Dev Diary: Path of Exile Alpha Update

A few weeks ago, we deployed a major update to the Path of Exile Alpha realm and invited a dozen or so lucky forum members (and many of their friends) to help test it. This development diary entry describes how we’ve handled the transition from development to maintaining a live game service that supports players playing from around the world.

Collating Feedback

One of the primary reasons for running an Alpha test is to get feedback from external players. This feedback can range from screenshots of visual problems to lengthy essays on how they feel a certain aspect of the game could be improved. It’s very valuable to read this feedback, because the development team is so used to how the game currently plays. Hearing from Alpha testers helps us learn what we’re doing right and find out early about problems that we haven’t noticed ourselves.

Collating the feedback from testers is harder than we had predicted. We have an internal bug tracking system with hundreds of open issues, so it takes time to check to see if each issue is already logged (and if so, adding any new information to it). For issues that we don’t currently know about, they often have to be reproduced by Quality Assurance so that we have useful reproduction steps before allocating them to someone to fix.

When an obvious problem makes its way into a deployed version, it’s normal for most testers to report it simultaneously. We don’t mind, of course, as it means they’re fulfilling their role as Alpha testers properly. This can result in a large amount of feedback to read through, but will pay off with a polished game. It’s fitting punishment that when the server goes down, we get deluged with IMs.

There’s an Alpha forum for both bug reports and discussion of game features. Some systems are heavily under debate and often get redesigned based on player feedback. For example, we’re constantly iterating on the passive skills screen. Our most recent attempt is too confusing and overwhelming for new players. We have a much improved layout in the works which should hopefully make everyone happy. Without the Alpha feedback, we might not have realised so soon that such a drastic change was needed.

It's great when Alpha testers post their impressions of the game to our main forum for the other community members to read and discuss.

Patch Development and Deployment

We are currently trying to deploy updates at least once per week. Each patch starts with a session where we identify the high-priority issues that are currently affecting our players. These could be server stability issues, client crashes, or some gameplay imbalance that needs addressing. Any currently-in-development features such as new quests or skills that are near completion are also flagged for inclusion in the next patch. Using our issue tracker, we identify this set of features/bug-fixes and mark them with the version number of the patch we’re developing.

As the team implements features or fixes bugs, they get tested by our Quality Assurance guy. Once most of the issues are complete (or the deadline for the patch is approaching), we “tag” a version of the game with that patch number. This version is essentially frozen in time, allowing extensive testing to occur on it. Fixes to any broken changes (or last minute changes that we want to include) are merged into this tag without introducing instability from untested features that are constantly being added to the mainline development copy of the game.

At around this time, we post the patch notes to the Alpha forums to give people advance notice of the changes. Sometimes they remind us about critical fixes we promised and forgot to include. It’s often possible to make last minute tweaks to issues after this stage while it is still being tested. Of course, it’s dangerous to change too much stuff at the last minute without adequate testing.

Once Quality Assurance is happy with the build of the game, we deploy it to the Alpha realm. This process can take several hours due to the amount of uploading required from New Zealand, but it can be substantially faster if the changes don’t require lots of new art.

With the new build live, players flood back into the servers to test the changes and see how well their characters cope with the new balance. If we’re lucky, they find all of the newly introduced problems quickly (in time for a hotfix that can be deployed within an hour). If we’re unlucky, it’s a phone call at 2am.

The Future

Our plans are to continue to deploy frequently updates and invite more community members to help us test Path of Exile. We’re intending to enter Beta in August, and will be demoing Path of Exile with a booth at the PAX Expo in Seattle that month. If you’d like to sign up for beta access now (as well as a chance at a lucky alpha slot!) please sign up here.