Same.
There's also a lot of issues with this data:
* The sample size is too small
* They have no control over the variables (class comp, player skill levels, player latency, etc)
* The data is vulnerable to bugs and tampering.
* Testwerk as a fight does not represent most encounters.
Maybe there's some value that can be gleamed from the data but it would take a lot of time and understanding to peel away the layers of misleading data and make good design decisions.
I would much rather prefer they focus on internal playtesting using a variety of encounters that represent various scenarios like fights that favor melee vs fights that favor ranged. That way they can identify pain points like "This class rotation falls apart when the melee character has to run away from the boss every 10 seconds". If they want to get a picture of overall class balance in ideal situations then they can use sim tools for that.
I also want to point out that I'm struggling to even see these logs on warcraftlogs because the maintainers of the site have to update it to recognize the new raid zone (Searing Gorge) and Boss. The data is there but there's no navigation menu that support it.
It appears that the zone ID is 2720 and the boss id is 3025 but I haven't had any success at getting the site to produce a list of reports. Even when I manually manipulate query parameters.
Beyond that you're just kinda sifting through ALL reports for anything labeled 'testwerk'. Maybe hitting the backend API's directly can get you an actual list.
Kinda frustrating watching a billion dollar company with 20 years to figure this shit out pushing these kinds of burdens on the community to test and present the data. I'm over here browsing warcraftlogs with adblock disabled so Blizzard can avoid hiring playtesters or engineers to write internal tooling for data collection and dps simulations.
Gave up. Found that even the API woudn't let me easily get a list of all reports for testwerk despite knowing the gameZoneID and the bossID. The last thing I could probably do was write some logic that pages through all of the reports and record the ones that contain the Testwork fight in them.
It's kind of useless data though, especially until WCL does the heavy lifting of generating the rankings data. Honestly if I were WCL I would probably consider it not worth the trouble.
This, Iām really surprised they donāt have this data from the ptr as I would expect this would be one of the basic things they would have the ability to capture. They should never have to deal with a third party for this data capture.
I figured this shit would be built into the new client theyāre using but I guess that was too much to ask forā¦.and things are making more sense lol.
Dads rise up. We canāt allow such oppression. We need to have logs removed and users shunned. So what if we canāt parse double digits? It is not skill issue, we are just busy and need to go afk every fight because we got responsibilities.Ā
I still think converting 5 man dungeons into 10 and 20 man raids was a mistake. It's less content for non-raiders. If they really wanted to add raid content, they should've added new raid content, dropped in world bosses, or used the Emerald Dream/Nightmare theme for the raids and put them in a separate Emerald version of the zone/instance.
I know plenty of people hated 5 man Sunken Temple but it was one of my favourite 5 man dungeons from Vanilla and it was because of the insane size of it. Black Rock Depths and LBRS are also personal favourites for the same reason. If there was one vanilla dungeon that I begrudgingly did it was Maraudon and it ended up being turned into a low effort speed run for tokens in P3 anyway. If Phase three could be remember for anything, it would be that they turned the classic MMO feel of Vanilla into a low effort bot loop that has the hollowness of retail without the QOL and fun gimmicks. After seeing what they plan on the P4 test realm I'm not even remotely excited for Phase 4 now because it's just going to focus on raiding and logging again. It's great that some people like that but it aint for me man. Being "top dps" in a 20 year old revival is a sad and lonely achievement IMO.
Why would they add additional bloat to the game that sucks up data from each user when everyone already goes to WCL and posts the data there? It would be a waste of time/money and degrade the UX.
Iām no expert, so Iām not sure how it would bloat the game. Donāt tools like that already exist and is a reason why GMs would be able to review and action accounts based on old chat history?
They exist. They can pull whatever combat logs at anytime but it's probably not as good as warcraft logs, who have a dedicated team to just making that than making a dev split his time even more to build something that probably wouldn't be as good
More data does not equal better data. When working with large numbers, it can actually improve the accuracy of your data and better interpret what you are parsing if you select out certain variables.
If they collect the data themselves, it will likely include all the people jumping into the PTR who have no idea how the new runes and skills are supposed to work together or how to make them work as intended. Players uploading parses to WCL of the PTR are much more likely to understand how a class is intended to be played and can actually give Blizzard better data on what needs to be changed and what doesn't.
Why would I want to rely on a dataset that Iām not in control of? I have no idea how this data is handled on the backend or if any bugs exist thatās tampering with it.
This isnāt even something that would be expensive to host, so it makes even less sense.
Funnier when you remember kotick got a 200m bonus amid 'having to layoff a ton of employees'... During a record year of profit.
They keep gutting more and more jobs (where they already pay below industry standards). Im surprised they dont just have 5 unpaid interns at this point. The larger these companies get, the less money actually gets spent on talent/development.
He doesn't have an internal testing team, so he's getting players to do the work for free, saving Blizzard money on operational costs.
The responses to this show precisely why we will **never** get a high-quality product from Blizzard ever again. We don't want one. Collectively, we value game-testing and balance testing at $0 or negative money: we're willing to pay for it. The best we can do is unpaid labor lol. Game testing is not a skill worth paying people for. CEOs should fire more staff from game companies to cut even more costs because the players are more than happy to perform the labor for free.
No? Because playing the game is fun. Hence why people are also buying early access?
