When will PTR Changes go live?

General Discussion
21

Not stress testing, there is a lot more to it than that.

22

I believe patch 1.40 was just under 4 weeks like this one.

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23

I mentioned above that the dev team confirmed this is not possible.

24

SO what is it? Changing a few variables should not need 4 weeks of testing.

25

There are bug fixes on the PTR too in this case.

26

The balance of the game should not be sacrificed like this just because some bug fixes, get some other way to test them and send the balance changes to live alone. As stated before, noone barely plays ptr after first week anyway.

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27

Should’ve been last week, if the PTR goes live with literally no changes then I have no idea what they’re doing

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28

There can’t be much more, if the player populations and playtimes drop down low.

But even if it is useful, I don’t see why they couldn’t do the “numbers only” balance changes faster, and do multiple rounds of balance changes until publishing code changes.

At this point, it feels like the developers are deliberately sacrificing timely gameplay balance, in favor of debugging/stability upgrades.
Which seems like a really bad business decision.

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29

I was just saying that since they are putting them in the same patch that is the reason it requires re-certification for the console.

To be honest, I don’t know why they can’t have a test balance mode in the live client for bigger changes that don’t involve any new animations or effects and just roll out smaller changes directly to live. This patch is big enough that I get why they wanted to test it, but couldn’t they have made it an arcade mode or something and then just rolled it over to QP and Comp after a week?

But if they do happen to put it on the PTR, they shoot themselves in the foot because then they need to go through the whole patch release process which is tedious.

30

Everything balance related on this patch is a number tweak that the workshop can get at (with the exception of a few we don’t have access to like recoil recovery, which surely they do have access to).

Minus those knobs we can’t get at (which are easily added) you CAN create this whole patch in a custom game, don’t tell me that isn’t possible. You could open your game and do it right now if we had those enabled. :laughing:

When they say the PTR can’t be on live, it’s because there’s a whole lot of other changes ontop of balance changes. I’m not saying put the ptr on the arcade, I’m saying they could do their knob adjustment patches there and end up with good stats in large quantities. If they were to give Hanzo new ability or something, sure, you wouldn’t be able to push that to the arcade. Justifiably that would require PTR time.

But adjusting cooldowns and fire rates etc? Come on.

Sorry to snark about it at you, but it’s not an impossibility, they just don’t want to put a balance preview gamemode up. Probably because they’re in less of a rush about it than players. When you’re balancing for months of unreleased content in advance, who cares if people are unhappy this week?

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