[2020] Players Make Thousands of Gold With Insider Information?

Sure!

Depending on where you live, getting into QA testing can be really easy or really hard. Getting into a studio with zero experience is much harder than joining an outsource group.

Finding the Job(s)

• Know your area - check http://www.gamedevmap.com/ for studios in your area

• Know the big outsourcers and where their centers are - this would include places like VMC, Babel Media, Mobius, Experis, Pole To Win, and a horde of other places. Sometimes it can be easier to get in there.

• It's really hard to get an entry level contract job if you aren't local. This is just reality.

• Search indeed.com, gamasutra.com, and other places where jobs are posted. You're looking for job titles like QA Tester, QA Analyst, or Game Tester, Game Analyst, etc. Company name isn't really important since many studios outsource to another company (it's expensive to run QA) or hand off QA to their publisher.

Write a Good Resume

• You want to elaborate and please use bullet points. I take like 2 minutes tops to read a resume and cover letter. Don't make me search for why I should hire you, tell me why.

• No grammar mistakes. No Spelling mistakes. Proper nouns need to be correct. For example, if you were applying to say... the LEGO store I'd expect you to do LEGO all caps and not Lego since the brand is LEGO. Same with ArenaNet, not Arena Net, not Arenanet. ArenaNet.

• Good cover letter. I don't care how many games you play - I care that you're methodical and can write well. Poor writing skills are the biggest reason that I reject resumes. Writing clear, coherent, clean, and understandable English is vital for QA Testers since all bug reports are written.

• Tell me your goals and why you want to work for us and why this job specifically and why you want to do it. It's cool if 5 years from now you want to be a designer, but you want to understand QA and work in QA for a while. Just don't discount QA as a real discipline.

• I don't care what betas you have been in. Unfortunately being in a Beta or an Alpha is not direct QA experience. You can mention it though because then I have a chance to talk about what games look like when they are really broken and find out just how sharp your eyes are.

The Interview

• Dress nice please. At least clean dark jeans and a nice clean button up shirt. Nothing fancy but feel free to do so if you like.

• Come prepared with questions.

• Do research on the company you are applying for and play the game. If the company makes free to play games there is 0 excuse.

• Remember QA is a real, serious job. It can be fun, but it also can be a slog. It is repetitive and testers need to be analytical and never on autopilot.

• You're likely going to be asked about bugs you personally have found. Don't use major exploit examples from WoW, FFXI, LoL, FFXIV, GTA, EVE, or any other major game franchise. Your interviewer, if they are someone like me, will know you didn't find that issue and are BSing them.

• You're going to be asked how you would test something. "All the way through end to end" is a poor answer.

• Always answer questions with enough information that the interviewer wants to ask you a follow up question.

• Prepare questions to ask the interviewer when you get the "do you have any questions for me/us" at the end of the interview.

• FOLLOW UP AFTER THE INTERVIEW. Thank the coordinator and the interviewer. Do this within 24 hours and add anything else such as clarifications to your answers, etc.

We outsourced because we no longer wanted to take breaks in contract employment, it was causing a drain on our department. We also didn't have enough space. Yes we could have gone with the India solution or the cattle call show up at 8am and see if you have a job solution where I would have no idea if the people testing GW2 had been trained to test GW2. There are many options in the industry and I am happy with the one I have. Could it be better in many ways in regards to how testers are treated and feel? Absolutely.

I don't deny that QA testing is the low rung on the totem pole, the pay is bad and the hours are also bad. I hated working 80 hour weeks when I did them. I didn't like being called in on a weekend when I hadn't had a day off in over a month. I currently don't enjoy being on call every night and weekend but this is my job.

A lot of people think it's QA's fault when the game takes a dip or there's a bug. QA has little to say in the development process. QA doesn't write code or implement content. If a bug is written that doesn't mean it gets fixed. If a feature is late it might not get tested as much. If a feature is so broken it is constantly being fixed and iterated on that introduces more and more risk. If a date changes QA just has to roll with it. I try not to take the blame QA approach and I'd hope others can refrain as well. I've asked some terrible things of our test team in the interests of the release being as good as possible for the players and I will defend my testers to my last breath.

The why's would be a better question for our engineers and QA Engineers, however I accept that UI can't be hooked into and automated and roll with it. :)

If you are playing the market with the intent to make 1000s or 10000s of gold that would be frowned on. It would be a case by case basis, but it wouldn't hurt for you to ask your lead what could get you into trouble. Usually asking absolves all guilt.

What Lauren said. Also, there are multitudes of logs. It's pretty easy to tell how and when someone is storing something for later and if its for a nefarious purpose by checking the timestamps. ;)

Yep. My team is the black box team, we have another team that does test scripts and code. Both teams work together pretty closely.

You can wear whatever you like once you're hired as long as you follow the 2 dress code rules:

• don't be offensive
• don't be stinky

Yeah there are several reasons. Selenium is a cool framework for some situations, but if you've ever used it, you know how much of a terror it, and its associated services/drivers, are to maintain.

Our UI layer is also not a standard framework you pull off a shelf, and it's implemented as multiple frameworks that support different interaction paradigms.

UI automation is also more like a 'last resort' for when your development team builds things so poorly that nothing else works. Proper implementation of MVC/MVVM patterns allow for test injection just below the view layer, meaning automation doesn't need to care about how it looks (which it can't possibly validate anyways).

That said, Gw2 was instrumented for test automation after the game released. While we are driving most of the game just under the UI with our automation, there's still some older UI that owns business logic that it shouldn't.

Rather than working around those decisions by instrumenting the UI and writing 2 custom selenium native drivers, we work with the programming team on their designs so we end up having less problems with UI owning game logic, and can test the functionality better.