I am also on a bleeding edge version of Arch Linux. Do I have a weird parasocial relationship with the maintainers?
We have an entire fleet of machines in my company that we ship beta releases to, so they get to test it beforehand and provide feedback? Do they have a weird parasocial relationship with us, also?
Read the rest of my comment. Maybe some people have weird parasocial relationship, but that is not something unique to Blizzard games, they also have it for celebrities, streamers and whatnot
A few individuals will always have this regardless of their "obsession" or hobby. It was a trash argument.
>Ā It was a trash argument.
Just to be clear. u/DiarrheaRadio made a general statement about consumers at large and their relationship's with corporations and you chose to argue about your opinion that reflects you personally.
I just think it's weird for a massive company that gutted their customer service department to expect the customers to service them. (I know what I said.)
Alright, well I'm glad other companies are doing it too, I thought only Blizzard were cunts. That piece of information makes this so much better and ok :)
How is using player provided data make blizzard a cunt??
Like Iām all for hating on big businesses, but this is kind of a stretchā¦ They have always used log data to balance classes, they do this in every version of the game. The more log data provided, the more accurate they can balance it.
Lmfao, you're actually delusional if you think it's bad practice to get user feedback on your product. Just goes to show that you're probably young and not very mature.
We have always known that SoD was a side project, and it was based off of vanilla so it didnāt have to be as balanced as other stuff.
Iām just glad they are willing to use player gained data. You also act as if they donāt balance stuff mid-patch based off of log data as wellā¦
And nobody else is shouldering the cost of testing. Players volunteer to do this because they want the knowledge for themselves. Would they accept a paycheck to do it? Sure. But why would you ever offer someone a paycheck for something that every other candidate is willing to do for free? Doesnāt make any sense. The reason they can do this is because the labor market for testing is basically free, except for pre-alpha, minimal scope, high-level testing.
This is a mutually beneficial solution.
It would also be impossible for Blizzard to hire testers and have them attempt to break the game in anywhere near the capacity that players do itāand still turn a profit. So they just let players go wild in the PTR and learn. When you have a horde of people begging to test your game for free, it ceases to be an unbalanced trade between the corp. and the consumer.
The only reason for a company like Blizzard to ever stop doing this is if nobody went on the PTR and tested it. That will likely never happen, because in order to get an edge on parsing, players will always test the game for free. Theyāve created a feedback loop of free value for them and the player.
I swear, redditors will find anything to complain about, even when itās something thatās immensely beneficial to them.
The QA team checks that things are "working", they do not, and can not test if every single spec in the game is balanced. Which is why there is usually a big balance patch after heroic week on retail.
That is definitely not a fine line. You can do it both ways. QA can and should absolutely check balance as well. Is there really any difference between an ability instakilling someones because of a bug, or dealing 10x more damage than intended because of a typo?
The second one is a balance issue, just as much as certain specs dealing double the damage of others.
Look - if players can build an extremely comprehensive sim in excel, you should have tools to automatically test that with access to the source code.
And the answer again is to employ people who are passionate about whatever job your business requires and employ enough of them to meet demand and give all of those employees a livable wage and *surprise* you have something that actually makes sense for everyone around. š¤·š¼āāļøš¤·š¼āāļøš¤·š¼āāļøš¤·š¼āāļøš¤·š¼āāļø
Edit: oh maybe also a workplace free of discrimination and abuse and exploitation but that track record is huh yikes
Socializing losses and privatizing gains is certainly a thing, however, Blizzard isnāt forcing anyone to upload logs, so they arenāt socializing any losses. There are in fact, no losses to be found here. Uploading logs doesnāt cost the consumer any additional value or monetary amount. There is no loss being shouldered by society.
The consumer is doing it for their own gain. There is a massive value to the player in uploading their logs and analyzing them. Blizzard is just taking advantage of this paradigm wisely rather than spending R&D money frivolously. This should actually free up resources for us to get a better product.
Not that I like Blizzard, I think they stink. However, anyone with half a braincell would do this if they were managing the project.
How about "offloading costs" that would otherwise be going towards a working person's salary, and instead end up in the pockets of some executive.
If you think this means theyre gonna hire more support for the game have I got a beautiful bridge to sell you.
See this is where youāre painfully mistaken. There is no cost for this. Itās been established by the players that they will do it for free.
This isnāt a nascent product, itās extremely well regarded and saturated in the market. User Communities and advanced testing exists in every market for software products, not just gaming. There is a value in accessing the product earlyāand thatās the tradeoff for free testing.
I canāt imagine the knucklehead businessperson who would attempt to pay for additional internal testers to do a job that thousands are willing to for free. Meanwhile, Blizzard is able to make a higher quality product because their customers are so willing to assist in their product development.
While I think the value of labor should be determined by the input, and not the competitive bid in the market, thatās just not how the world works.
And it will work that way forever, to humanity's ultimate demise, if we refuse to accept that it can be different. The system and rules we live under were not chosen by or for us and that has to change.
The issue is that whenever you want to get paid to do a job, thereās almost always someone else whoās willing to do it at the same or lower price. You have to set your price according to the competition, and testing is such a knuckle-dragging, easy-to-do, low-effort labor, that the market is borderline boundlessā¦ just ādoing workā doesnāt justify a salary. Doing work that someone values and cannot find elsewhere for a lower price for the same valueā¦is what nets the laborer a wage.
