Guild Wars 2

Hi,
after the last release of the LS unfortunately we can see that maybe the 2 weeks release schedule is to tight.
I would like to suggest to Anet a couple of things as a “programmer” myself (i’m an Oracle DBA and i know how much testing is needed to do something in the right way as the customer want).
First thing:
If you want to maintain the 2 weeks release schedule i would like to suggest to reclute some of the players in order to massively test the patch one, two or three times. So a closed beta test of only the content. You can come up with the process to choose which players to reclute (with non-disclosure agreement and so on). Or maybe as someone as said in the forum use something like DOTA2 that have a client only for testing the feautures.

Otherwise please change the schedule to something more “human” to test more intensively the new content, so less people will be angry for the bugs and more people will be happy with you and your job.

What do you think about it?

You are making a rather massive mistake in your post though.
You are assuming they only have 2 weeks to work on the content. That is not the case. They actually have closer to four months to work on content.

But the thing is, no matter how much you test something things might (and will) slip through. You can never get a test environment to be 100% identical to a live environment, and thus you always risk running into issues not present on the test one, but on the live one.

I have played quite a few games with player-tests before release (both PTRs and NDA-protected betas) and they STILL have bugs and issues when released, so adding those doesn’t really make something issue-free. It just costs time, money, resources and hurts the game by spilling out information before it is ready to be revealed. There is always some kittens that can’t respect NDAs after all.

By the way, before people throw in “Public Test Realms” into this discussion, two games I played which ostensibly had such did not deal with a lot of the bugs which were breaking things. UO had a “feature” of slimes splitting nigh infinitely, boy was that fun. EQ had its own bugs and “features” which were denied to exist by the higher ups.

And neither game had GMs which enjoyed having bugs demonstrated to them,usually resulting in temp bans. I know I got one on UO for “exploiting” for being able to reproduce an issue. Can’t recall what it was other than an item in town not behaving right, think it was being able to smelt items not on my person? Been a while.