Suboptimal testers?

[stormguard]

 

Nothing personal against the guy and I appreciate the effort people take to help test new ships. However doesn't the feedback and testresults become kinda skewed when you have people testing playing the game and ship very unoptimal. I know other games have pretty high requirements in terms of gameskill. I'm not expecting unicums to test new ships but a 50% wr should be a bare minimum. Felt like this guy was more interested in flying around Microsoft Fly Simulator style than actually playing the game. Thoughts? 

[lameoll]

its not like wg listens to testers annyway

[lovelacebeer]

I believe the theory is that by have a variety of skill levels doing testing WG should get a more well rounded understanding of how a ship performs in the hands of a average player as well as a great one. 

 

That being said given WG rather dubious decisions I’m not sure if either testing doesn’t work or they just ignore what the testers say.

[T0byJug]

5 hours ago, stormguard said:

 

Nothing personal against the guy and I appreciate the effort people take to help test new ships. However doesn't the feedback and testresults become kinda skewed when you have people testing playing the game and ship very unoptimal. I know other games have pretty high requirements in terms of gameskill. I'm not expecting unicums to test new ships but a 50% wr should be a bare minimum. Felt like this guy was more interested in flying around Microsoft Fly Simulator style than actually playing the game. Thoughts? 

it takes all skills to test

 

[El2aZeR]

The sole point of testers is to generate data for glorious spreadsheet. For that they need a wide skill range. Feedback is ignored.

[PaxtonQuigly]

21 minutes ago, stormguard said:

However doesn't the feedback and testresults become kinda skewed when you have people testing playing the game and ship very unoptimal

Wouldnt the feedback and testresults become skewed once you start to filter people based on skill?

Ships would immediately seem better than they really are if you only let good players test them.

[T0byJug]

5 hours ago, El2aZeR said:

The sole point of testers is to generate data for glorious spreadsheet. For that they need a wide skill range. Feedback is ignored.

edit

 

[YabbaCoe]

23 minutes ago, stormguard said:

 

Nothing personal against the guy and I appreciate the effort people take to help test new ships. However doesn't the feedback and testresults become kinda skewed when you have people testing playing the game and ship very unoptimal. I know other games have pretty high requirements in terms of gameskill. I'm not expecting unicums to test new ships but a 50% wr should be a bare minimum. Felt like this guy was more interested in flying around Microsoft Fly Simulator style than actually playing the game. Thoughts? 

We have plenty of testers who are very skillful. But we also have testers who can be seen as average or even below average. For results we definitely want to see data collected with that particular ship in Random battles environment done by the best, but also it is important to see, how average folks are doing with that ship. Because just imagine, that testers would be always only best of the best... their testing results would be outstanding, therefore all ships would need to be nerfed in order to balance them more in line with other ships. Than this nerfed ship would be launched to wide public and only unicums would be able to play decently with that ship. 

Also access to test ships have several volunteer groups - Supertesters, Privateers, Modders, Moderators or Contributors. For example regarding Privateers, you can do stuff, that is helping other players or helping us and therefore you would have access to test ships, regardless your results in game. But generally we have guys there, which knows basically everything about the game, therefore more skilled in average. 

[_Lupastro_]

IMO a test to be effective must reflect as much as possible the "average reality" . What is the use of giving a ship a test to someone very skilled? You'll tend to overestimate it due to the skill of the player or to nip the ship if the performance is poor. A sample with wider skill levels gives us a better idea....

[stormguard]

Thanks for the responses and explinations. That makes more sense. Shoutout to the work the testers do :)

 

Would be interesting to read more about the testprocess.

[ColonelPete]

1 hour ago, stormguard said:

 

Nothing personal against the guy and I appreciate the effort people take to help test new ships. However doesn't the feedback and testresults become kinda skewed when you have people testing playing the game and ship very unoptimal. I know other games have pretty high requirements in terms of gameskill. I'm not expecting unicums to test new ships but a 50% wr should be a bare minimum. Felt like this guy was more interested in flying around Microsoft Fly Simulator style than actually playing the game. Thoughts? 

And a couple of days ago someone was complaning that the testers are too good and WG would make ships weaker needlessly....

[The_Chiv]

I have played with and against many a super tester. Some are amazing, some are average, some just like to troll. Each provides a segment of the community in terms of skill and in all honesty are some pretty decent people.

[Gvozdika]

Well with the CV Rework they basically took all of the feedback from every stage of testing and promptly ignored all of it. See also....

 

Smolensk and other 'perfectly balanced' ships released to the live servers. 

Commander Skill Rework.

The epic Brainfart that was the Naval Training Centre.

Puerto Rico Disaster.

Submarines. 

 

That all of these were tested I have no doubt. That they had plenty of feedback and data from these testers of varying skillsets, backgrounds and points of view is also unquestionable.

 

However a decision-maker higher up at WG will then stick their fingers in their ears saying 'LA LA LA! I cannot hear you!' and will insist in cramming in their latest daft ideas irrespective. I believe this person is high enough in the organisation that they cannot easily be them removed/reassigned to tea-making duty.

 

You know it makes sense!

 

 

[Deckeru_Maiku]

I would expect WG take a special look at how potato testers fare in their new designs, as from these group probably comes their most income...

[ghostbuster_]

20 hours ago, T0byJug said:

it takes all skills to test

 

and what help does it help? i mean i have seen players who would most likely die even before pressing one "delete entire enemy" button if there was one. Testers should be at least above avrg. Imo having arvg and below avrg testers is useless.

