Modern Warfare 3 gives glitchers a week to break the game
Infinity Ward is flying out key members of a glitching community to the studio to test Modern Warfare 3 for a week.
A franchise as popular and as competitive as Call of Duty invites bad behavior. Every Call of Duty release has seen its share of exploits--the over 200,000 videos on YouTube show how fascinated fans are by finding ways to break the game.
Hopefully, Modern Warfare 3 won't be as vulnerable. Infinity Ward is flying out key members of the mapMonkeys community to the studio to test the game for a week. The glitch-centric community has worked on previous games in Activision's popular online shooter, but only for two to three days, "which wasn't nearly enough time," according to the announcement [via CVG].
"This time, Infinity Ward is keeping us there an entire week so we can find more bugs and glitches than ever before! I know this goes against mapMonkeys since we thrive off of finding and sharing glitches with each other, but this is an amazing opportunity we can't pass up!"
Activision's outreach to the community is a smart, proactive way of engaging an audience that would otherwise find exploits once the game comes out. It's also a relatively affordable way of augmenting the traditional QA process--without the fuss of making a reality show.
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Andrew Yoon posted a new article, Modern Warfare 3 gives glitchers a week to break the game.
Infinity Ward is flying out key members of a glitching community to the studio to test Modern Warfare 3 for a week.-
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This is pretty much an industry-wide problem. Instead of hiring 1 person with experience and actual testing know-how and paying them a wage comparable to QA in any other industry, most publishers would rather hire 5 high-school graduates who will be happy to go "Can you believe we get paid to do this?!?" for minimum wage and attempt to make up for in quantity what they lack in quality. This is the reason that you lose your most competent employees to other companies or whole other industries.
It's the reason why QA testing for publishers has a remarkably high turnover rate. In most cases, they literally do not care if you are good at your job as long as you fill a seat and find x # of bugs per hour. Activision is just the most egregious of the offenders. Luckily my introduction to QA was with a publisher that actually valued competent employees over seat-fillers.
The lack of desire for, or even interest in, hiring people who are actually competent at their jobs as QA analysts with most publishers is the main reason I switched to working exclusively for developers. Not only are the pay and work environment drastically better, but you actually get to interact with the art/programming/audio staff without having 3+ levels of bureaucracy between you and the development staff, which leads to quicker bug fixes and an overall faster production schedule for a title.
Then again, once you start doing production work you get to deal with a whole other (albeit far more rewarding!) level of cat-herding. All in all, developer QA and light production work is infinitely preferable to publisher QA work by far.
To be fair, though, not all publishers take this counter-intuitive approach to quality assurance; there are some that realize that hiring quality testers leads to a higher quality product in the end. Unfortunately, though, this is far from the norm in the gaming industry based on my experience.
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A friend and I were (most likely) the first ones to find the collision bugs in BF 1942. Such as bailing out of a plane on Coral Sea right down through the top of the conning tower where a player could shoot through the walls (right next to a handy ammo crate at that) and murder the whole team trying to launch planes off the deck. We found another way with using the parachute and the walk ramps on the ship to get under the ship itself and cap the hidden control point before the ship was sank, prematurely ending the round.
We also found a few ways to get underneath the aircraft hangers on El Alamein. (no flights today fellas!)
Almost all of it was fixed when Dice made it so that if you clipped through a wall you'd die.. but they forgot a couple other spots I had found that still work to this day. -
If it helps get rid of glitches like this game breaking one I'm all for it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0zVL8IRRvo&t=30s
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