What are we up to?

[Renegade]

I appreciate the thought you put into this, SM, but unclarity about the testing process really only shows lack of attention, not lack of information.
I've already mentioned why issues-to-test lists are not helpful at this point, we still have one to get at least some form of testing, we have instructions on how to report positive feedback (including more testing directions) as well as a place for it in Answers, etc., etc.

There's really no mystery to it:
Play the damn game. Report any issues you have, or if you have none.
Try out Ares's features. Report any issues you have, or if you have none.
Combine Ares's features. Report any issues you have, or if you have none.
Experiment with Ares's features. Report any issues you have, or if you have none.
Try to break Ares's features. Report any issues you have, or if you have none.

If you must have easier directions, consider testing the way to find the answers to the following three questions:

1. Does feature X work as intended?
   
2. Does feature X integrate properly with the rest of Ares?
   
3. Is Ares as a whole still stable?
   

Answer these three questions for each of Ares's features, and we'll make a giant leap towards release. But apparently, actually modding and playing the game seems too much to ask of the modding community these days.

And before you come with the retarded "Ares has been stable for months *drool*" bullshit, if that were true, we wouldn't still find obvious bugs with frightening regularity...like broken single player campaigns, or Ivan bomb handling having been broken for months.

Quite frankly, the bugs that do get found show us that there hasn't been much searching yet.

A single month of proper testing could be all that's necessary. Really. If we had gotten daily feedback from half a dozen testers over the entirety of January, covering the breadth of Ares, we probably would've released last week.
Instead, the positive feedback thread over at Answers expired, because no one posted in it.


So yeah. There's really no mystery, and really no mechanism needed. We just need people to shut up and actually check Ares for bugs for a change.