So, you've decided to become an Empires Tester. May God help you. We've decided to open beta testing to the public; please point any (potential) beta testers to this thread for general questions on how to test. Before we switched to this open testing system, we were using a closed one, which ended with zero active testers, so the general intention of opening it up is to try and get more testers. 1) Empires testing is currently delivered via Steam - you won't need any extra applications. See this thread. 2) Testing will be split into 2 types of tests. A "PLAYTEST" and a "BUGTEST". In a PLAYTEST, the general idea is to simply play the game, much like an Empires pug, and then give feedback afterwards. It isn't for sitting around in your main testing random shit and not helping your team, because you'll ruin the rounds if you do that. You're there to play a proper game for PLAYTESTS, and give feedback afterwards, especially balance related. In BUGTESTS, whilst a round may be played seriously, the general intention is to test specific issues, be they things we've updated, bugs that are still in, new bugs, new features etc. The general idea is that we'll need 5-10 people for these tests. However, you are also welcome to start testing on your own, and are encouraged to invite your friends and arrange your own tests. Read through the release notes for the beta version - which is always stickied in this forum, and try to think of ways to break the new features, and how to most easily test the full breadth of the functionality. This thread is for tips on how to test. PLAYTESTS will probably be held on a Saturday night at a pug-like time, given that we're hoping to run them like a regular Empires pug, only on the test version. BUGTESTS will be held on a Friday and/or Sunday, possibly an hour earlier than we would run the Saturday night tests. They probably won't last as long either. 3) Usually, we like to playtest every new balancing version in beta. However, with the playerbase as small as it currently is, as of april 2016, this is not practical, so we will be doing only a basic playtest in beta, and monitor the result of matches after doing a balance update to the default branch. The general idea is that we'll need at least 30 people for these tests, so we prefer not to fracture the playerbase with beta testing at present. 4) It's important that every tester gets access to this forum so that they can submit their feedback directly. If someone tells you about a bug, try to convince them to support us by creating a forum account and posting their feedback in the corresponding testing thread. 5) The testing server host will be listed in each version's testing thread, and will always include "beta" in the title. The Nubs testing server currently hosts the beta version, so we will probably be using that mostly. 6) Please keep the forum thread open while testing, so that you can alt-tab and submit any issues you find.
