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.