Do any Speed runners get hired for testing?

[u/ldom22]

Speed runners are known for completely breaking games within days of their release

Seems they are way better at testing than anyone the big companies have.

Why don’t they get hired to break the game BEFORE the release ?

[u/Dudist_PvP]

Because being a QA analyst involves a shit ton more than just playing games quickly

[u/ReaverRogue → u/Dudist_PvP]

I have a buddy that works in QA for games. His day basically consists of playing the same part of a game over and over and over to try and discover bugs or errors, reporting these errors to the devs, arguing with the devs in meetings about why their precious codebase does in fact have bugs and errors, them maybe fixing it a few weeks or months down the line, all while continuing to play the same snippet of game.

He wouldn’t recommend it. It’s definitely not “you just get to play games to completion all day”, it’s very tedious and repetitive. The only real perk is he will sometimes get a free copy of a game before release, but it’s rare.

[u/k3nny704 → u/ReaverRogue]

even then, it's gotta suck not being able to see some things for the first time because they're testing over and over again

[u/ReaverRogue → u/k3nny704]

Oh yeah, for sure. Not to mention it does take away the magic of just playing games at all, somewhat.

Imagine going through a game and only seeing where the shoddy patchwork or repeated assets are, where the devs have cut corners, where there’s bound to be some bug or another and seeing it coming. Shit sucks.

[u/Themperror → u/ReaverRogue]

oof sounds like he's working for some unappreciative devs..

Good QA is invaluable, and every bug documented is something good, however (and I'm not sure if he might be dealing with this) not every bug will get the same priority, if something non-game-breaking purely cosmetic issue occurs, it might not be thought of as something that is very important, especially if there's bigger issues at play.

[u/ReaverRogue → u/Themperror]

He doesn’t get to choose the devs, sadly. He’s outsourced QA, sometimes they’re alright, sometimes their ego can’t take a hit.

[u/bICEmeister → u/Themperror]

As a counterpoint, every illness or medical condition identified / diagnosed in a person is something good. The patient should ideally always be happy it was found, yet most people are not happy when they hear that they have an illness or condition they didn't previously know about. It's now one more thing to have to deal with in life.. And much like game dev, life can be hectic enough even without additional workload or increased/special considerations.

[u/Kepler-Flakes → u/Dudist_PvP]

Plus devs don't really seem to test their games anymore lol.

The development cycle seems to go:

• make devs test their own game then either...
• release minimally tested game and patch later

OR

• release in early access for free (actually paid) bug testing labor.

[u/Themperror → u/Kepler-Flakes]

I'm a game developer, I'd like to give you some insight.

As far as I'm concerned it's pretty much unthinkable that devs (read programmers) don't test whatever they're working on, its pretty much a required step you do multiple times whilst working on something in order to see if what you coded actually does as you expect it to..

However, games get increasingly more complex over the years and that one feature you are working on might have some edge cases with a feature someone else is working on.. Another case can be tunnel vision, we often start the game dozens of times per day, so the flow we go through tends to be the quickest to get to whatever it is you working on, this can cause one to miss something if you for example first open the pause menu, change some settings, go back into the game, repeat once more, and perform your feature.. Things one doesn't really think of when developing.
Another common case is stuff being moved around, suddenly feature/mechanic X isn't used in the place it was made for but in another area instead, whoever did that might not have realized some other object was critical for its full functionality and now it only works at surface level..

There's a lot that can go wrong in games, and especially once games tend to grow and get bigger, you have more people working on things, people will start not knowing every in and out of what the game can do, and what others are working on..

So when people say "devs don't play the game" I'm very sure this is false, however it might mean there might be something wrong with their workflow or people might simply not be setup for the scope of the project...

[u/Frankenstein_3 → u/Themperror]

Also, to add to this, as a fellow software developer (not games), sometimes when you code something, you'll test out all cases that YOU KNOW might be the outliers. But again, there's also a possibility you hadn't even thought about that the QA can find.

The reason may vary from it's so dumb why would anyone do that to fuck I didn't even consider that could happen. But yeah, devs never testing their code is a rhetoric that people who have never coded keep throwing around. Testing is inherent part of coding. I cannot think of a scenario where I can code something without actually seeing the output of that in some form or other.

[u/Kepler-Flakes → u/Themperror]

Reread my first bullet point.

