This is a topic that only impacts a small subject of the player base.
The announcements of Raid Testing doesn’t leave guilds from the EU or OCE regions much time to get stuff planned as its late night for EU on a weekday or early morning for OCE so there is more planning involved in simply just attending and getting a group assembled.
Would love it if we had much more of a heads up.
For example: Announcement on Monday for tests on Thursday / Tuesday for tests on Friday.
There’s already a challenge with getting a group together, adding time pressure doesn’t help and means that data is tainted as you may have to go with an uncoordinated group/PuGs rather than a team that will play as you expect.
This is super fair feedback and something we’ve talked about previously.
To understand the problem, we need to take a step back and talk about how we do PTR testing:
The week prior to a PTR test, we confirm which bosses are ready for testing and ask their designers to have them in a stable & testable state by the end of the week.
The weekend before a PTR test, we generate a new build to use for testing.
While bugs are to be expected on PTR, we want to ensure a baseline level of stability so that we’re not wasting players’ time. This is where QA comes in and they do a great job finding any bugs that could interfere with testing.
Once we’ve fixed any major issues & have QA’s blessing, we put the new build on the PTR and post our announcement for raid testing.
The challenge comes in with that last part - sometimes the problems we find are serious enough that they can take multiple days to fix or might prevent raid testing that week entirely. An example might be something like: “there are invisible holes in the floor all over the raid”. This is why we wait until we’re pretty certain a test will happen before announcing it.
That being said we do know what we “want to” test by the start of the week, and we could announce that sooner, but it’d come with a significant risk of plans being changed or canceled later in the week. The question then becomes: “would it be OK to announce a test earlier, have players plan to attend, and then cancel it later if we discover a problem that would prevent testing?”
I’d want to discuss with the team before promising any changes to how we do things, but I’m curious to hear your thoughts on this based on the information above.
Honesty would go a long way personally, and by this I would mean having an announcement early but stating what bosses (if any) could be problematic and push those tests towards Friday to buy more time and if needs be cancel those (as I’m sure we all have other things we can be doing on a Friday, right?).
For me personally, I would love to know it in advance even if it ends up being in a state that is not presentable for testing. It helps planning, and it helps gathering resources and people before hand
The bottom line, for everything that matters WoW is:
As long as you guys communicate with us, is all good.
Communications is and will always be the key to do anything.
We’ve posted the schedule for the next two weeks of raid testing here. As mentioned in Zahko’s reply above, there is the possibility that the schedule could change as we get closer to the day of testing, but we hope the advance notice helps with planning your raid groups.
As everyone gets used to the earlier raid testing announcement process, please let us know if you have additional feedback and if you’re enjoying the change.
