Clarification on behalf of beta testers, to the anti-nerf crowd

[zephyr1]

@AliceCooper

IMO, beta testers should concentrate more on detecting the hero’s functionality aka bugs rather than accessing whether the hero is OP.

This is a reasonable opinion to hold, but the Small Giant Staff have explicitly said that QA (quality assurance) testing is not the reason for the Beta program:

@littleKAF

Because the main intention of Beta isn’t to be like a QA testing. We have added more QA here. We needed more and we have a QA team here now. It is more about adding early feedback. Even though designers are doing all the automation and using tools to predict battles, it’s still desired to get actual player feedback. And also feedback about how new features look. That is the most important part of the program. So that’s why we cannot add tons of people that would never really share any feedback.
They are not Guinea pigs. They are not out finding bugs. That’s never been the intention.
Even though sometimes it’s very helpful.
Yes, it’s helpful to see if there are bugs in the game but that was never the main purpose.
That was the first that I’ve ever heard that. When I got into Beta, the first time my question was ‘what am I supposed to do?’ So I tried this and this and went in with the mentality of ‘can I break the game’ because if I can break the game now, then a million other people are going to totally break the game and we’re trying to catch it. If that’s not the intent, which is what I just heard, it’s more so – just play it. Give us your comments. If you catch a bug, great.
This is good feedback as players often ask “what is the point of Beta?” Just play it! Play it like you would the normal game. We don’t need you to be hyper focused on every little detail like bug hunting. Just play the game and give active feedback.
That’s good feedback. I haven’t heard that before and I think I have been doing more bug hunting. And I’ve been doing stuff that I would never do in the game, and stuff that I think others wouldn’t do because it just doesn’t make sense, but I was trying to say ‘hey, has anyone thought of this. Would this break it.’ I was thinking that was the role and I guess I was wrong is what I’m now hearing.
Well I wouldn’t say that’s wrong. That is one way of doing it. We keep getting feedback that we should give very clear instructions on what to test but we want people to go freely into Beta. Because we want feedback like “hey, I couldn’t even find these Hero Costumes,” – that would be a problem with that feature.
If we want to test a feature, for instance the Costume Chamber. If we helped you open the Chamber, then we wouldn’t get average player experience feedback. We can’t help you open the Costume Chamber or use the Keys to get the Costume. We want to see you naturally open it and say “oh, here’s the chamber” and “oh, this is how you do the mechanics” like an average player would.