Aside from Public Testing Realms is there also Private Testing? Like test a new hero privately, before releasing it to the public trys?
The devs mentioned playing upcoming changes to see if they are any good/need finetuning. Does not always work, but i guess a lot of the bad changes did not go further than there luckily.
So if you want to play before the PTR, become a dev.
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Some say the article image is a fake, but I think they have a separate server just for devs where they can play every hero that is in progress at any time. Speculation, of course. Not all of those heroes might ever make it into HotS.
Judging from the UI (if the image from the Ars Technica article were genuine) that pic is from 2015 or 2014.
Almost certainly fake. Dozens of such pictures were circulating the internet at the time. So many heroes making it into release was more due to common sense rather than insider knowledge. For example Malthael and Imperius are there due to Diablo III RoS. However Baal, who was the antagonist of D2 LoD, has not been released yet.
We all know that Blizzard has a closed testing system. Most game developers do. However the main give away that the image is fake is that it is using the standard match making UI rather than the custom game UI, which HotS has always had since it was based on StarCraft II. The test pool would be too small for sensible match making most of the time. Additionally testing would need to be limited to a select few heroes at any given time since testing balance against only unreleased content is pointless. Hence test sessions would likely be arranged via custom game, meaning that it is unlikely most heroes actively in development would be available at any given time and most certainly would not have been laid out in that UI but rather selected from a list.
That said there were some actual leakers. Some anonymous person regularly posted lists of upcoming heroes which were for the most part accurate. The heroes is the short lists have mostly all been released by now. There are a few notable exceptions, such as Baal who appeared on the lists multiple times but still has not been released. As such their leak was most likely genuine since they were listing the heroes currently in development/testing, from a state that they might be released shortly in the future rather. The inaccuracies such as Baal would be for reasons similar to Deathwing who has also been worked on multiple times in the past, making the character feel right and play well.
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Guarantee that there are private servers in Blizzard HQ that they use for internal play testing.
I would doubt that they would let people outside of blizzard have access because there might be multiple “under development” projects on there and they may not want to give away everything.
They likely do allow such people, but they all have to sign Non-Disclosure Agreements.
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if that’s real who took the screenshot and why sharing it? i don’t think a dev would share it and a player wouldn’t be able to share it either because they won’t have access to the devs server. which means it’s more than likely fake
Such screenshots can happen as the result of an Evil Maid or just a disgruntled employee.
Screenshots can leak information as to where they were taken. For that reason they are not a safe leak medium as there are legal and professional repercussions for violating a NDA. This is why leakers usually leak in the form of blocks of text rather than images or videos, since being written in your own words it is very difficult to track down who the leak was.
No idea. The article doesn’t say where the image is from.
Well, don’t they have a specific build of the game for BlizzCon attendees? Like in this year the BlizzCon build already had Deathwing implemented.
I think it is natural to believe they have different builds they play on to test incoming changes/heroes and such.