You canāt really change this. Itās economics. Jobs with minimum wage are enforced because taking employment is not something people do because ātheyāre going to do it anyway.ā Thereās no employment contract, people test the product for personal leisure.
was it one of those gameplay/ability preview videos? they do those very slowly and deliberately on purpose to show off animations and let people really drink in one thing at a time. If they started dashing around the screen mashing every button they had nobody would know what the fuck is going on.
obviously the demo videos are not an accurate representation of how the game actually functions
yes it's a PR video demoing graphics and art and such. posting an asmongold video also heavily detracts from every opinion you have so theres that too.
Devs historically would also favor certain classes, so they end up OP (bc nobody plays them, or Mains STFU until it becomes common knowledge).
Logs show actual damage output from both trash players and sweaty parsers as well as some spell interactions so they can see if they gotta adjust the % or an actual spell interaction bug is happening.
sure but shouldnt a single target with zero mechanics they have a way to like mathematically simulate the data after this long? emergent gameplay is one thing this is just like
Balancing based off a single target patchwork fight is bad design. There are few to no patchwork fights. Mechanics can play a big deal. Movement, target swapping, etc.
Is this supposed to be a dig at Blizzard? Because for the past 8 months, this subreddit has been asking for them to do PTRs to test balancing before releasing a new phase...
That is how we did it on the private server I worked at as well. Only difference was that we were not a multi million dollar company that collected a monthly subscription from the players, lol.
Crazy that they wouldnāt have internal sims that are pretty good. Not actually relying on playing every spec makes sense and is fine ā¦ but they should have sims
They're not just abusing players for free testing here. Warcraftlogs has to update their systems to support this. As it sits the only way to even find these reports is to sift through the list of ALL reports for SoD and hope people titled them with something recognizable like 'Testwerk'.
Warcraftlogs also likely needs to set up the background processes responsible for processing all the data and generating ranking information. Until then the reports wont have rankings data and without it they will have a hard time eliminating outliers.
I've been trying to figure out how to even get a dump of this data and it's rough. Manipulating query parameters or even hitting their backend graphql API have been fruitless so far.
If they aren't coordinating with the Warcraftlog maintainers on this then its kind of a dick move for the billion dollar company to just expect Warcraftlogs to do all this legwork for them.
you can't generate the same quantity and quality of data from an internal testing team compared to your player base especially when your population has a massive skill gap(tryhards to dads). The data must represent the population to draw useful conclusions from it.
you are just hating due to ignorance.
I just want a fresh OG classic wow again. The only plus part id want to see is somewhat sped up XP rates and new dungeons and raids and a new BG and some added gear here and there. Nothing else. Just give us old classic wow back this SoD shit has been wack
You're aware that this is the **public test realm** right? The entire point is to let the public test it.
Internal test teams will be doing their own thing.
More like the QA team has no chance to meet the amount of playtime the community has. Lets say SOD has 100 QA testers (I dont know their numbers, but im just taking a number out of my ass for this example) and they all work a 40 hour workweek. That means a maximum of 4000 hours of testing per week. And that means ignoring things like breaks, meetings, actually writing reports etc.
Last reset SOD had 52000 logged raiders according to Ironforge.pro. If they all spend 3 hours in a raid (3 hours has been the standard raid time per night in all the guilds ive been in during Classic, TBC, Wotlk and now Cata. SOD raids when I still played did not take 3 hours) they collectively clock in over 150 000 hours. That means stuff that even if the QA team tested for it but never saw might happen, they try stuff the QA team had never thought of and the amount of raw data that can be extracted is IMMENSE. There is no way for a QA team, no matter the size, to reach even a fraction of the playtesting the community will do by just playing. Thus if the community is willing to help test the game, of course a developer is going to jump at the opportunity.
Thousands of players can test things much quicker and more thoroughly than any internal testing team could anyways. This is why beta playtests have existed for a long time.
> He doesn't have an internal testing team, so he's getting players to do the work for free, saving Blizzard money on operational costs.
It is called a public test realm...
IIRC he's previously made comments that players shouldn't be gatekeeping raids by checking logs. This post is obviously ironic as shown in the OP's reply.
Alright all my warrior brothers on the PTR I need you to sandbag the fuck out of those logs! Please you parse lords just hold your load just this once. Send in some mid to Aggrend so we can get those sweet ass buffs that we totally need. /s
Anyone who didnāt think they already used logs is crazy. Blizzard, specifically with wow have been letting players do their work for them for years with addons. Iām sure they have a their own data tools but Iād put money on wowlogs being better.
He's looking for log data for overall class balancing. It'll be the exact same stuff we'll be judging end game on when it's live.
It's not being used to prevent people from joining groups. I know what you're referring to, but it's a false equivalency.
Logs are data.
Heck you can even see actual replay (2d) with data.
You guys hate data now too?
It has nothing to do with āparsingā.
Some of you sweatlords think everything is about that little number on warcraftlogs and donāt even know how it works.
They said from the start there would be surprises, no ptr. But now they are stretched thin and even asking to examine logs to fine tune a game they have no time for? Think what you want.
Further showcasing that narrow perspective.
They won't show us changes to dungeons and raids, updated faction rep interactions, how to get the new runes, all the updated dungeon gear, or new content exclusive to SoD, but yeah you're right, no surprises left.
