Customer Support and QA Shouldn't be Left to Chance #2

I was originally thinking of titling this something like "CS and QA shouldn't be entry-level positions," but that's unfair and untrue considering the point of this post.  I've met and had the pleasure of working with a lot of meticulous QA folks and diligent CS people.  These positions are often overlooked in the game production process when they are crucially important for success.

When games are first being created from concept to alpha builds, it always seems far too early to bring in QA people.  After all, nothing is working during the alpha phase.  Whole features don't work; whole sections of the menus don't work; there are floating buttons that are final UI?  Or are they?  And the rest of the team is so hyper-focused on creating artwork or game systems that it's easy to overlook game features as an early draft.

During this period, the game designers and product managers are usually the ones who do the majority of game testing.  This isn't just an opportunity to see if the game functionally works, but does it work in terms of the game concept.  What will happen to this feature/quest when the game is 6 months old?  Will it age well or will it just be for first-time users?

It's easy to imagine that if the game has dozens or hundreds of levels that these early testers are just trying to see if the game runs and if the levels are coherent enough to pass a glance test.  Do the levels start?  That's usually good enough as the technical debt starts to pile up as the dev team needs to dedicate resources to other places: game data collection, ad mediation platforms, Facebook integration, etc. 

Once the QA team is called into test the game, it's usually filled enough with content that unless the team is well-managed by a QA Lead (I've seen a team of 10+ people test the same 20 levels in one week) or a fantastic small team of QA folks with free time (I've seen a team of two run flawless QA by themselves for 3 live games and 2 in development), there's bound to be something that falls through the cracks. 

This usually isn't a big deal when it's a sandbox-y type game.  So a graphical glitch causes some physics to malfunction?  This can be forgiven and fixed in a patch.  The real question is "Can the bug be ignored?"  "How far into the backlog can we shove this thing?"  What happens when a level simply cannot be won in a linear progression game?  Every piece of game content after that level is essentially useless since no one will see it.  It can happen; it does happen.

So who is next in line to find these game-breaking bugs?  The Customer Support team, who is, probably even more tragically brought into the game at the last minute to catch all of the flak for the game.  Have they been trained on the ins-and-outs of the game?  Do they know the game's direction?  Do they know what will change and what definitely won't be changed?  Have they spent enough time with the game, so they could answer basic questions?

The CS team is usually going to be the one who discovers the live game bugs first (since in reality, the players are going to report them as soon as they see them).  The best CS people are the ones who can act as an intermediary between the game community and the designers.  And unfortunately, the majority of soft launches/early access/beta-releases in modern gaming is an expansive (and free, kind of, if you don't count the damage to the company's reputation) QA session with hundreds or thousands of live testers (in the form of real players). 

And the kind of way that those positions are an afterthought of the game project when the game is such a delicate and fragile position usually makes the entry-level people stand out as heroes.  But I'd finish by saying that both QA and CS should be brought into the game design process at the very beginning.  As soon as there is an Alpha to play, not to report bugs, but to learn about the game process and find out the goals for the game.  If they are entry-level and they want to advance their game-making career, then having regular access to the designers and managers in the early phase will give them the confidence and route to speak up when that last maintenance and patch caused another game-breaking bug.