Guild Wars 2

Public Test Server(s) – Why not?
This is not a rethorical question or intented to be another dumb ‘anet get your balance right’ – thread.
I am actually curious why you decided, to not have any pts.
If that has been answered/statet before I would be very grateful for a link or at least a short summary, but if not, i’d love to get an official response.
And I’d also like to know, if there is any chance you would reconsider that decision.

I mean: I literally dont see any possible problems. I doubt you lack the server capacity, I doubt you lack the manpower to roll out experimental changes.

On the pro side: There are balancing problems. I will not adress this further, but significant parts of the community are obviously unhappy with certain elements of the game. And even if that number was actually below average, their concerns are still considerable.
Even if you said you had enough internal testers and dont really need a public test phase for upcoming changes, I believe it would make a lot of your players happier, if you made them feel like they had a bigger part in the updating/feedback process.

In the end Pts usually attracts people who are truly interested in the balance and try to offer valuable solutions. Its like a horde of free mini-devs.

So yeah. It would be cool, if I could get a real answer for this, official or unoffical, and it would be even cooler, if we would be able to test out changes ourselves before they make an impact on the game.

From Dulfy’s summary of the very recent AMA http://dulfy.net/2016/03/05/gw2-reddit-developer-ama-summary/ :

“We’ve experimented with public test servers and there are two problems for us: 1) much of our stuff is story driven, and not suitable for a public test server; and 2) the results from play patterns don’t match what we see later on live. Instead, we developed a system we used for HoT where we can beta test characters and maps on the Live servers with a cute little personal sandbox that surrounds beta characters.We will be exploring using that tech more so we can do public-test-server-like things but in the live game, so we get real useful results back.”

This was addressed in ama, but I am to lazy to go find it. Basically their assumptions, was in the past test servers didn’t reflect the actual server due to different motives for being there. Also GW2 is very story driven and test servers wouldn’t work out because it would be to much of a reveal.

They did mention maybe using the isolated sandbox mechanic like they did for previous betas more.

Aight. thanks for the answers. I could have checked the ama myself I suppose, but, as you said, too much.

Look at what happened with the Edge of the Mists, that did have a PTS which showed it had lots of good potential – WvW guilds approved of the new mechanics and apparently (I wasn’t involved) there were some really interesting fights and potential to do a lot more once people got familiar with it.

Then it went live and almost immediately became a karma/experience train map where servers would go around in one big zerg following an agreed pattern so they’d almost never run into each other and could just keep capping objectives for rewards with little/no real challenge.

Now you could argue that was the result of only having dedicated WvW guilds on the PTS, but I suspect that’s what would happen even if it was open to everyone. People complained that the HoT betas were pointless because the rewards didn’t carry over to your non-beta account, and that was people who wanted to do PvE. I think its highly unlikely large number of people who normally only enter WvW for the rewards would suddenly choose to play it on a test server, and if they did they wouldn’t be playing like they normally do.

In my experience though most of what you get on a PTS are people looking to learn the new content so they can complete it first/best as soon as it’s released, people looking for exploits they can repeat when it’s released and people who just want to play around with the new stuff and any special features (like instant level 80) for fun.

People who are genuinely willing to commit to testing content for no personal benefit beyond getting a better game out of it are hard to come by.