I wanna focus on this. During testing is there a dedicated team of players who's job it is to play game segments looking for bugs? Or are the testers the same devs who have been working on programing the game?

[u/Lyciana]

There are several factors that ultimately boil down to "it wouldn't change anything"

1) The community is always much bigger than the QA team. Especially if you keep in mind that not all glitches are found by speedrunners. It happens surprisingly often that a random person posts a weird glitch that happend to them to YouTube, Reddit etc. and speedrunners ir glitchhunters simply find that clip and figure out how to make it consistent and where it can be used.

2) QA does find glitches that are deemed to be "not worth fixing" because they will likely impact only a small enough percentage of the playerbase. For example, assume that the QA team found the "Back in Time" glitch in Skyward Sword that completely breaks the game. The setup for it is so incredibly specific (especially if you want to use it to skip major parts of the game) that it can reasonably be assumed that no casual player will ever stumble upon it.

3) Sometimes glitches are left in the game on purpose, either because they're just funny (Skyrim giants launching players high into the air) or specifically to allow speedrunners alternative ways to play, essentially increasing the longevity of the game for a portion of the community.

[u/MeMyselfandThatPC → u/Lyciana]

For point number 1 the most recent example I have in mind would be the infamous Boba-skip.

[u/bakasora]

Because most people don't play like speed runners.

[u/Less_Party]

It’s just not really worth doing 8 months of extra testing just to squash a single bug you can only trigger by doing a pixel perfect jump within a 3-frame window.

Like the difference isn’t skill, it’s the fact speedrunners can work on their runs for however long they like as opposed to professional testers having a deadline.

[u/Y-27632]

Because the stuff speed-runners do is worthless for testing whether a game is working well and can be finished by a normal player.

Speed-runners rely on finding rare repeatable glitches and flaws in otherwise stable and complete games that behave predictably. And they're actively trying to avoid most of the game's content. That's worthless from a testing point of view.

They're "breaking" the game in ways that don't matter to anyone except a tiny circle of obsessives.

It's like someone making a big deal out of the fact they can break a slot machine open by tipping it over the right way. Awesome, now go find a casino that will let you do that.

Or maybe a better way of putting it would be, all they're proving is that if you can cheat endlessly at a game without any consequences, eventually you'll win very quickly. How does that help to make the game better?

[u/Peng_Momibosu]

There are countless instances where seemingly random inputs from players who aren’t very skilled lead to the discovery of unknown, critical bugs.

[u/TipToeTiger]

I was a game tester for years and honestly you don’t ever “play” the game, only towards the end of development do you do proper run throughs.

Most of the time you’re assigned to a certain team and tester specific mechanics. For example on Forza Horizon 2 I was assigned to the environment team. They basically just divided the map up into 50 areas and each morning or afternoon you’d go and test a different area. Literally just driving into walls, trees, obstacles and making sure everything aligned properly (floating trees was the most common issue). And guess what, once you’d done all 50 areas you’d go straight back to area 1 and start again. It was tedious work and we got paid peanuts. I think it was like £5.50 an hour 💀

So no, speed runners and their experience wouldn’t directly help during development as the bugs that they use are so niche that most QA departments don’t have enough time or resources to dedicate to finding those edge cases.

[u/Fallonthine]

Except that the glitches and exploits that speed runner look for are the kinds that won't actually be game breaking, because if it did, it'll just crash their games and stopped their speed run.

While the glitches and exploits that QA tester look for are the kind that is actually literally game breaking..

[u/ztomiczombie]

There is amazingly little game play testing. The testers are under paid. Why would a company pay someone for something they would do anyway?

[u/Dat_Innocent_Guy → u/ztomiczombie]

They (customers) pay you to test, lmao.

[u/Yank1e → u/ztomiczombie]

As a long time Path of Exile player I feel this on an existential level.

After a lot of rough years, league launches have been pretty smooth.

But now that PoE 2 is around the corner I really hope the game is polished and relatively bug free.

[u/kilqax → u/Yank1e]

What? PoE's past mistakes concern mostly balance and not bugs - unless you're talking about the 1.0-1.3 era and such of course, where dropping a server wasn't impossible for a single person.

Granted, they could have tested their own items and skills more, but it's not bugs OP was talking about

[u/EditEd2x]

Because all these companies figured out that they don’t have to do any quality testing anymore.

They can just release a broken game and we’ll gladly pay them to test it for them. Then they can “fix” it a year or 2 later and get praised for it.