[ghostbuster_]

20 hours ago, YabbaCoe said:

We have plenty of testers who are very skillful. But we also have testers who can be seen as average or even below average. For results we definitely want to see data collected with that particular ship in Random battles environment done by the best, but also it is important to see, how average folks are doing with that ship. Because just imagine, that testers would be always only best of the best... their testing results would be outstanding, therefore all ships would need to be nerfed in order to balance them more in line with other ships.

 

and you having these unskilled testers results in buffing the ships which are already too strong. 

20 hours ago, YabbaCoe said:

Than this nerfed ship would be launched to wide public and only unicums would be able to play decently with that ship. 

this is how it should be tho. if you dont do that, we get ships which are OP af in the hands of players with some skill. look at smolensk for example. or belfast. or petro. avrg joe performs arvg/below avrg with these ships. but we all know these ships are absolut monsters in right hands. there is a reason why we see a lot of petros in high "competitive" scene. your balancing around avrg players results in having so many broken stuff in the game. you need to balance the ships according to their best performances. 

 

[ImTryingButYouDontHelp]

20 hours ago, stormguard said:

Shoutout to the work the testers do :)

Yeah, must be very frustrating to test, give good feedback and see decissions are made exclusively regarding money income 

[159Hunter]

Do they test gameplay and/or technical stuff @YabbaCoe?

[Taliesn]

24 minutes ago, ghostbuster_ said:

and what help does it help? i mean i have seen players who would most likely die even before pressing one "delete entire enemy" button if there was one. Testers should be at least above avrg. Imo having arvg and below avrg testers is useless.

 

As useless as having different groups in clinical trials to see how a new vaccine works or indeed have a group that doesn't even receive a dose yet is part of the study. You want to collect as much data and as varied as possible and how average or poor players fare in a ship is as relevant as how unicum players do. You want to test it will all types of players.

 

Cue jokes about WG not giving sh$t about the results anyway .

[YabbaCoe]

9 minutes ago, 159Hunter said:

Do they test gameplay and/or technical stuff @YabbaCoe?

Depends on the groups. Supertesters are more involved in testing technical stuff. But regarding test ships, it is mostly gameplay testing. 

[MannequinSkywalker]

1 hour ago, ghostbuster_ said:

and you having these unskilled testers results in buffing the ships which are already too strong. 

this is how it should be tho. if you dont do that, we get ships which are OP af in the hands of players with some skill. look at smolensk for example. or belfast. or petro. avrg joe performs arvg/below avrg with these ships. but we all know these ships are absolut monsters in right hands. there is a reason why we see a lot of petros in high "competitive" scene. your balancing around avrg players results in having so many broken stuff in the game. you need to balance the ships according to their best performances. 

 

^^ This.

 

 

21 hours ago, YabbaCoe said:

but also it is important to see, how average folks are doing with that ship. Because just imagine, that testers would be always only best of the best... their testing results would be outstanding, therefore all ships would need to be nerfed in order to balance them more in line with other ships. Than this nerfed ship would be launched to wide public and only unicums would be able to play decently with that ship.

That's how it should be anyway. 1) You can always buff a pre-nerfed ship but if you already released a (i.e) a broken prem ship like Thunderer, Smolensk, etc. then what r you gonna do? Well, what you do is removing them which is another wrong step. (2) You let below average Joes or bad Joes to test ship chars, analytics, armors, shells, penet. dmg. this and that, etc. while they can't even sail properly or have no idea about the game mechanics. Another wrong step.  (3) If you'd let only or mostly unicum/sunicum players test the ships you would see the true potential of those ships in the right hands and can make adjustments which you call nerfs accordingly. You saying "but below avg players  wouldn't be able to play these ships as good as better players, what would they do then?" Well, (a) They have to learn better (b) For years we have seen what happens when you test ships with bad players and all these Thunderers, CV reworks, etc. come out and all these points may have been leading to a bad game design. That's why we see so many land slide wins/losses because a bad joes can take advantage of poorly tested ships from the map end and spam he (just as an example). I believe, instead of WG "nerfing" its ship testing capabilities with bad, below avg and avg players, they need to put more steps in the game to teach game mechs., game play and such so players can improve themselves.

[Padds01]

21 hours ago, stormguard said:

However doesn't the feedback and testresults become kinda skewed when you have people testing playing the game and ship very unoptimal. 

no , it gives a balanced point of view not even games like starcraft or cs go will balance and test on just the top tier. you need to provie a good game experience for everyone and believe it or not close to half the player base is under 50% 

[Verblonde]

36 minutes ago, Taliesn said:

You want to test it will all types of players.

This. If you only have unicums doing the testing, you end up with almost zero meaningful data regarding how the ship will perform in game 'in real life' for the simple reason that most players are (probably very obviously) not unicums.

[principat121]

Lets be clear about huge misunderstanding here: Testing new ships is the least of ST tasks! And yet is it the only one where normal players recognize Supertesters and hence the impression that ST is mostly about testing new ships. As writen before there are alot of other tasks that came beforehand.

 

I hope that this is not a breach of NDA, but understand that getting access to the newest test ships on the live server is only the reward for doing the normal mandatory ST stuff.

[MimosA_A]

I'd say the value of the feedback (not that the balancing department seems to ever do something with it, but hey-ho), depends more on the player's awareness of their own skill rather than their skill. There's a lot of people who simply lack the self-reflection to discern between the quality of a ship and their quality of their plays. Being a good player doesn't mean you're good at objective evaluation. Remember the whining after the Thunderer range nerf? Players from across the entire spectrum of skill were crying about how useless it was going to be. I'd say a bad player with good self-reflection could give quite some valuable feedback.