Guild Wars 2

it doesn’t really make sense to me. i’ve played C-list MMOs that had working PBEs (multiple ones actually) with extensive patch testing before they dared release anything on live.

i don’t understand what the devs expect’ll happen when they keep offloading completely untested content onto the game’s sole live shard.

The first few days of a new release are typically the public testing experience :P ‘S why I generally don’t play new content until a few days in.

I suspect they do, but a very small one that consists mostly of the interns at Anet. (not saying thats bad, or being mean)

or

They don’t want their secrets to get out. A lot of what the LS is about is about the .. oh i don’t know.. the story? so when peeps from the public test it they go and blab about it and now suddenly there is no surprise when the LS gets released.
EX: Imagine if we read about everything that was released and happened in today’s LS update a week ago.
Not saying testing the content is a bad thing, just pointing out some cons to what a public test server could have.

In my experience on most test servers, and even public betas before launch, very few people are actually testing.

They either play normally or muck around with special testing features (like in UO when the appeal of testing servers was being able to set your stats to whatever you wanted and a huge pile of free gold) and any actual testing of content happens by coincidence.

Anet do test content before it’s released but they do it internally with their own staff doing the testing (apparently 60 people based on the Gauntlet preview), presumably because that way they can tell the testers exactly what to test and how, and if they need them to do things like try the same event 15 times to try and recreate a bug they can do that instead of just hoping 15 different people do it and tell them the results with enough info to identify the bug.