Guild Wars 2

Since these holiday and Living Story events keep having bugs that are evidently not apparent until the patches go live, a test server would give you an opportunity to get rid of them in a “live” setting before the actual release. The test server was one of the things that SWTOR did excellently, and I’m sure there are other games that have as well.

Put your group of test players under a non-disclosure agreement if you have to keep upcoming releases secret (good luck with all the data mining that goes on), but something needs to prevent these major bugs from happening, and a test server would likely resolve a lot of it.

I also think you’d have plenty of people willing to spend some of their game time testing things for you.

A test server will however never be exactly the same as a live server, so even with a test server issues might turn up on the live servers.

People seems to be under the impression that ArenaNet does not test stuff at all, which they quite clearly do (and have a server for, which is also used for press-events and such)

I don’t remember SWTOR having these issues with huge bugs in their patches, and I believe the test server was one of the reasons for that. I wasn’t questioning whether or not ANet tests their patches, and it’s not about an exact imitation of a live server (which you can’t possibly reproduce). It is about creating a better approximation of ‘live’ using a large group of volunteer players, rather than ANet’s internal QA servers, which have proven hugely inadequate in preventing large bugs in their patches.

I think the big problem is that every big patch day there seems to be a trail of mini-patches that fixes everything the patch broke.

An example happened just this patch when racing moa’s could be stunned. Since then it has been fixed but you can’t tell me 1,000+ players poking at the game in a test server couldn’t have spotted that in five minutes. Heck even 100 would have found in in an hour.

A public test server would be a improvement. Anet can test new things before releasing them(such as balance fixes, and new content), and the normal players get a less buggy game. Win Win.

The Lose here is obviously the issue of secrecy. Any test content would have to be scrubbed clean in order to prevent spoilage of their living story plot or surprises. Personally I don’t mind the spoilers on it, but I have a feeling Anet does.

actually they shouldnt, World of Tanks does a test server every time the do a patch with new tanks in it. they give every player 10k gold, 100million credits, and a few hundred thousand exp.

the only thing they actually care about getting leaked, is from the super testers…who get to test tanks that may or may not make it into the game.