Wizards of the Coast has a bug-testing tool called RoboQA, which it forces on a grueling regime, playing “tens of thousands of games of Arena every night”. This was revealed by MTG Arena developer Alex Werner, who wrote an article on Reddit, describing some of the most interesting bugs the devs have squashed.
RoboQA creates MTG Arena decks entirely at random and pits them against each other, making in-game decisions at random too. According to Werner, “it happily makes bizarre choices that no human would ever make, leading it to find crazy interactions.” The idea is that if the game ever breaks or gets stuck, RoboQA sends a report.
In one example Werner provides, a bug was found with RoboQA involving The Gitrog, Ravenous Ride, a new mount card from Outlaws of Thunder Junction. This card lets you sacrifice the rider ‘crewing’ it to draw cards and place land cards from your hand onto the battlefield.
The industrious bot discovered that, if for some reason you played a spell to reduce the crewer’s power to less than one, MTG Arena had a tantrum. It would demand you place ‘up to -2’ lands from your hand onto the battlefield, requiring you to find an imaginary number greater than or equal to zero, but less than or equal to negative two. The game could not continue.
“The drawback of RoboQA is that it won’t notice if things work wrong… RoboQA can’t catch incorrect rules enforcement, it can only catch crashes and hangs,” says Werner. He adds that human-run tests are needed to check rules interactions, “but they only verify cases that we think of”.
So it sounds like RoboQA is not about to put someone out of a job. It wouldn’t be able to catch some of our favorite MTG Arena bugs from the past few years, either, like this visual glitch that hid creatures’ stats, or the infamous Ninja’s Kunai exploit.
The bug discussion is well worth a read, if you’re interested in that sort of thing. Or for more Magic: The Gathering content, check out our guides to every MTG set in order and all existent MTG Arena codes.
Source: Wargamer
