I have been a member of the community since 2004. Finally after the meet the devs series and calls for the community to help, I finally decided to join the team just to help out a bit. This was in May 2011. Initially I applied to just be a tester but in those 7 years, I had never built a client...couldn't dream of it, didn't think I had a chance.
But I got lucky...I finally gave it a shot, went through the guide, and most importantly I had f-rd (aurelynt) to walk me through it. I was done in 20 minutes. Sadly, one day a few weeks later, f-rd logged out of irc and hasn't been seen since.
So what we need here is someone who
a) knows client building enough to troubleshoot when things go wrong (and it seems something always does) and
b) has a good skill of walking someone through it and can be there a good amount of time whenever someone may give it a shot.
Also keep it mind, it varies by OS. So you may need one person per platform.
Another problem with the built client approach to testing, is it does not update art. And many of the things that have to be tested as of late (map updates, animation, etc.) requires one to see new art.
There is an internal dev updater for that but I doubt Talad would be willing to give too much access to that. The alternative would be to have a separate site like that dedicated to testers (maybe use ezpcusa?), but then that would mean uploading all that stuff twice.
I'm not sure what the best solution here is but it seems given there not much of a testing team at the moment (there's the dev team ourselves, and LigH at least), we need something other than the built client approach. That seems to be a real blocker.
Of course one could say we are -all- testers, but there are various stages. There's testing things before they come out, just to see if it works in the first place, then there's testing once it's released (us, the community).
(and by the way, after a hard drive crash in October, I never built the client again.
)
