Message for the "Testing Team"

I think it's time you packed up your belongings and went home to be family men. Evidently, testing FM is not your vocation in life; the countless number of bugs (patch or no patch) will testify to that. It's a disgrace that year after year the same issues are rearing their ugly head and it takes at least three patches to have a stable game. Already, it is most lucid that FM09 is going down the same road and will require another patch (on top of the one already released) that, for me, is totally unacceptable. As I say I think the life of a family man beckons for you lot.

Aren't we the testing team?

Aren't we the testing team?

We certainly did a better job than that mob. For instance we identified the injury bug within 10 minutes.

In defense of the testing team (shocking I know), the amount of bugs that are reported during testing but left entirely untouched is staggering. So it's not just their fault.

Cullen89 -

You don't quite understand how making games works, so it's a bit naive to point the finger at the testing team and state that they should go home.

The testing team find faults, report them and regress faults that are fixed among other duties. Over the years we have grown and improved our QA department no end and we're very proud of how much we invest in this area. Not many developers take this part of the process as seriously as we do or understand its importance.

The testers do not fix issues themselves, that's the responsibility of the development team and there are only so many of us at SI. We don't have a limitless pool of resources and making a simulation like Football Manager is not easy when there are so many subjective areas.

Yes we make mistakes and yes we sometimes have to make some business decisions to ensure we survive. But we're open and honest about these things when they happen and we'd like to think that even if we did release a perfect game, we'd still end up altering something based on the feedback we receive from the community. Some things are just subjective or not it's not possible to gauge mass effect until the game is out. The amount of physical hours achieved in one day's play is likely to far surpass the amount of physical hours of our testing teams at SI and SEGA over the course of the year.

We are proud of our after sales support, which a lot of companies ignore or don't go the same extra mile as we're willing to go to. But we're all football fans and enjoy allowing the community to shape how the game evolves throughout the year too.