Guild Wars 2

There are far too many things that come out in patches as blindsides or worse untested by live players.

ANet could save themselves and the player community some grief by allowing content patches to be tested by players just as Rift currently does and DAoC in the old days.

That is how you get the community on board and help limit missteps.

Anyone else agree?

I definitely agree with this! Bump bump bump. And, they’d need to be really active on the PTR and listening to feedback…

Doesn’t wow even still do this, or did they stop?

EVE Online uses their test server, and the resulting feedback, heavily (although not always intelligently). It is a good thing.

I support the idea. If there will be a PTS I’m going to help testing, no doubt about it.

A community test server is a good community management move. Of course players are cranky, irritable wonks that love to backseat game design and throw hussy fits… and that will never change.

A community test server helps people come to terms with changes and find out they’re not so bad.

Rhyse.8176:

Doesn’t wow even still do this, or did they stop?

EVE Online uses their test server, and the resulting feedback, heavily (although not always intelligently). It is a good thing.

They still do this.

I would love a test server, alot of us necros already test the class after each update to see if something was changed that was not intended. Alot of them now noticed a change on the staff 1 attack which has been wonky for sometime but many others are now seeing it because it extended further then 1200 range. We tested the jagged horrors and those things have a animation of 2-3 seconds of just getting out of the ground, and 7 seconds of life at 80. The horror we cannot turn off or anything plus not to mention it could makes boss fights like lupi and alpha harder. We tested and just about proved without access to the game code we had a broken trait line by not giving the life force.

A community test server would help alot for them since they only have two guys working on this, we players could test out the new changes for them. 1000 players will have a better chance then the 2 programers to find an issue.

Agreed 100%. Those who don’t wish to be spoilered can avoid it, those who don’t care will get on there and check it out, and hopefully stuff will be a LOT less buggy when it hits the live servers.

Yes! Please, we need a PTS, we need to test upcoming updates/changes and provide our feedback. Your 2 programmers are getting paid for their work (which makes less incentive to find/fix bugs). The players are the ones wasting their valuable time playing your game, and we are telling you we WANT to help, does that not mean something?

I’ve said this before and I’ll agree with it again. The game really needs a PTR because the testing of new content has been very lackluster so far.

i suggested that several times, a-net seems to be ignorant, thinking that “exploring” is something people care about as endgame content, even if it means everytime releasing broken content when a new patch comes.

i have no problem to test some hour instead of play, if this can be useful to the development of the game in the right direction.

/agree

All the other MMOs do that, except this
ArenaNet are hispters or something.

Even with the largest PTR in the world World of Warcraft still releases with bugs every.single.patch often really huge and annoying ones relating to something breaking in the classes or a quest or two not functioning because an NPC gets stuck, however, because they don’t do one time events the frame of reference shifts. When it’s going to be out for months players can just come back and do the quest or raid later. If it’s fixed in a week (or less) out of a 3-18 month patch it’s like it never happened.

Just in the last few months there was a DK bug that allowed people to kill players of their own faction and wipe out cities. It was patched quickly – within 12 hours – just like the bugged NPCs here. But people tend to forget about the little bugs like that which pervade WoW (or the larger ones in the Secret World or the ones that are happening now with Rift’s Storm Legion) because the time between new content and old is so much larger.

Halloween went off extremely well but there were some issues – most of which were resolved in this patch.

What they need to do now is the same thing that they probably did while the last patch was happening namely — sit down and take a hard look at their process and code and make a set of best practices going forward.

In the end the discovery aspect and figuring it out with everyone together is worth more than having everyone post in /map or /g what we’re supposed to be doing because they already know from ptr.

TDLR; No, lets see if they can fix their live events first.

It goes as this, “Help us, Help you”

player testing is what got us into this mess.

they actually do have player testing ongoing right now, under NDA, with the vast majority of people invited being zerg guilds and wow clone raiders. where do you think they got the player feedback that led to the ascenson gear treadmill?

player testing is a cancer on the industry in general, especially when it’s under NDA. more than devs and pubs chomping at the bit to copy wow’s success, teh feedback from the same set of incestuous players that get invited into every NDA CBT over and over again that give 2 types of feedback primarily – and that is the first bit is how amazing the game is and perfect in every way- in essense an echo chamber, think of mesmer’s feedback bubble, doign damage to people inside it from their own actions. the 2nd set of feedback is private agendas – that is to cater to wow clone raiders in teh form of progression gear paradigm that has plagued and homegenizaed the genre for the past 8 years, and to tune anything guild related from guildprogression to key money sinks to guilds with 500-2000+ members.

same thing in every game, and gw2 is no exception.

Agreed
Agreed
Agreed

But off course people would all flock to that server for the test. Do we make it a selection of the players? Like the 10 000 most active beta testers? Or randomly select a different server for a test?

They really need it. Have an NDA in place for it and make it so you can take/create one character specifically for the test server. An extra character slot that doesn’t count against your normal ones.

prenavo.3926:

They really need it. Have an NDA in place for it and make it so you can take/create one character specifically for the test server. An extra character slot that doesn’t count against your normal ones.

they already have this. this is where they got the feedback for ascended gear and agony. they have had player testing for this entire patch for a while.

no i am not in this test group. it is not hard to find out about. i don’t know how many of my wow clone raider associates have used their presence in this test group as proof this is what players actually want though in the last week.

A public test server is not going to happen. People will just use it to get new content early and get a boost start for farming the new stuff. An option will be to have different accounts for testing and for playing, but again giving a testing account to each current player is impossible.

A Live Test Krewe like in GW1 could be possible.