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Making WoW - Working Quality Assurance at Blizzard in Vanilla, AMA with Author John Staats
Classic
Geposted
12.12.2019 um 12:41
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perculia
Last year, John Staats published The WoW Diary, a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of vanilla Warcraft. With Classic WoW now launched, we thought it was the perfect time to check back in with Staats and highlight the book again!
We're excited to announce that every week or so, we'll be publishing an essay about vanilla WoW by John Staats. This week's essay is
Upward Mobility
, discussing the experiences of Blizzard employees working in Quality Assurance.
If you find this essay interesting, consider purchasing The WoW Diary on Amazon:
WoW Diary Book on Amazon - $39.99
Special Boxed Edition on Amazon - $149.99
Have any questions on the essay or vanilla WoW development in general? He'll be checking out the comments section and answering them, so you may learn something new!
A million years ago, I designed and built half of the dungeons in vanilla WoW. If you have any questions about making the game, I’m happy to answer, here on Wowhead. - John Staats
To find the right exterior level designers, a voluntary task was offered to Blizzard’s QA team to create exterior areas using WoW’s ubiquitous game editor, called wowedit. Since Blizzard published its own games, we had a few dozen quality assurance and customer support staffers (some were temporary, others full time) who were integral to the company’s success—not only for the polish that went into its titles but also as a source of passionate development candidates. The moment someone was hired to Blizzard’s QA or customer support team, their only goal was to leave and get onto a development team, whose salaries, responsibilities, and creative input were considerably better. Applying for a position as an exterior level designer was a big opportunity.
The two-dozen exterior level design applicants worked in wowedit after hours and on their own time. The given instructions were, “Create an interesting zone using the available Elwynn ground textures and props.” Wowedit was new, buggy, and clumsy, and it lacked major features like auto-saves or shortcuts that reduced repetitive actions. It was tedious and imprecise work, and most applicants had never worked in a 3D editor before; most of them lacked artistic experience, and there were no tutorials. The fact that they’d never learned the self-discipline to frequently save their work, coupled with mind-numbing repetitive processes, meant the candidates frequently lost hours of work whenever the editor crashed. It made the application process incredibly painful, but the people who wanted the job badly enough spent the most time on their levels and generally produced better work.
After a few weeks, the design and art teams ranked the submitted exterior levels without knowing who’d built them, referring to them only by their number. There were four people whose work was ahead of the pack: Bo Bell, Mark Downie, Josh Kurtz, and Matt Sanders. Josh Kurtz’s level was accompanied by a notebook of lore explaining the area. No one read his twenty-five-page document, but the amount of work he put into his story was a sign he would be a passionate developer. We learned that the two submissions that had received the highest marks were authored by the same applicant, Matt Sanders. Matt had served in the Navy and had a reputation for being a hard worker and team player, and after Mark Kern saw who made the two strongest entries he commented, shaking his head, “For whatever reason, military guys always make the best game developers. I don’t know why that is. They just seem to have an intuition.”
Nobody grins more on their first day on the dev team than someone from QA. Contrary to what people believe, QA people don’t sit around playing games all day. Although they’re the first people to see new titles, one can’t describe their day-to-day routine as fun. It takes meticulous effort to write and verify bug reports. Developers fix bugs at their own pace, after which it becomes QA’s responsibility to test and verify whether the proper adjustment has been made. Some bugs are trivial or are duplicates of others; some are fiendishly difficult to solve and take months or even years to address. Other entries aren’t even bugs and are dubbed “working as intended.”
When a problem is discovered by QA, it has to be verified by senior QA staff members. Josh Kurtz described nightmarish experiences he had isolating a bug that occurred whenever a player attacked a monster in Diablo II’s expansion. To eliminate the possibility that a weapon was the culprit of the bug, Josh had to attack a dummy monster using every weapon in the game, a process that took hours. Tasks like these might be split among QA people or sometimes they fell to just one unfortunate soul to sort out. After every weapon was checked, Josh reported the results. The programmers or designers would change something, and Josh would then have to retest every weapon and report results again. The developers would change something else, and Josh would need to test everything again to make sure the bug hadn’t reactivated. And again. After doing something like this repetitively for hours, for days, for weeks, and sometimes for months, QA drudgery feels less like being in a computer game company and more like a psychological experiment. These entry-level positions are minimum-wage jobs, but people endure the experience just for a chance at getting a development position, becoming a QA lead, or attaining some other non-developer position. But everyone’s goal is the same: escape from QA.
Aside from the politics and headaches that pervade this dues-paying atmosphere, there are some major perks to being in QA. Being surrounded by gamers every hour of the day creates a strange mix of camaraderie in this every-man-for-himself environment. People learn how games are made, and it isn’t uncommon for people from QA to move into game design positions at other companies. Full-time QA members are part of company events like movie day, holiday parties, and Las Vegas launch events. But ultimately the best part is working with other people who are passionate about games.
If you enjoyed this excerpt, check out The WoW Diary (book) on Amazon, it’s PDF, or signed box edition.
WoW Diary Book on Amazon - $39.99
Special Boxed Edition on Amazon - $149.99
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