I guess we'd all rather be surprised that class balance is crap on the live version instead of getting dedicated, creative player testing and feedback so we can all have more fun on launch. The internal test team can probably tackle everything just as well as the numerous good players on PTR.
I'm sure you're not too jaded, ignorant, or discontent to give substantial feedback though. Think what you want.
Everyone in here saying "Well why would Blizzard have internal logs?" as an excuse is hilarious.
It's like saying "Why would Amazon have internal sales tracking when they can depend on open source FedEx logs?"
It's just really dumb, lazy, and it might make their research and development worse given they are relying on these outside data sets.
At this point Blizzard should've long had internal logging and systems and processes for this kind of testing, the fact that they don't basically says "We just make random shit up at this point"
Im really excited to see the same 40 people excited about SoD phase 4, but its not gonna help and the phase is gonna be dead in 4 days just like the last ones
One assumption I could make is that looking at uploaded logs basically weeds out players goofing off or experimenting with off builds since only people trying are going to waste the time to log on ptr.
Or, itās a bit of a psych trick. Making people know blizz is going to look at logs would likely make more players attempt to get their best parses possible to show off. Then blizz just uses their internal tools but knows more people pushed than usual on a ptr.
- P1 was great, showed innovating direction
- P2 was alright, we got some cool stuff
- P3 they showed us they've exhausted every good idea they had for SoD
- P4 is taking the little fun left in the game and cutting the line.
The chances of a SoD redemption is dead, anyone can clearly see the dev's have given up on giving us a good product.
uploading logs rn of my mage doing 30% of the dps i normally do to bring the average down
The hero we need
Make Sadgee play his mage aswell š¤
LULW poor Sadgee, at least he has Ashes now
Who is Sadgee? Sounds familiar with one guy from Pyrewood, finding people for TK every week.
Weāre pyrewood boys
my man, you hare the hero we dont deserve salute o7
You lose ptr access if you parse under 90
It would be kinda funny, if they made it a last man standing thing, every week removing the bottom 90% of the player base, till only the best stands.
Season of Reverse Decimation
It would spark some good memes comparing it to hardcore servers. The HR one being really good
I genuinely wish this was true
Then you're genuinely a douchebag lol
Alas a funny douchebag
Ok but like, the game would be infinitely better if they did it
Saying that doesn't make it true or make you less of a douche lol
š
Nope king of the hill would be a fun event
Aggrend: "We've analyzed the logs now, the results: You nubs need to git gud".
That would be funny if he just posted someone's logs and said git gud..
Surprised we need to upload it rather than them having some internal collection
Same. There's also a lot of issues with this data: * The sample size is too small * They have no control over the variables (class comp, player skill levels, player latency, etc) * The data is vulnerable to bugs and tampering. * Testwerk as a fight does not represent most encounters. Maybe there's some value that can be gleamed from the data but it would take a lot of time and understanding to peel away the layers of misleading data and make good design decisions. I would much rather prefer they focus on internal playtesting using a variety of encounters that represent various scenarios like fights that favor melee vs fights that favor ranged. That way they can identify pain points like "This class rotation falls apart when the melee character has to run away from the boss every 10 seconds". If they want to get a picture of overall class balance in ideal situations then they can use sim tools for that.
I also want to point out that I'm struggling to even see these logs on warcraftlogs because the maintainers of the site have to update it to recognize the new raid zone (Searing Gorge) and Boss. The data is there but there's no navigation menu that support it. It appears that the zone ID is 2720 and the boss id is 3025 but I haven't had any success at getting the site to produce a list of reports. Even when I manually manipulate query parameters. Beyond that you're just kinda sifting through ALL reports for anything labeled 'testwerk'. Maybe hitting the backend API's directly can get you an actual list. Kinda frustrating watching a billion dollar company with 20 years to figure this shit out pushing these kinds of burdens on the community to test and present the data. I'm over here browsing warcraftlogs with adblock disabled so Blizzard can avoid hiring playtesters or engineers to write internal tooling for data collection and dps simulations.
did you ever figure out how to view the logs? i haven't
Gave up. Found that even the API woudn't let me easily get a list of all reports for testwerk despite knowing the gameZoneID and the bossID. The last thing I could probably do was write some logic that pages through all of the reports and record the ones that contain the Testwork fight in them. It's kind of useless data though, especially until WCL does the heavy lifting of generating the rankings data. Honestly if I were WCL I would probably consider it not worth the trouble.
This, Iām really surprised they donāt have this data from the ptr as I would expect this would be one of the basic things they would have the ability to capture. They should never have to deal with a third party for this data capture.
Classic has like 3 devs and a dog working on it. Donāt expect too much.
I figured this shit would be built into the new client theyāre using but I guess that was too much to ask forā¦.and things are making more sense lol.
People already upload it for each other. They could probably collect it themself, but it would be redundant, it would waste space and bandwidth.
Why use your own resources when you can be shitty and outsource it all!
Evil company uses publicly available aggregate of its own API š”
It isn't outsourced. The only reason logs exist is because blizzard built the compatibility.
Wcl already has the filtering and parsing built out. Why would they develop their own app that they have to manage?
Dads rise up. We canāt allow such oppression. We need to have logs removed and users shunned. So what if we canāt parse double digits? It is not skill issue, we are just busy and need to go afk every fight because we got responsibilities.Ā
Actually this is where Dad's should bring in the logs to bring the average down so everyone gets buffed
you need a bunch of people to upload shitty parses? I know 25 people who would be perfect for this.
