Guild Wars 2

If I like an MMO an try to stay involved in development by making suggestions, as do many other players. The most frustrating thing about GW2 development though is how you test changes. You basically rely on the live game to see whether something works or not. Since it’s live you have to make changes very small and incremental so you don’t brake the game, and players have no idea what those changes will be for the most part until they come out. The whole process feels sluggish and more frustrating than it needs to be.

You need a test server: set a limited number of players and allow players to volunteer for it, if more players volunteer than there are spots pick ramdomly. Get a few hundred players in there and let them test stuff BEFORE it goes live. That way you can test multiple things at once, test more radical changes and get lots of feedback and testing samples by having players just play. Then when you do release a patch it can have a lot more changes at once, players will know what’s coming and the community will feel actually involved in development. I am very curious to hear from a developer why you don’t do this.

I too would like a test server to see if things work before actual patches drop

They do have a test server with a small amount of testers.

Now that this thread is in the suggestions forum it will probably die soon