The Sims 4 Quality Assurance Q&A Recap
Cade: Welcome to today’s Dev Q&A!
In about an hour, we’re diving deep into all things QA (Quality Assurance) and QV (Quality Verification)! Our team is here to answer your questions about how we test, verify, track bugs, and ensure overall game quality and stability.
Quick Topic Note:
Today’s focus is strictly on general QA and QV workflows, testing, and processes. We know many of you are eager to discuss Quality of Life updates, but today is not the session for QoL topics! We have a dedicated Dev Q&A session scheduled with the QoL team in a couple of weeks, where they’ll be answering all your QoL-related questions.
SimDevAlex: Hey all! Long time no chat. For those who don’t remember: I’m Alex, a QA… dude on TS4!
Been working on this wonderful game for 2 and a half years, but I’ve been in QA for well over a decade!
In my time here my focus has mainly been on helping address YOUR issues and finding ways to be better/faster/smarter about getting them handled. ALSO, I am the father of Plumrobert, and I love that he finally breached containment and made it to ya’ll!
ANSWERER: INTRO
Question: Why has QA been reduced in the last few years?
Cade: QA and QV has actually been invested in over the last 2 years.
Question: Is there still a dedicated bug fix team?
SimDevAlex: There’s several teams! Including the QoL team which Laura and I have both been a part of since its inception!
Question: how do you decide what bugs you decide are worthy of fixing?
SimDevAlex: There are a lot of factors! Generally things like “impact to game” are considered (like crashes over clipping), and then we consider things from ya’ll in the community (like votes in EA Forums) . Potential for adding additional risk is considered as well. (We dont want to try to fix something that makes other things WORSE. )
Question: how is the QA process exactly? you have a list with tasks, or you play freely doing everything you come up with trying to find bugs?
QA Lau: Honestly, there’s no such thing as an exact QA process! It really depends on what we’re working on. First, we establish how a feature is supposed to work and verify that. But the real magic happens when we hunt for the edge cases.
Question: do y’all look at the forums or discord often to know what the players really want?
Cade: All day, every day
Question: Are there any plans to update the gallery and get it working properly? The search features don’t work and It has been reported as broken multiple times.
Cade: We just pushed an update for these issues via a server deployment last week. Please give it a shot now
Question: How much does player feedback influence what QA verifies after a release?
QA Lau: player feedback influences quite a bit! we try to be as connected to the community as possible
Question: Are you using a program to detect bugs, without having to play-test? (If so, what program?)
SimDevAlex: No. Part of working in the games industry means we get to play games!
Follow Up Question: Reading this adds a bit of frustration. The duality of my statement stands in understanding Maxis is housed within a larger ecosystem with business goals, but why and how has so much managed to make it to the consumer with a lack of refinement? I’m a fairly newer simmer, and I’ve been on the forums reporting issues that date back years. Is there never push back from those on the QA + QV teams to alleviate from player and dev headaches? Yall know folks who play sims hold grudges and have mob like energy
SimDevAlex: Since i’ve been here, we’ve been making big pushes to fix more bugs more frequently. AND to increase communication. (Like revamping the flow in EA Forums)
Question: How do you all remain so calm? Just asking for a friend.
Cade: I’ve worked across phones, Twitter, and 3 different forums platforms for a decade here. You can’t throw anything at me I haven’t seen before.
Question: What’s the most challenging part of the QV process?
SimDevAlex: I’ve said this before, BUT there as SOOOOOOO many variables in games, wrote about it back in january here: https://www.ea.com/games/the-sims/the-sims-4/news/sims-qa
Question: Have there been situations where the community discovered a bug that your internal testing completely missed? What makes those bugs so difficult to catch?
QA Lau: Oh, for sure! It definitely happens. The wildest part of the game is that there are so many variables influencing how everyone plays. While we try to take into account as much as possible, a few things can slip by.
Question: How do you balance “your” personal playstyle vs testing for bugs across playstyles when looking for bugs? How much is targeted to looking for something specific vs generally playing and noting what pops up?
SimDevAlex: This is a great question! I (personally) spend a lot of time researching different playstyles. TS4 has so many resources and fans and history that it’s really easy to find how different people experience this game. I also have my degree IN Video games, (dorky I know) but it helps deconstruct a lot of ways to go about testing. We have different types of testing (scripted, unscripted) and we do our best to keep them fresh to avoid what’s known as “pesticide paradox” ( where we dont change our approach and assume we found all the bugs)
Question: When it comes to quality testing, do you have different spec of machines to test different hardware capabilities?
SimDevAlex: Yes! We test allllll types of configurations, we explicitly maintain machines called “min spec” which are set to the minimum specifications of the game and make sure we are running performance against those.
Question: Hi! This might sound like a silly question, but I was wondering: does the QA team actually fix the bugs themselves, or do they report them to the engineers and the engineers fix them?
QA Lau: That is not a silly question at all! Our main job is to find and diagnose the bugs, and then we work closely with our incredibly talented engineers who dive into the code to actually fix them!
Question: Does any of the team have any legacy families going?
QA Lau: Some of us do!! I have played the sims for a looooong time