Today I read this post on bug.hr
Developers of Guild Wars 2 game are kindly asking players to use they game on next Wednesday, so they will monitor stress on game servers. As a software tester, I will state what are disadvantages of this approach.
Some of those disadvantages were stated in the blog comments by users.
“I will not participate in that stress test event, because you never know when game will crash”.
Players are human being, they have fillings and emotions are triggered while playing the game. Could you guess the player emotion when game is slow or when it crashes?
They will not continue game play. That means that developers (and this is also wrong in this post, because developers never monitor servers, there is another role for that) have only one chance to record the stress on servers.
Here is how stress test should be done.
You have testers that know how to code. Testers will cooperate with developers to write virtual game client, that will generate game protocol from client to server. Project manager should agree with developers, testers and operation engineers what they want to find out with stress test. Those scenarios should be run using the load test tool that was created by testers/developers. Stress test should be minimally defined by following parameters:
- number of concurrent users
- which client scenario should be run.
