Rinse & Reveal; The Sims QA Team 👋

Ahoy and welcome! Alex here, your resident QA Sims… dude. You may remember me from such previous chats like the Discord Q&As! The Sims community has been so wonderful in engaging and asking questions about what QA actually does that I thought it was about time to peel back the curtain and give ya’ll a more in-depth look at what it is QA does (and doesn’t do!).

This write up (article?) will cover most (but not all) of the things QA does, not just for The Sims, but also for most other games (and even traditional or non-interactive software).

I’m pretty geeky about my chosen discipline, and love info dumping, so by the end of this I’m hoping ya’ll will have a better feel for the ins and outs of QA and why it matters!

What is QA?

QA stands for Quality Assurance and the name explains it pretty well! Our job is to assure the quality of the game by ensuring that we are checking various aspects of the game (including, but not limited to checking for bugs). Much of the work we do is hidden, done in the shadows of early development, but we are also responsible for assuring the quality once it gets into your hands!

Every piece of software has bugs, and games are no exception. Our job is to catch the big ones, while making sure players run into as few of the little ones as possible. We start by looking for the obvious issues, but we also hunt down the subtle ones that can destabilize saves, block progress, or trigger cascading problems. (This hunt is the fun part of the job!)

When a fix is proposed, we first confirm the fix is valid, then we work to identify any side effects it might cause. (It’s not really a fix to fix 1 thing and have it break other things!) For The Sims 4, we take what we learn from the developers and share that knowledge with TheSimsDirect team to assure that our communications with you via the Save File investigation blogs, Laundry Lists, and Patch Notes are accurate. In QA, we take our technical knowledge of the game to bridge the gap between the people who make the game (the developers) and the people who play the game (you!).

So… what does the QA team actually do?

Glad you asked, because this is where things get fun! Since QA plugs into every stage of development, our days look different depending on what part of the game we’re working on…

During early development (this can range from “a couple months” to “a couple years” depending on the project), QA spends much of their time partnering with the developers and watching for anything that looks like it might wobble stability or affect gameplay. When a system or feature is taking shape, we flag potential pitfalls, validate that changes behave the way the team intended, and start running the game through common scenarios to see what breaks. During these early stages we can and are encouraged to offer up feedback. (This is where we try our best to represent you, the player.) 

As fixes come in, we retest them from a bunch of different angles to make sure they actually solve the issue and don’t introduce new surprises. Actually, hang on, I got a story for this… 

Tales From QA Storytime (an interlude).:

Recently, when testing Adventures Await’s new Getaway feature, we came across a pretty silly bug:

“Small dogs can be slotted as Singles in the Romance Competition Getaway”

Yeah, you read that right. You could get Toto to join your new Reality Dating Game! 

We found this bug during our “ad-hoc/halo testing” stage of development. This is a stage that happens after we validate that things are “basically” working as the developer intends them to be. BUT! This stage is where we in QA get to have some fun with our job.

Before I jump into how we found the bug let’s define some terms:

“Halo” testing is simply “testing around something specific” (in this case the Romance Competition Getaway).

“Ad-hoc” testing is a form of “scriptless” testing (think of it like Improv Night at the comedy club).  

So the tester was figuring out their plan of attack on how to halo around the new Getaways and thought to themselves, “Can I make a Romance Competition that has non-humans?”

This leads to them trying different things while verifying with the developer on what the intended behaviour ought to be. Until they came across dogs.

Specifically, small dogs. And flagged the bug for the developer to address.

Why just small dogs? Why not anything else? Who knows! But what QA did know is that despite how handsome Dilbert Wing is, he did not belong in the Romance Competition Getaway as a competitor! This is a small glimpse of some of what we do behind the scenes to ensure that we are assuring the quality.

Poor Dilbert will have to find love the old fashion way.. 

Now back to our regularly scheduled article:

As fixes come in, we retest them from a bunch of different angles (we call this “halo testing”) to make sure they actually solve the issue and don’t introduce new surprises. 

We also take the saves YOU shared with us in the past via EA Forums (plus ones we create internally), and use them to help us playtest different scenarios in the game (in an attempt to emulate real life playstyles). We also use different platforms, hardware setups (like different types of computer parts), and pack combinations, to better understand how the game may behave out in the wild. We do this all while checking that new content “plays nicely” with the rest of the game (including older packs). A lot of our time spent out of the game itself goes into crafting checklists and testing frameworks that help the entire studio catch problems earlier. (This is business speak for “We assure the quality of how the game is made AND the game itself.”)

As we approach release (about a month or so out, again depending on the project) things get more intense. This is where we begin to lock everything down, confirm the developers have eyes on any remaining risks, and start revalidating every set of changes that went into the upcoming release. We run some more scenario testing, more edge case investigations (just to be sure), and another round of fix verification to ensure nothing major slipped between the cracks on the way to launch.

