@drfate786 said in March Winter Alpha?:
(...)If I test a game I will not know exactly what transpired and what might happen if they fix that particular glitch(...)
I guess you have a wrong perception on QA testing. Paid QA testers aren't programmers and they are certainly not hackers, game developers couldn't afford that. Paid QA testers actually require no specific skill set (other than mental resistance to very boring repetitive tasks), which is why they don't end up with a good salary. A paid QA tester does nothing different from a normal 'player', they play the game. If they find something that's looking odd, they issue a report. The difference to a 'normal player' is simply that they are 'forced' to issue a very detailed report and that they spend the required time to figure out how to reproduce a certain outcome. That and that they have to repeat the same thing over and over again in a game.
As for figuring out what might happen if a bug is fixed, nobody can do that. You can take an educated guess, but, depending on the issue, there isn't just 'one way' to 'fix' something. Programming is a little like writing a story in that regards, the 'main story line' might be the same, but the details and especially words used can and will drastically differ. I'm going to give you a concrete example. Ask ten programmers to sort a list of numbers, I'm willing to bet you're going to get 10 different code snippets back, some vastly different, yet all of them are going to sort a list of numbers. Even the algorithm used is going to differ, one might use Bubblesort, another could go with Heapsort and the next one could argue for Radixsort.