Guild Wars 2

The last couple of patches have had bugs that have made parts of the game unplayable, these bugs are incredibly obvious and would have shown up with even cursory testing. Two of the biggest have been in WvW with parts of maps being no go areas DCing anyone who goes near it and now with siege not being place-able in many areas instead…

Other things like performance issues etc are more excusable as you cannot account for all hardware compatibility issues etc.

This is not an area you can save money in Anet, invest in a PTR instead of rolling out unpolished trash which only serves to hurt your player base rather than help it.

No matter how much you test something there will always be issues that won’t turn up on test-servers.

I have played quite a few games with PTRs and they still get rather big issues with patches.

The environment on a test-server is never identical with a live-server, so no matter how much money you spend on test-servers there will always be issues.

I think the point of the OP is a PTR would eliminate more of these issues before going live.

+1 for a public beta server. You simply can’t identify all bugs in a closed environment, especially when it comes to performance issues and other things that require a lot of players to become an issue at all. They admitted that some problems occured because of latency they didn’t have in their test environment in the past for example, that’s pretty laughable, especially considering they’re developing an MMO.
How some of the bugs that slipped through in the past couldn’t be noticed by their so often praised (by themselves) QA is totally beyond me.

DarkSider.1079:

I think the point of the OP is a PTR would eliminate more of these issues before going live.

And I addressed that in my reply as well.
A test-server will NEVER be identical to a live-server. And there will ALWAYS be issues that don’t turn up on test-servers but on live. This is the case in every single game with a PTR.
It cost loads of money, it generate hype for releases, but it doesn’t really fix all the issues, no matter what people want to believe.

With how GW2 is designed, I think a PTR is a waste of money/time for Anet.

Instead what they need to do is have their own staff playing on patch release for the first 8-12hours of any patch going live, and have a 24 hour window to get the bug fixes rolled out.

This is not a community driven game, and the community shouldn’t be responsible for finding and fixing bugs PRIOR to Anet rolling out patches. It just wastes everyone’s time.

sirsquishy.8531:

This is not a community driven game, and the community shouldn’t be responsible for finding and fixing bugs PRIOR to Anet rolling out patches. It just wastes everyone’s time.

Instead, it seems to be the job of the community to find the bugs after patches. Each patch seems to cause more & more ridiculous bugs than the last. Now Engineer’s entire Throw Mine skill is broken. The whole thing. How is that missed?? There are traits that don’t and have never worked, yet Anet doesn’t even know months later, despite countless forum posts. Then it seems they rely only on their debugger and not actual game-play testing because they’ve argued with the community saying something works, only to be shown screenshots of community testing proving it’s broken. The community payed Anet to play a game, not to be employees without pay. Why are we doing all the bug testing?

lordkrall.7241:

DarkSider.1079:

I think the point of the OP is a PTR would eliminate more of these issues before going live.

And I addressed that in my reply as well.
A test-server will NEVER be identical to a live-server. And there will ALWAYS be issues that don’t turn up on test-servers but on live. This is the case in every single game with a PTR.
It cost loads of money, it generate hype for releases, but it doesn’t really fix all the issues, no matter what people want to believe.

I’m not claiming that this would be a magic fix for all issues but there are certain problems that as I stated with even a cursory check would have delayed the release of these last couple of patches till they were resolved.

I also acknowledged that certain issues would always slip through the net but a PTR allows it to be tested on as many different machines as possible reducing those risks.

I fail to see how it costs LOADS of money, those bugs need fixing at some point whether in a PTR or when it goes live it makes no difference, hell we have some servers that have a very poor population that members have asked to be closed for some time now how about changing those servers into PTR servers? But hey that’s a different suggestion all together.

But you are missing the whole point.
A PTR-server will not work the exact same way as a live-server, therefore issues that turns up because of stuff on the live-server will not be identified on the PTR, and therefore it would all be a waste of money.

LOTRO is using a PTR for every single update. And yet after every single update they have rather glaring bugs and issues, which did not turn up on the PTR.

Same goes for Diablo 3.

lordkrall.7241:

The environment on a test-server is never identical with a live-server, so no matter how much money you spend on test-servers there will always be issues.

You’re not doing it right. If they aren’t the same base, they will always miss basic stuff.

In any case, they have terrible QC. I mean really, really bad. How do you screw up major parts of multiple classes during a so-called “bug fix” patch? Necros and Engineers both have major issues now BECAUSE of this patch. I’m betting some of the other classes do as well.

lordkrall.7241:

No matter how much you test something there will always be issues that won’t turn up on test-servers.

I have played quite a few games with PTRs and they still get rather big issues with patches.

The environment on a test-server is never identical with a live-server, so no matter how much money you spend on test-servers there will always be issues.

“This won’t fix every single problem so KITTEN IT we’re not gonna do it at all.”

This is a subject that is hard to defend, there is a lot of bugged content right now on the live game and for me it has become unplayable. I would rather wait an extra week or two for more stable content than experience random crashes and broken classes on this scale, as I’m sure most of the player base would.