Participation in BFA beta?

[medeardorff]

I received my invite to the BFA beta yesterday. I am interested in participating in that beta for the Zygor guides. I have been a user of your product for many years and know it pretty well. I have also been in some non-game product betas, as well.

Thanks,

Mark.

[ZG Support 1]

At this time we are not looking for any beta testers. If/When we get to that point there will be an announcement.

[paladin62]

Any idea when the beta version will be out? I know you haven't had a lot of time yet but just wondering if you had a rough ETA?

[ZG Support 1]

I do not know if we will release anything that can be used on the beta server. I don't think that decision has been made yet.

[itzferal]

I do not know if we will release anything that can be used on the beta server. I don't think that decision has been made yet.

If you do, you have many people here willing to test. It's in our best interest to do so . Keep us updated please.

[johnneumeyer]

If you do, you have many people here willing to test. It's in our best interest to do so . Keep us updated please.

I agree, would like to help as well.

Have a good one, everybody!

[rob_phillips12]

Hi Zygor!

Another BFA beta tester here...I just finished my leveling journey on beta last night, the 110-120 grind. Anyway, I really think you guys should do a beta release, this expansion has so many rabbit holes to chase some early testing by the user community would really help you guys in the long run to be ready at launch, especially with Blizzard short running beta this time.

Thanks!

[myrroddin]

I have often wondered about beta testing Zygor guides, but one thing concerns me, in that Zygor must have some custom app or addon code that logs who, what, where, why, how, and when, along with geographical steps (ant trails), and which can be edited and cleaned up by the team.

There used to be such an addon years ago, but memory fails me in remembering its name. Regardless, I doubt Zygor wants non-staff to have access to their intellectual property.

That would mean that we could only test the guides, provide feedback and corrections, but we would not be able to give exact, precise step-by-step updates, which in turn forces someone at Zygor to redo the steps to replicate our feedback.

All this is necessary to keep private code private, but it does hamper things.

[ZG Support 1]

Yes, we do have our own custom, private addon that is used for creating the guides and tracking all of the pertinent info for each step (you might be thinking of the old Tourguide addon). We then apply any manual edits that might be needed. And then finally we have to run thru the entire guide again with a toon to see how it works in the normal guide viewer to find any errors and those are fixed with manual edits.

When a bug is reported the first thing that happens is someone on the team tries to reproduce the bug in game as needed, simple things like a typo in the text is easy to find without a reproduction. If we're able to reproduce the bug then it's much easier to make sure it is fixed, if we're not able to reproduce it all we can do is try to find anything obviously wrong in the code. If we find nothing wrong we can only put that bug on hold until it's reported again with a different means to produce in hopes of being able to reproduce it to be able to fix it.

Now normally having more people testing the beta guides that we think are completed would be a good thing. However we are a pretty small team and the more bugs being reported to us the longer it takes to make more guides. We then run into a bit of a dilemma, either get a lot of bugs fixed but only have a few guides available at launch or have as many of the guides available at launch as we can and fix the bugs after the launch. We often go for the 2nd option because Blizzard is always changing things between beta and launch anyway which causes bugs. It's often a tough decision but it often depends a lot on how well everything is going and how confident we are in Blizzard not making any drastic changes.