Guild Wars 2

The idea has been frequently tossed about on these forums and I believe the ultimate solution to patch release day bugs, community discord regarding balance, and making the players feel more involved is to implement a Player Test Environment where the community can truly collaborate with developers to shape upcoming changes.

The area this is most relevant to is structured PvP. PvE players are getting frequent content every two weeks and bugs are fixed within days (if not hours) of patch release. The most difficult content to test are balance changes and I believe a larger quantity of QA via community testing would improve player satisfaction with patch releases.

One suggestion I saw that I liked was a “Test Mists” where players could travel to and get a sneak peak of upcoming changes. The Test Mists would not need to include much besides the NPCs to gear your character and a few hotjoin servers.

Alternatively new log ins could be created for players signing in to a totally different server with a full world in the test environment. Character imports would not be necessary as the main objective would be testing sPvP content which requires no leveling or gear grind.

A separate forum could be created for the Test Environment feedback and discussion.

Let me know what you all think

I agree with all of this.

Would probably need to be a separate server, but aside from this it would be just perfect.

It depends on resource cost vs. benefit. For example, it could be that a matchmaking fix, rewards revamp, tutorial revamp, hotjoin scoring re-design, better spectating, build templates, death breakdown revamp, and match stat-tracking could ALL be implemented next year—

Or they could do none of that but be able to introduce a PTR. They’ve stated multiple times that a PTR would be difficult/resource costly to implement for GW2. I know which option I’d choose, if I could only have one or the other.