Guild Wars 2

I don’t see the need for a PTR because the problem isn’t that they don’t know about bugs, the problem is that they don’t fix them. And the usual bugs with non-working achievements and so on that are introduced with every release could be easily remedied by proper internal beta testing as well. The fact that simple things like achievements or POIs don’t work means there’s no testing for these things at all. You would simply have to run by only once to test that. Their QA is screwed up, a PTR doesn’t help with that. We already ranted about that in length here:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/The-forum-bug-process/first

PTR is to find bug/error, not to balance thing. The problem is does people report this bug or walk away ? (80% of player want to try the content only but disregard the bug or the bug is not there in low level (thats why all player in PTR should be buffed to the highest level or can achieve the highest level faster >>> this actually what the problem of all betas (short time (usually days), lot of thing to be tested, slow exp, reset every beta, higher level content never been tested correctly))).

Balancing is the last last last thing to do in PTR (dev usually will put this aside), except the thing is so so overpowered.

Almost every major mmo and other online games have a ptr and judging by the amount of bugs areanet has each patch it might be worth having, that or invest in a bigger QA deportment.

Off the top of my head these are some games with a PTR WoW (argue how ever you would like this game has become so much bigger at patch to patch no buggy patches a few things here and there but nothing like it has back in vanilla) Team Fortress 2, Dota 2, League of Legends, and many more.

If it didn’t work why would any of these games spent time having a PTR in the first place, so it has to be working somehow and arguably these games are all less buggy or not buggy at all after a patch compared to GW2.

Okay here’s a question. With the amount of patches coming out, and as fast as they have to be done, how much time would players actually have to play content. This stuff is happening mega-fast. They won’t put it up on the servers till it’s past their own internal testing. My guess is there isn’t much time.

Then you have maybe hundreds of players filing reports, and someone has to go through those reports. Some of them may be bugs, some of them may not be.

For a big company, with a long lead time, test servers might be a great idea, but I’m not thinking it would help greatly in a game where content arrives every 2 weeks.

I can’t speak for Anet, but I know in some companies there are a lot of bugs that make it through because of the crappy personality of the devs responsible for fixing it.

Example- the buddy of one of my coworkers was a game tester for a branch of EA. Not a beta or Alpha tester; I mean a “Grandma’s Boy” type paid tester (movie reference).

He was testing the PC version of a really crappy console port, and of course it was buggy as could be. Being the good little tester that he was, he reported bugs as he found them. The problem? He would constantly get emails back from the devs saying “Thats not a F***ing bug” and just ignore them.

So, just because a bug makes it past testing doesn’t make it the fault of the testers. Sometimes the testers do their job just fine, and its the devs who let it slide.

Vayne.8563:

Okay here’s a question. With the amount of patches coming out, and as fast as they have to be done, how much time would players actually have to play content. This stuff is happening mega-fast. They won’t put it up on the servers till it’s past their own internal testing. My guess is there isn’t much time.

Then you have maybe hundreds of players filing reports, and someone has to go through those reports. Some of them may be bugs, some of them may not be.

For a big company, with a long lead time, test servers might be a great idea, but I’m not thinking it would help greatly in a game where content arrives every 2 weeks.

As a software developer, if I had to take an educated guess, I would say the new content isn’t being produced in 2 weeks. There were some pretty long stretches in the past 10 months of no content being produced. I would bet good money they have some lead time on these patches in the upwards of a month+. Chances are, the patches being popped out today were started 1-1.5 months ago. More than likely there are 3+ different content teams working on these patches, so one releases while the other two+ are still working.

So, that said, there should still be time to test each individual patch appropriately before putting it out. I can’t imagine a company pushing out a patch to a live server with millions of customers on it and just saying “Meh, if it works, it works!” =D

Just posted in the bugs forum about this but felt it was necessary as an example of why we need a PTR when testing.

They just loaded the new achievements pane and not all of my achievements have loaded. Lots of the things I had already completed by default are not showing. I’ve salvaged thousands of items as a farmer for almost a year now. And as another minor example the miniature collection doesn’t show a single one of my minis. I’ll be checking into this further when I have more time.

Just another example as to why PTRs work and are needed because if they made a copy of people’s characters achievements and all onto a new test server and people logged in to find the achievements missing like on mine they’d be posting multiple bug reports long before it went live with plenty of time to research and fix the issues.

Sorry to sound like the dumb one, but where did they ever say that they were going to create a PTR?