The Path of Exile Developers have published an interesting interview with two of their Quality Assurance employees. Kieren and Lionel are particularly familiar with the new The Fall of Oriath expansion announced later this year.

As you describe, the normal daily routine looks like this, which is first checked whether and which patch has priority and which errors still need to be fixed. If no patch is pending, go through the list of bugs that were reported via support tickets. All new features implemented by other departments are also checked on the test server. The contact to all other departments at Path of Exile Developer GGG is one of the main reasons that makes the work so interesting and varied.

The Quality Assurance Team currently consists of 9 people. When asked whether they mainly test manually or using software / tools / bots, it came out that they do not have bots, but that direct gaming is more of a luxury. Whoever had the idea that you could spend 8 hours a day in the game to test it will unfortunately be disappointed. Many of their tasks require tools and scripts and are thus done more efficiently than manually.

For example, creating a character with certain skills and equipment, warping him to a monster at a certain point in the game, then a certain skill is triggered. To solve such a task exactly, about 40 lines of script code are required. If the bug was fixed at this point days later, the identical script is run through again. You simply cannot achieve this accuracy manually.

They demonstrated a few of the funnier graphic bugs at the end of the interview, here is an example:

You can find the full interview at the official website of GGG.

Preview of new graphics for The Fall of Oriath

Yesterday they already showed a first insight into the areas of expansion. Including the wetlands and an excerpt from the fight against Shavronne and Brutus in act 6. You can't wait for the expansion to be released.