, we often make the backend a lot more complicated. More complications, more bugs.