It’s clear there is no semblance of QA left in this game. We’re getting live patches that break every custom keybind. Poorly designed/tested new heroes. D.Va and Junkrat getting double points in some arcade modes for 2 months. Game modes like the Emre 5v5 that literally launch in an unplayable state. Stadium bugs galore. I could go on for hours. The theme of the last 3 years of OW has been quantity > quality. It’s time to pull the brakes and remember that many of us paid $60 for a fully functional game, not early access slop. Bring back the PTR or experimental cards and open up player feedback channels for these issues. Stop forcing untested, terrible changes on the entire playerbase. All you’re getting is short-term gains on these shoddy content patches while slowly bleeding out dedicated players in the long run.
I don’t think they have the staffing or budget for that anymore.
Activision was stingy but Microsoft is Ebenezer Scrooge in comparison.
This is the worst time for a PTR. If it wasn’t being utilized before, it definitely won’t be utilized now. Especially with zero downtime between seasons and battlepasses. People are just going to play the game as they have always done.
PTR server? Look at the state of the game first. Art design lacks creativity, and the Season Pass and Mythic skins have dropped in quality.
Character design isn’t any better Sierra feels like a recycled kit: Widowmaker style Grapple, a weaker Tactical Visor, and a watered down Earthshatter.
They already struggle with balancing and matchmaking, and their track record in maintaining the game isn’t great. And now you want a PTR server? With what budget and manpower?
The reality is simple: modern game development is about doing less, maintaining less, and making more money.
Think it’s bad here? Look at the state of Warcraft. And they do use PTR-its been really bad lately.
I was for a PTR but it’s obvious there’s no guarantee things will change.
While I like the sentiment (especially in regards to QA stuff) a return to the experimental tab across all platforms would probably be better and then available across all platforms meaning widespread testing… however - the closest we had to any sort of public testing recently was hero trials and those were scrapped due to bringing the development timelines for each hero forward by half a season. I’m sure that there is heroes and maps either complete or partially complete but the PTR was for testing patches that were pretty much completely done, and that just isn’t going to happen at the moment.
The bugs have been annoying and it seems season 2 especially was rushed out the door (key bindings issue, payload race being disabled for weeks, cosmetics vanishing, Switch 2 launch) with less testing than usual but I’m sure once the team has got back into the proper swing of things with the new hero cadence this will be resolved. I’m sure they’re very stressed right now making sure the rest of the year is good off the back of Season 1’s success!