Public Test Realm

General Discussion
1

Hi folks!

Some exciting news… SCR is getting a Public Test Realm (PTR). This means we can share features/code/whatever with you earlier than ever before. It also means the things we’ll be sharing won’t be in a production ready state. PTR means slightly different things to different game teams, so I think it’s worth explaining what PTR means to our team. We have a small dev team on SCR, and in order for PTR to not detract from our efforts to keep releasing content, we won’t be rigorously testing our PTR releases. More specifically, that means:

  • There will be bugs & instability
  • We may change the build and environment often
  • PTR data/settings/profiles are different & separate to your live ones, and we may wipe or change PTR data as needed (i.e. we won’t be applying the same level as care to PTR as we do with our live environment)
  • There may well be more lag in-game, especially if you’re not in Korea (most of our PTR infrastructure is housed in Korea)
  • …
  • You get the idea

Some exciting things we’re planning to release on PTR very soon:

  • Keyboard commands working when the mouse is held down.
  • Cloud settings framework refactor - as some people still report that cloud settings are lost or not uploaded. Although we cannot prevent physical failures in transporting network packets to/from the cloud, we’re developing a more robust solution that will handle fail cases as gracefully and completely as possible. This deploy is sharing our “first look” at this. If we hear positive reports, we’ll merge the code into the main branch for our next major release.
  • Matchmaking algorithmic changes. One of the main problems with ranked play is that foreigners cannot easily match with Koreans, even when they have good latency connections, and people are using VPNs as a workaround. This new algorithm should match people using actual ping data rather than estimates, and will hopefully match folks from outside Korea with Korea as long as their ping data looks like it can achieve a good TR. Similarly, regardless of the presence of a VPN, if the connection is not good enough for a good TR connection, they will not be matched with Korean players. It should also be noted that since we do not expect a high population on PTR, combined with our PTR infrastructure being largely in Korea, we’re mostly testing ranked stability as well as pulling some useful real-world data from the server.

PTR will be an “opt-in” experience from the Blizzard Launcher. You can opt in and out at any time.

To access PTR from the Blizzard launcher, click the dropdown list of regions. Public Test Realm will show as a separate region.

We look forward to hearing your feedback on our PTR builds!

1 Like
3

Its really hard to get games on PTR, maybe we can try the new code for MM for 2 days?? im pretty sure that will work nice haha

4

Yep, that’s where we’re trying to get to.

1 Like
5

Nice :slight_smile: where i can find the end date of the actual season of ladder ?? cant find it T_T

6

  1. Do you plan on releasing the new patch before the end of KSL S3, or is there some sort of agreement between you guys and the league preventing you from doing so? I am dying for relaxed input to come out.

  2. Any thoughts on the lag that exists when selecting larva from hatcheries making it difficult to macro? I made a video here about it.

  3. I know you guys have been looking into race picking/race dodging. Why not have an option where you select the races you don’t want to play against. If you select 2 races and win the match you only gain 1/3 of the normal mmr (since you are dodging 2/3 of the possible matches), if you only select 1 race to dodge then if you win you only gain 2/3 of the normal mmr (since you are dodging 1/3 of the possible matches). Put a limit of only being able to do this sort of thing for 3 games/day. Just an idea.

2 Likes
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#3 doesn’t seem too appealing. maymbe veto 1 race (no MMR loss)? No more than that, It would prolly cause another forum of what race is overpowered or whatever. It would work prolly short term.

8

I’ve got a question and I really hope a blue can address it. Now you have PTR for all of us to test in have you now considered to try very minor to extreme experimental changes to the core game just to see feedback until finally making a decision?

From the beginning of Remasters announcement there has been 2 sides of the fanbase coming at you 1 side saying “We need to respect the original 1.16 Patch and leave it alone until the end of time” and the other “This game needs a lot of modern game design to keep the older out of touch generation playing and newcomers to enjoy this masterpiece for the very first time”

It has been constant butting heads and I think the main fear is that we depend on the developers to swing out these changes into the live version and it could potentially “ruin the game” creating more heated discussions and require boycotting for hope that the developers will change it back which I think we can all agree is not fun for anyone especially the people who put the hours in to develop this stuff for their audience.

To try and cut this short what I’m basically asking is will Blizzard now implement changes that can improve Quality of Life or fundamentally change gameplay to test the waters in PTR and reveal if the change is actually a positive thing we had no idea we wanted for the future of Brood War or knowing the truth that the game should never be changed.