In addition, Orion got some new tech that allowed for the buff he created, Inspired Greatness, to be changed so it would scale based on your fellowship size. Now when under the effect of Inspired Greatness you will be buffed up according to how many group members you bring along. This was a drastic change to how it was previously used in our Lone-lands revamp and it required a lot of scrutiny from we testers. The new tech also allowed him to cut down on the number of changes he needed to make to get Volume I into the state he wanted. But then he decided to take that further and allow this buff into non-instanced areas where the Epic books take place, under heavy constraints. This was a potential QA nightmare! Players buffed to elite status while out in the world!? Cats and dogs living together!? Mass hysteria! We had to test extensively against potential exploits and ensure that it was indeed very limited in nature. We also had to look at all of the Volume One content from the perspective of many different class and fellowship compositions, while also considering the varied play styles of all players who want a chance to see the Epic Books for themselves.

Then there is the challenge of guiding the rest of the QA teams in the proper ways of testing the changes. I made initial exploratory passes while creating the testing plan, and then relied on other teams (“Team Awesome,” with preliminary help from “Team Chaos,” and some later grouping work by “Team Lakehouse”) to go through what I wrote and submit their own bugs on any issues they found. I had to create character template files to allow better accessibility to the content I wanted tested and quickly get the qualitative runs going (digging out proper equipment for each class takes a while). I then rallied the private beta testers and asked for their feedback on the changes before we moved into a later testing phase. This process is still ongoing and we’re currently rounding up any pressing issues and getting them taken care of before Volume III Book 1 is pushed to the live servers. Our public test server, Bullroarer, is the last net we have for finding edge-case issues that may have slipped by on our QA server environment and during the bug escalation process.

As you can see, there’s a lot of work involved in preparing a feature for release! I hope you all appreciate this little peek behind the curtain. On patch day, we QA testers are usually closing our eyes and waiting for the sound of explosions and screams of terror. If nothing bad happens, we can let out a short sigh of relief before starting up the process anew. The developers take us on a new ride every time, and we never quite know what exactly to expect!

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About the Author

Amanda "Brynhildr" Cosmos has been in the LOTRO QA department for over a year and a half. She enjoys Tolkien lore, harmonious quest flow, and playing LOTRO as a female Elf Champion.