Jeff Kaplan: evaluation

Transcript context

…That’s amazing. And sure enough, they’d be right. But you have to have that relationship where the devs trust QA. Or just even on, like World of Warcraft, they had a great relationship with QA in that they built out a full raid team to do the raids. And then you’re not only, like, looking for bugs, like, “Hey, the dragon was supposed to fly and instead it just, like, sunk through the world and the game crashed,” which would happen. But, like, if you really value QA, you’re asking them, “What do you… Dude, what do you think? You’re…” You know? Like, “10 million people are gonna see this. Your opinion, multiply it, you know? It matters. What do you think? You know? Are you having fun? Oh, yeah, this is cool. This isn’t cool.” So QA was important. The other thing that was important is the Blizzard engineering, which you have to architect your game to be hotfixable. And what a hotfix is, games, there’s a couple ways to fix ’em. The way most of us know, ’cause all the software we have gets a patch, you know? You have to update it. You have to download a new version of it. Windows, you know, you get that annoying message, like, “There’s a new version of Windows.” And it takes, you know, a few minutes and you update it. You know, obviously, we patch our games and that’s where we fix a lot of bugs, but if you really wanna run a game like Overwatch or World of Warcraft successfully, you need master level engineers who have architected the client and server in such a way that you can hotfix the game on a dime. And what a hotfix is, is a server patch that no one’s client has to go down for. Mm-hmm. That’s because you’re dealing with a huge number of players and you discover an issue and you want to respond to that issue really quickly.…

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