ORIGINAL: simovitch
We didn't always try to think of crazy combinations of key strokes that might cause a crash, but perhaps we should have.
Yes. You could have focused on the new functions at least. One CTD is being triggered when the player issues a bombard order. That's not a "crazy combination", nor a new function, though.
.....Very few of us manual players really played the game to break it - we were more interested in play balance.
Well, if you don't have enough testers, then there's always the possibility to let Erik call for additional volunteers say 1 month before the final candidate is planned to be released, and have this group play and "rape" the game in - what I'd call - a beta stress test.
Adding a function to the error message window, which would give the player the opportunity to enter an error description and to send that error report (via http) to Panther, shouldn't be a tough job.
.... PG just doesn't have the resources available to go back and manually retest every scenario after each build.
....
The game was released when the scenarios were playtested to the designers satisfaction and the autotesters and the manual testers reported no critical bugs or crashes over a period of several days.
Well, with the level of anticipation for this particular game, it wouldn't have been a problem to expand the group of testers temporarily (as I outlined above), most likely. The actual testing of critical and basic functions was insufficient.
