Posted by SphereMaker on September 13, 1999 at 04:18:18:
In Reply to: Re: Conjurers posted by LTP on September 13, 1999 at 03:50:04:
> It just seems that certain things which should have been obvious during any rudimentary testing were not found, and were (obviously) subsequently abused, causing frustration in many. I'll say two things to that. First, development of the class was a pain in the ass because two disk crashes caused us to lose a LOT of the work done on them. Everyone involved was frustrated at having to redo a lot of coding (and subsequently some of the things we thought were tested and working, weren't), at having our coders run out of time to work on it, at having the code switch hands several times and having to figure out what the real status of the class was at any given time. Suffice it to say we have been eager to get the class in and let players actually have fun with it. Second, the two test groups were actually pretty important to balancing the class and it was ruined for everyone involved. Only Implementors can advance characters (in levels) so even using a test MUD we (the people coding and testing) couldn't use mortal characters to test the class (or could, but only rarely). Obviously a lot of testing is going to be missed when the only level you're casting spells at is somewhere above 55th. Balancing is occuring. Adjustments are being made. And I'd like to thank the conjurers who have been good enough to help us iron out problems. If I had the time to play one I would, just to speed up the process of finding what's wrong and what isn't (and even then that isn't a good test because I wouldn't be looking at the class with a fresh eye). Ideally we'd have code inspections/reviews, test plans, formal QA and players that would be reliable enough to perform reasonable beta testing. Well, maybe that will happen if we ever get paid to do this.