[EA_One_Eye]

Okay, alot of people have said "why don't you get it right the first time?" I'll explain a little how things work.

The Development Team works for a few years to come up with a game. Now remember, these are coders who are working on individual parts of the game. The odds are they don't do anything other than test the area they are working on (the need for testers). And of course they won't be trying to do wonderful stuff like expacking to the cliffs in Omaha Beach. So...they have a rough game, but not enough money to finish or to market it. They look for a Publisher.

Now, the Publisher assigns a production team to the game, as well as Marketing. Marketing gets their info from the Production team, and they go off and do their thing...even if it isn't much. Production figures out how much time it will require to finish the game, how much money, programmers, etc. All of this happens 2-3 years before the game even goes to Testing. Once they have a rough Alpha, maybe 4 months from the final deadline, it goes to Testing.

And that is where all hell breaks loose. We play the game, break the game, cheat the game, and basically pound the game to dust. Programmers fix the bugs, we find more. Those get fixed, we find more. We work 12-16 hour days, 6-7 days a week for weeks on end (this is no joke) as we get closer to Finalling the game. This goes one for a while until Production says "shit, we are going to need a patch!" After that, the important, MAJOR issues get fixed, minor tuning and such get put off to a patch.

The game ships with issues....the community is in an uproar, the Testing and Programming teams get some much needed rest. And then the patch work begins....Because we have to be careful about the size of the patch, the Programmers can only work on so much. And the same cycle starts all over again, a dead line is given, certain goals for this patch are set out, and we try to get all the "current" issues handled. Then the patch is released.

And guess what? The cycle starts all over again for the next patch! While this is going on, if the game is a big enough hit, part of the Programming team breaks off to make expansion packs. Why? Because money is needed to fix other things and to promote the game.

So...that's a rough outline of what it takes to be a Tester/Patch Tester. It's a shitty world, but hey...it's a job!