Once an update goes live, our focus shifts to post-release feedback. We monitor community conversations, track the reports put into EA Forums, and look for patterns that help us understand how widespread, and severe an issue is. We take your feedback seriously, and we use your reports and turn them into bugs for the developers to work on for a fix. All this information feeds straight back into our development pipeline, shaping how we follow-up on fixes as we plan for the future.

What can’t QA do?

There’s a lot QA is responsible for, but we also have our limits. QA doesn’t choose which features or content get made (or what they are meant to do); our role is to stay as objective as possible. We reach agreements with the developers to establish what data we can use to measure whether what’s built reaches their intended quality bar . Mod-related issues are also outside of our control, though we stay up to date on the popular mods of the day and look for patterns in player reports that might point to deeper compatibility concerns. 

While QA tests an enormous range of scenarios, all video games or software have practically an infinite amount of possibilities. Think about every choice YOU can make from the moment you boot The Sims 4 and how it creates a different branching possibility that makes your game unique to you. Now consider how many people play this game (there’s a lot of us!). No two Simmers have the same journey (and we love this!) despite arriving at similar destinations. Due to these variations, unfortunately, some issues will inevitably slip through the gaps. When this happens, we listen to your feedback and take that to get those bugs filed, and then evolve our testing models so that we can continue to get better.

What changes has QA made recently?

We’ve been really focused on getting top community voted fixes out quicker, and en masse. Part of our ability to do this is predicated on QA’s ability to turn your reports into actionable bugs. Back in January 2025 we updated to the new  EA Forums. (Time flies!) This move has given us better telemetry (data) so that we can better understand the reports ya’ll care about. The data on the back end is helpful for us to get better information, quicker. From a player perspective we have the statuses on the reports so you can see how it moves through the flow. These statuses also help us flag when we need YOUR help to get a report reproduced internally (the “Needs Info” status). Better info, better communication from us, and more saves has allowed us to get the developers more comprehensive bugs. 

While we’ve been collecting saves for a long time, we’ve recently added an extra bit of emphasis around how we can expand our testing using these saves beyond the bug they were initially sent to help with. It’s not enough to just address the bugs you report, we’re using the data we’re getting to expand our understanding of how you are playing the game! 

(Deep breath cuz this sentence is a doozy) These improvements to how we measure/monitor what issues are causing the most pain to ya’ll in our community, with a specific focus on the top 20 issues, coupled with the expanding use of our vast collection of player saves and expanded tools that look at data  across different time periods beyond just votes, has gotten 27 of the 40 most voted community reports fixed!

We acknowledge that this process isn’t perfect, and we are constantly looking to improve on it. (Your feedback has been incredibly helpful in this regard!) QA (to me) is an art form, and we strive to evolve with our medium. For the QA team on The Sims 4, we’re constantly evolving our processes to meet the standards we expect from ourselves, in order to put out a quality product for ya’ll. 

How QA + Simmers Work Together

Player reports are a major part of how we understand what’s happening at scale. Comparatively, there’s a handful of us, and an army of you! An old saying in QA is “The best playtest is the day you launch your game!” Effectively, no matter how many test hours you put into your game, the feedback you receive on launch day is always the best. Somewhere out there one of you will do something we never thought to do. This is where your reports are so important. (And why I love Simmers for being so proactive about reporting things!) 

We have a team dedicated to parsing through reports to find patterns, figure out frequency, and identify potential severity. All the information ya’ll share with us from the EA Forums is read and taken into account as we try to get the bug to happen on our end. When you share your saves, videos, and/or step-by-step instructions are helpful for our team to get the bug tracked and reproducible. At the end of the day it’s QA’s job to get the bug filed, and to use our tools to help decipher the potential root cause so the developer can get in there and fix it, but I cannot understate how appreciative we are to have a community as engaged as ya’ll as it’s a huge help.

Sometimes bugs are trickier than they appear on the surface. So clear-well defined “reproduction steps” are what we in QA use to communicate with the developers and with each other. Our goal is to get it 100% of the time, but that’s not always possible. We can try a thousand scenarios in a thousand different saves we’ve created in an attempt to repro an issue reported by the community, but I reckon there’s nothing better than getting the info straight from the people who are actually experiencing it. Because at the end of the day it’s not enough to just say “the bug exists”, we in QA have to prove it exists and we do that by figuring out how it happens. 

A Hearty Thank You

Again, I want to share our team’s appreciation for the community around The Sims 4. We are incredibly fortunate to have players committed to quality, who are willing to share their experiences, and are giving us the opportunity to improve our game. QA is an imperfect artform, one that is at its best when you’re able to work together as a team. The more perspectives you can assemble from a variety of backgrounds, the better you get at finding the bugs. So if you ever think something feels weird, broken, or just not right, please drop a report. Your info makes a real difference!