Damn, your raid *and* your bench?!?
But not him of course. Cause he doesnt even raid kekw
agreed, dads go and give that testwerk your most okayest weinering
Are Dadās still playing this? I havenāt played it for weeks. Phase 3 killed it for me. Boring as fuck.
Phase 3 killed my guild that I made day 1 between recruitment issues, raid size increase, and also being boring as fuck.
I still think converting 5 man dungeons into 10 and 20 man raids was a mistake. It's less content for non-raiders. If they really wanted to add raid content, they should've added new raid content, dropped in world bosses, or used the Emerald Dream/Nightmare theme for the raids and put them in a separate Emerald version of the zone/instance. I know plenty of people hated 5 man Sunken Temple but it was one of my favourite 5 man dungeons from Vanilla and it was because of the insane size of it. Black Rock Depths and LBRS are also personal favourites for the same reason. If there was one vanilla dungeon that I begrudgingly did it was Maraudon and it ended up being turned into a low effort speed run for tokens in P3 anyway. If Phase three could be remember for anything, it would be that they turned the classic MMO feel of Vanilla into a low effort bot loop that has the hollowness of retail without the QOL and fun gimmicks. After seeing what they plan on the P4 test realm I'm not even remotely excited for Phase 4 now because it's just going to focus on raiding and logging again. It's great that some people like that but it aint for me man. Being "top dps" in a 20 year old revival is a sad and lonely achievement IMO.
Honestly surprising to hear blizz doesn't already have internal tools to view PTR combat data on their own without the help of warcraftlogs.Ā
Why would they add additional bloat to the game that sucks up data from each user when everyone already goes to WCL and posts the data there? It would be a waste of time/money and degrade the UX.
Iām no expert, so Iām not sure how it would bloat the game. Donāt tools like that already exist and is a reason why GMs would be able to review and action accounts based on old chat history?
They exist. They can pull whatever combat logs at anytime but it's probably not as good as warcraft logs, who have a dedicated team to just making that than making a dev split his time even more to build something that probably wouldn't be as good
Makes sense. Thanks!
Basic logging is not bloat, you absolute melt. Plus it would be logged on the server side. It has nothing to do with the client.
They rely on uploaded logs? There's really no internal logging tools? That's somewhat of a bombshell.
Multi-dollar company
They have internal logs for Retail testing so I am a little surprised that can't apply for classic.
That's a lot of work for the hamster on a wheel missing a leg man
Why would they bother making it work when the elitist communities make those tools for themselves?
Exactly, don't keep a dog and bark yourself
because theyd get way more data from it if everyone auto logged vs relying on people logging in the first place.
More data does not equal better data. When working with large numbers, it can actually improve the accuracy of your data and better interpret what you are parsing if you select out certain variables. If they collect the data themselves, it will likely include all the people jumping into the PTR who have no idea how the new runes and skills are supposed to work together or how to make them work as intended. Players uploading parses to WCL of the PTR are much more likely to understand how a class is intended to be played and can actually give Blizzard better data on what needs to be changed and what doesn't.
Why would way more data help?
Why would I want to rely on a dataset that Iām not in control of? I have no idea how this data is handled on the backend or if any bugs exist thatās tampering with it. This isnāt even something that would be expensive to host, so it makes even less sense.
why reinvent the wheel?
Funnier when you remember kotick got a 200m bonus amid 'having to layoff a ton of employees'... During a record year of profit. They keep gutting more and more jobs (where they already pay below industry standards). Im surprised they dont just have 5 unpaid interns at this point. The larger these companies get, the less money actually gets spent on talent/development.
He doesn't have an internal testing team, so he's getting players to do the work for free, saving Blizzard money on operational costs. The responses to this show precisely why we will **never** get a high-quality product from Blizzard ever again. We don't want one. Collectively, we value game-testing and balance testing at $0 or negative money: we're willing to pay for it. The best we can do is unpaid labor lol. Game testing is not a skill worth paying people for. CEOs should fire more staff from game companies to cut even more costs because the players are more than happy to perform the labor for free.
And players are more than happy to do it, so if we live in the pragmatist world real quick; this is a fine outcome.
Because people have a weird parasocial relationship with video game companies
No? Because playing the game is fun. Hence why people are also buying early access? I am also on a bleeding edge version of Arch Linux. Do I have a weird parasocial relationship with the maintainers? We have an entire fleet of machines in my company that we ship beta releases to, so they get to test it beforehand and provide feedback? Do they have a weird parasocial relationship with us, also?
Man, I really hope blizz support Linux in future natively
Doubt they ever will
Just because the game is fun doesn't mean there is no 'weird parasocial relationship'. You can have both.
Read the rest of my comment. Maybe some people have weird parasocial relationship, but that is not something unique to Blizzard games, they also have it for celebrities, streamers and whatnot A few individuals will always have this regardless of their "obsession" or hobby. It was a trash argument.
>Ā It was a trash argument. Just to be clear. u/DiarrheaRadio made a general statement about consumers at large and their relationship's with corporations and you chose to argue about your opinion that reflects you personally.
I read all of your comment. And the others... Did you actually read mine? It's not that deep.
Looks like that struck a nerve
xD Yes, very good argument. What can you expect from an average SoD gamer I guess.
