Guild Wars 2

They got a dev server and QA does the testing, but a PTR rarely helps because players will only test the content and never report the bugs.

what i would like to know is what kind of reward BG got when they did it. Just imagine if its 3 blues and 2 greens hahah. Like how many of them actually got ascended weps or at least exotics

Quarktastic.1027:

The new Tequatl is akin to a raid boss in other MMOs. It requires a level of organization, communication, and cooperation that is extremely difficult to get from 80+ random people.

The new Tequatl is a fight designed for large guild groups being overseen by multiple commanders on voice chat.

There should NOT be any design that in a game that is based on having 3rd party elements to accomplish it imo.

Until a server beats teq w/o voice coms or anet adds coms into the game, I will continue to say it needs adjustment.

Quarktastic.1027:

The new Tequatl is akin to a raid boss in other MMOs. It requires a level of organization, communication, and cooperation that is extremely difficult to get from 80+ random people.

The new Tequatl is a fight designed for large guild groups being overseen by multiple commanders on voice chat.

So you are saying, put it in a instance? And call it a raid?

They should test it before release, but in a different sort of way, it doesn’t have to be easy enough to finish on the first day or w/e but it should at least be playable, I’m getting 30 second delays and constant DCs during Tequatl and it’s just discouraging.

SirusDibley.3716:

now the new Teq comes out and one server has completed it…once.

That’s a bad thing?

Obviously the content is not impossibly hard, because it has been beaten.

Obviously the content is not too easy, because it has only been beaten once.

Do you think there should be no content that is not insta-killed by everyone?

Essence Snow.3194:

Quarktastic.1027:

The new Tequatl is akin to a raid boss in other MMOs. It requires a level of organization, communication, and cooperation that is extremely difficult to get from 80+ random people.

The new Tequatl is a fight designed for large guild groups being overseen by multiple commanders on voice chat.

There should NOT be any design that in a game that is based on having 3rd party elements to accomplish it imo.

Until a server beats teq w/o voice coms or anet adds coms into the game, I will continue to say it needs adjustment.

That’s never going to happen because a lot of people will use voice chat whether they need to or not. I’ve known guilds who required everyone to be logged into their favorite voice chat program any time they were representing, even if they weren’t actually doing any activities together.

cesmode.4257:

Vayne.8563:

Rebound.3409:

They are testing on us obviously.

A PTR system is way above their income apparently.

Or they’ve deemed it as useless as it would be.

How on this green earth would a PTR/PTS be useless? Having more testing is always better than not. And having it tested on the players that will play the game into the ground is a good way to go…BEFORE launching it live. GW2 claims to have a QA team, but I don’t think they do their job well at all considering all of the bugs and exploits. I always use WoW as an example, even though I do not play the game nor do I wish to, but Blizzard has had a PTR available for years. Their new content doesnt bug out and isnt as exploitable as GW2.

That’s absolutely not true. That’s like saying that doubling development staff halves development time. It is a well known fact that such logic simply doesn’t work in the real world.

You might say that testing a minor piece of content for 10 years could theoretically deliver perfect software. However, that’s not a viable business model.

No, not having a PTR is either a budget reason, Arenanet feels their stuff is bugless and superior(laugh), or they just can’t be bothered with one.

As it stands, the content is functional for 99% of the players, and hotfixes can cover that other 1%. I don’t think there’s a whole lot to improve honestly, Arena.net churns out pretty functional content at a very fast rate.

The amount of game breaking bugs is lower than in other MMOs, the amount of downtime due to such bugs is almost zero (compare to 8 hour maintainances in other games).
The question really is, is it worth it to delay content for another week, spend tons of money on a test server to fix some minor problems that might or might not be caught in a test environment (because testing hardly if ever happens on a PTR). The answer is a clear and resounding no … it’s not worth it.

Arena.net clearly does a better job than other companies, and as such, simply can’t be bothered with a useless feature like a PTR.

A PTR would improve content at an alarming rate.

This sentence is meaningless. A PTR doesn’t improve content. Best case scenario some minor bugs get found, normal case scenario it achieves absolutely nothing, worst case scenario exploiters hide bugs to exploit a word first. “Alarming rate” is a weasel word but does not apply to fixing bugs.

cesmode.4257:

@Eurhetemec…so then instead of testing content with a larger pool of testers than their small QA team and reporting bugs…we encourage the behavior of haphazardly pushing out content that will inevitability break in some fashion just because we want to look cool in front of cameras and say “We will pushout content every two weeks”.

My god man..do you read what you write? I write SQL for a living. I pull data from databases, mold them into reports so overpaid directors can read them in a pretty format. If i didn’t proofread, test, or UAT, Id be fired.

We just rolled out a new platform here. We performed UAT. We found bugs, we reported, they fixed before go-live, and all is well in the universe. Do you think that this is a worse alternative? Do you think that not having some sort of UAT or PTR is better than having the actual end-users test the stuff?

Wow. Im going to exit this thread because clearly the mentality of quantity vs quality, and not wanting to put forth proper effort to debug and test is beginning to be toxic around here. Not sure you all understand what you are saying.

This is hilarious.

Not only did you not “exit the thread” as promised, but more importantly, your comparison is fundamentally in error. You are being completely ridiculous if you don’t think ArenaNet do extremely serious internal testing. The thing is, no matter how good your testing is, in a product of this size and complexity, which is orders of magnitude greater than what you’re describing working on, it is inevitable that some bugs and issues will go live.

Read that carefully: inevitable.

It is not possible to avoid it. Every game that has a PTR/PTS is proof of that.

I’m not arguing that they shouldn’t be testing or something. That’s strawman nonsense. I’m arguing that a PTR/PTS would not improve things meaningfully. Particularly not unless they put stuff on the PTR for a very long time, which would lead to far slower content roll-outs.

You keep saying “quantity vs quality” as if it’s a magic phrase that will convince everyone. It’s nonsense. GW2’s added content has been both high quality and of significant quantity. It’s not perfect, but nothing ever is. It’s as good as any game that has a PTR, though, that’s the thing.

PTS is useless because it’s just another forum for players to come state their flawed opinions. Player perception is generally pretty far off the mark and largely useless for tuning the game.

They’ve actually tuned an encounter to be difficult, that’s a good thing. It has been defeated on several servers already. This means it’s doable. Having an encounter where people have to actually organize in stead of pulling out a ranged weapon, standing in a safe spot and spamming 1 is good design.