[timhere1970]

Quote: Originally Posted by CM Hooe

QA in AAA gaming is more than you could handle. It is one of the most trying, strenuous, thankless, and important roles in building a video game. People who work Quality Assurance jobs in AAA - including at Tiburon, a AAA studio - work tirelessly to report, prioritize, and track bugs internally. They also ensure built features the dev team builds for the new game are working as intended and attempt replicate issues reported by users playing the retail product. QA personnel in AAA typically work 50 hours a week at minimum, and that's not accounting for crunch (short weeks-long bursts before a major deadline or development milestone where 80 hour work-weeks and 16-hour work days are not uncommon). QA is one of the most thankless jobs in gaming because if the QA team is doing its job 100% perfectly, the end user will never know. Thanks to QA, the worst bugs that ever exist in a video game are never seen by the public; not in retail, not on an E3 floor build, not in a hype video, nowhere and never. QA is basically invisible to the consumer, but absolutely vital to the process of completing a video game. If you are insinuating that the QA staff at Tiburon doesn't work hard or doesn't work effectively, you fundamentally do not understand the nature of AAA game development. Sources: my own first-hand knowledge from on my own experience performing QA during crunch as an independent game developer, supplemented by second-hand knowledge from my current supervisor, whose first video game industry jobs were QA positions at Blizzard and Sony San Diego.

Not trying to be a dick here but as a layman it is very hard to understand how they do a patch that messes up the game and nobody notices it or they just don't care. Take punting for example. How does that pass the whole qa process when I notice it in a few hours of game time? After they are done with the patch it then is still awhile before it gets released because it has to go through sony/Microsoft certification. Do they still not notice? It seems to me it had to be and they released the patch anyway. I think they should take the approach of do no harm and that patch should have never been released with that big a flaw.