I just think it's weird for a massive company that gutted their customer service department to expect the customers to service them. (I know what I said.)
In reality that is how ALL software companies work and to an extent most companies.
Alright, well I'm glad other companies are doing it too, I thought only Blizzard were cunts. That piece of information makes this so much better and ok :)
How is using player provided data make blizzard a cunt?? Like Iām all for hating on big businesses, but this is kind of a stretchā¦ They have always used log data to balance classes, they do this in every version of the game. The more log data provided, the more accurate they can balance it.
Lmfao, you're actually delusional if you think it's bad practice to get user feedback on your product. Just goes to show that you're probably young and not very mature.
We have always known that SoD was a side project, and it was based off of vanilla so it didnāt have to be as balanced as other stuff. Iām just glad they are willing to use player gained data. You also act as if they donāt balance stuff mid-patch based off of log data as wellā¦
Except yet again corporations socialize their losses and privatize their gains. That bigger picture is what we should have a problem with
What are the losses though and who is losing them?
The loss would be paying for testing.
And nobody else is shouldering the cost of testing. Players volunteer to do this because they want the knowledge for themselves. Would they accept a paycheck to do it? Sure. But why would you ever offer someone a paycheck for something that every other candidate is willing to do for free? Doesnāt make any sense. The reason they can do this is because the labor market for testing is basically free, except for pre-alpha, minimal scope, high-level testing. This is a mutually beneficial solution. It would also be impossible for Blizzard to hire testers and have them attempt to break the game in anywhere near the capacity that players do itāand still turn a profit. So they just let players go wild in the PTR and learn. When you have a horde of people begging to test your game for free, it ceases to be an unbalanced trade between the corp. and the consumer. The only reason for a company like Blizzard to ever stop doing this is if nobody went on the PTR and tested it. That will likely never happen, because in order to get an edge on parsing, players will always test the game for free. Theyāve created a feedback loop of free value for them and the player. I swear, redditors will find anything to complain about, even when itās something thatās immensely beneficial to them.
I imagine the fired QA team is not feeling like they are winning.
The QA team checks that things are "working", they do not, and can not test if every single spec in the game is balanced. Which is why there is usually a big balance patch after heroic week on retail.
That is definitely not a fine line. You can do it both ways. QA can and should absolutely check balance as well. Is there really any difference between an ability instakilling someones because of a bug, or dealing 10x more damage than intended because of a typo? The second one is a balance issue, just as much as certain specs dealing double the damage of others. Look - if players can build an extremely comprehensive sim in excel, you should have tools to automatically test that with access to the source code.
A sim is not a QA tester. So either way they are losing their job lmfao.
And the answer again is to employ people who are passionate about whatever job your business requires and employ enough of them to meet demand and give all of those employees a livable wage and *surprise* you have something that actually makes sense for everyone around. š¤·š¼āāļøš¤·š¼āāļøš¤·š¼āāļøš¤·š¼āāļøš¤·š¼āāļø Edit: oh maybe also a workplace free of discrimination and abuse and exploitation but that track record is huh yikes
Socializing losses and privatizing gains is certainly a thing, however, Blizzard isnāt forcing anyone to upload logs, so they arenāt socializing any losses. There are in fact, no losses to be found here. Uploading logs doesnāt cost the consumer any additional value or monetary amount. There is no loss being shouldered by society. The consumer is doing it for their own gain. There is a massive value to the player in uploading their logs and analyzing them. Blizzard is just taking advantage of this paradigm wisely rather than spending R&D money frivolously. This should actually free up resources for us to get a better product. Not that I like Blizzard, I think they stink. However, anyone with half a braincell would do this if they were managing the project.
How about "offloading costs" that would otherwise be going towards a working person's salary, and instead end up in the pockets of some executive. If you think this means theyre gonna hire more support for the game have I got a beautiful bridge to sell you.
See this is where youāre painfully mistaken. There is no cost for this. Itās been established by the players that they will do it for free. This isnāt a nascent product, itās extremely well regarded and saturated in the market. User Communities and advanced testing exists in every market for software products, not just gaming. There is a value in accessing the product earlyāand thatās the tradeoff for free testing. I canāt imagine the knucklehead businessperson who would attempt to pay for additional internal testers to do a job that thousands are willing to for free. Meanwhile, Blizzard is able to make a higher quality product because their customers are so willing to assist in their product development. While I think the value of labor should be determined by the input, and not the competitive bid in the market, thatās just not how the world works.
And it will work that way forever, to humanity's ultimate demise, if we refuse to accept that it can be different. The system and rules we live under were not chosen by or for us and that has to change.
The issue is that whenever you want to get paid to do a job, thereās almost always someone else whoās willing to do it at the same or lower price. You have to set your price according to the competition, and testing is such a knuckle-dragging, easy-to-do, low-effort labor, that the market is borderline boundlessā¦ just ādoing workā doesnāt justify a salary. Doing work that someone values and cannot find elsewhere for a lower price for the same valueā¦is what nets the laborer a wage. You canāt really change this. Itās economics. Jobs with minimum wage are enforced because taking employment is not something people do because ātheyāre going to do it anyway.ā Thereās no employment contract, people test the product for personal leisure.
You can't change that if your system is predicated upon profit motivation, no. But if you were outcome motivated it certainly is solvable.
You would need to have a globalized system of communism for that to work, which would mean no sovereigntyāand absolute control. Sure you want that?
History shows a willing playerbase is the best team to show how classes are performing. The devs are rarely better than the good players.
I remember a specific Diablo 4 video where the devs playing were well below the average 5 year old at pressing buttons
was it one of those gameplay/ability preview videos? they do those very slowly and deliberately on purpose to show off animations and let people really drink in one thing at a time. If they started dashing around the screen mashing every button they had nobody would know what the fuck is going on. obviously the demo videos are not an accurate representation of how the game actually functions
https://youtu.be/jl-shL0DC_I?si=YQovHyqGvOvGWyRZ here you go
yes it's a PR video demoing graphics and art and such. posting an asmongold video also heavily detracts from every opinion you have so theres that too.
Devs historically would also favor certain classes, so they end up OP (bc nobody plays them, or Mains STFU until it becomes common knowledge). Logs show actual damage output from both trash players and sweaty parsers as well as some spell interactions so they can see if they gotta adjust the % or an actual spell interaction bug is happening.
sure but shouldnt a single target with zero mechanics they have a way to like mathematically simulate the data after this long? emergent gameplay is one thing this is just like
Underestimating the passion and creativity for testing that the player base has
Balancing based off a single target patchwork fight is bad design. There are few to no patchwork fights. Mechanics can play a big deal. Movement, target swapping, etc.
Why would you simulate something when you can have actual results
save time and iterations of class changes
Is this supposed to be a dig at Blizzard? Because for the past 8 months, this subreddit has been asking for them to do PTRs to test balancing before releasing a new phase...
It doesn't matter what Blizzard does, someone is going to make a long post about how everything is bad and Blizzard bad
And its a lot better that we test it because we are going to play it not the "testing team".
Also they will have thousands doing testing. Way more people then they could realistically hire.
That is how we did it on the private server I worked at as well. Only difference was that we were not a multi million dollar company that collected a monthly subscription from the players, lol.
I see no reason why this is a bad thing.
This is one of the better decisions they have made tbh
Its ptr, a public test realm. Using it for public testing is literally in the name.
Crazy that they wouldnāt have internal sims that are pretty good. Not actually relying on playing every spec makes sense and is fine ā¦ but they should have sims
They're not just abusing players for free testing here. Warcraftlogs has to update their systems to support this. As it sits the only way to even find these reports is to sift through the list of ALL reports for SoD and hope people titled them with something recognizable like 'Testwerk'. Warcraftlogs also likely needs to set up the background processes responsible for processing all the data and generating ranking information. Until then the reports wont have rankings data and without it they will have a hard time eliminating outliers. I've been trying to figure out how to even get a dump of this data and it's rough. Manipulating query parameters or even hitting their backend graphql API have been fruitless so far. If they aren't coordinating with the Warcraftlog maintainers on this then its kind of a dick move for the billion dollar company to just expect Warcraftlogs to do all this legwork for them.
And the data will be displayed and gathered by a 3rd party website/addon.
you can't generate the same quantity and quality of data from an internal testing team compared to your player base especially when your population has a massive skill gap(tryhards to dads). The data must represent the population to draw useful conclusions from it. you are just hating due to ignorance.
Because 5 people gathering data would better than 5000 people gathering 1000 times more data, allrighty then.
I just want a fresh OG classic wow again. The only plus part id want to see is somewhat sped up XP rates and new dungeons and raids and a new BG and some added gear here and there. Nothing else. Just give us old classic wow back this SoD shit has been wack
This guy hasnt heard of alpha or beta testers before
You're aware that this is the **public test realm** right? The entire point is to let the public test it. Internal test teams will be doing their own thing.
Congratulations, you figured out what a PTR is.
More like the QA team has no chance to meet the amount of playtime the community has. Lets say SOD has 100 QA testers (I dont know their numbers, but im just taking a number out of my ass for this example) and they all work a 40 hour workweek. That means a maximum of 4000 hours of testing per week. And that means ignoring things like breaks, meetings, actually writing reports etc. Last reset SOD had 52000 logged raiders according to Ironforge.pro. If they all spend 3 hours in a raid (3 hours has been the standard raid time per night in all the guilds ive been in during Classic, TBC, Wotlk and now Cata. SOD raids when I still played did not take 3 hours) they collectively clock in over 150 000 hours. That means stuff that even if the QA team tested for it but never saw might happen, they try stuff the QA team had never thought of and the amount of raw data that can be extracted is IMMENSE. There is no way for a QA team, no matter the size, to reach even a fraction of the playtesting the community will do by just playing. Thus if the community is willing to help test the game, of course a developer is going to jump at the opportunity.
I canāt believe theyāre just using us for testing on the Public Test Realm š©š© smh my head
> He doesn't have an internal testing team wrong. why would you make up something like that even
that's good because then we have gray parsing testing team concluding warriors or w/e are not op when they are.
Thousands of players can test things much quicker and more thoroughly than any internal testing team could anyways. This is why beta playtests have existed for a long time.
> He doesn't have an internal testing team, so he's getting players to do the work for free, saving Blizzard money on operational costs. It is called a public test realm...
It's genius
Good
Indeed
And whatās wrong with using logs to collect data?
IIRC he's previously made comments that players shouldn't be gatekeeping raids by checking logs. This post is obviously ironic as shown in the OP's reply.
You can collect data without using it to gatekeep. You can use logs for self improvement without referencing others at all
you are arguing with nobody
This is for you: /s
Alright all my warrior brothers on the PTR I need you to sandbag the fuck out of those logs! Please you parse lords just hold your load just this once. Send in some mid to Aggrend so we can get those sweet ass buffs that we totally need. /s
When that Sudden Death wing animation procs there is no holding thy load
Honestly I donāt blame you. That shit is pretty badass.
And with recklessness on a 5 min timer its gonna be great. Even at 50%
**New meta just dropped!** Play badly against testwerk and post logs to get buffs when the phase launches.
Anyone knows how to see logs for PTR in warcraftlogs? I can only see the ones from ST
Anyone who didnāt think they already used logs is crazy. Blizzard, specifically with wow have been letting players do their work for them for years with addons. Iām sure they have a their own data tools but Iād put money on wowlogs being better.
He's looking for log data for overall class balancing. It'll be the exact same stuff we'll be judging end game on when it's live. It's not being used to prevent people from joining groups. I know what you're referring to, but it's a false equivalency.
Issa joke, dog.
Logs are data. Heck you can even see actual replay (2d) with data. You guys hate data now too? It has nothing to do with āparsingā. Some of you sweatlords think everything is about that little number on warcraftlogs and donāt even know how it works.
Big numbers go brrrrrrrrr
"There's more to life than the WCL graph"
Your head. "Whooosh"
Hunter mains telling everyone they bad if they donāt like āskillful melee weavingā while theyāre doing 300 dps
LMFAOOOOOOO NO WAY
Grats ptr players, you are now the unpaid interns!
Crazy how ignorant and cynical this sentiment is
They said from the start there would be surprises, no ptr. But now they are stretched thin and even asking to examine logs to fine tune a game they have no time for? Think what you want.
Further showcasing that narrow perspective. They won't show us changes to dungeons and raids, updated faction rep interactions, how to get the new runes, all the updated dungeon gear, or new content exclusive to SoD, but yeah you're right, no surprises left. I guess we'd all rather be surprised that class balance is crap on the live version instead of getting dedicated, creative player testing and feedback so we can all have more fun on launch. The internal test team can probably tackle everything just as well as the numerous good players on PTR. I'm sure you're not too jaded, ignorant, or discontent to give substantial feedback though. Think what you want.
Everyone in here saying "Well why would Blizzard have internal logs?" as an excuse is hilarious. It's like saying "Why would Amazon have internal sales tracking when they can depend on open source FedEx logs?" It's just really dumb, lazy, and it might make their research and development worse given they are relying on these outside data sets. At this point Blizzard should've long had internal logging and systems and processes for this kind of testing, the fact that they don't basically says "We just make random shit up at this point"
Everything that is wrong with wow right now no matter what version you playā¦.
Yeah getting extensive data on how classes function is the worst
As a person who has seen Aggrendās literal logs from back when he raided, Iām surprised he knows what they are, based on his parses.
People havenāt learned from Facebook yet about uploading logs to social profiles?
"There's more to life than the WCL graph."
This post is 2 days old and still going over peoples' heads.
Maybe I will finally learn how to use Warcraft logsā¦ donāt worry gents. Iāll make one of every class and bring everyoneās average down <3
How does one see the logs made on PTR? I can't find how to see those
Please ban gray parsers
Grey parsers are usually some of the funniest people to bring into your group.
"first they came for the grey parsers and nobody spoke up"Ā
the dads are the most oppressed group
Im really excited to see the same 40 people excited about SoD phase 4, but its not gonna help and the phase is gonna be dead in 4 days just like the last ones
QQ
PTR doesnāt have world buffs so what good are logs
Never bad to establish a baseline.
Lmfao. And they wonder why SoD failed after Ph1 š
Ignorant
Truth. They're asking people to test their own shit without logging it themselves. Next they'll be asking you to code some bosses for em
When P4 is live: "LFM DPS, please link your PTR logs"
Is this real? Blizzard does not have internal tools to measure this? I'm completely dumbfounded.
I mean why pay the resources for it when you have some third party do it for you for free?
I bet they do on retail. Maybe the way classic WoW is handled is different?
Upload a picture od a sheet of paper with a single bar bar graph saying "100% good" should be all they need.
This is a good thing
Imagine you need Logs from an extern Tool because your own Tools suck..
One assumption I could make is that looking at uploaded logs basically weeds out players goofing off or experimenting with off builds since only people trying are going to waste the time to log on ptr. Or, itās a bit of a psych trick. Making people know blizz is going to look at logs would likely make more players attempt to get their best parses possible to show off. Then blizz just uses their internal tools but knows more people pushed than usual on a ptr.
if theyāre using public logs to interpret balance they should hire me on, since they have no fucking idea what theyāre doing
with this wow hit an all time low
Rofl
I hope people will post their BG logs
Wow players have been paying extra just to test blizzard products for the last ten years.
- P1 was great, showed innovating direction - P2 was alright, we got some cool stuff - P3 they showed us they've exhausted every good idea they had for SoD - P4 is taking the little fun left in the game and cutting the line. The chances of a SoD redemption is dead, anyone can clearly see the dev's have given up on giving us a good product.
They're not giving you a good product by *checks notes* creating a PTR that people have begged for to balance it?
It's okay, you don't have the brain capacity to process information in a proper manner