Following up from Holly Longdales post here: https://worldofwarcraft.blizzard.com/en-us/news/24056982/a-word-on-world-of-warcraft
I don’t think it’s a good idea to not have Patch 10.2.6 on the PTR. Time and time again it has shown that non-tested events are riddled with bugs, and more so when they haven’t been on the PTR and when we can’t give feedback on it.
Love is in the Air is a recent and good example of this.
If you want to have an event spoiler-free for the majority, stop downsizing on QA and increase their team (looking and calling you out here, Microsoft), or let a portion of players play test it with an NDA.
15 Likes
I know I was one of the ones who suggested implementing an NDA on untested content that they wanted to keep hush-hush. It feels like they learned nothing from the CC when new public events or content came out that lacked proper testing on PTR’s.
I feel like they thought because no one tests Public Events or PvE content beyond raids and mythic + dungeons that they could let this fly with no details on what 10.2.6 could possibly be.
They may think the speculation by players is fun, but the entire mystery of an untested, unknown patch; especially when a lot of employees were recently laid off, is more anxiety inducing given the track record of new things being introduced. The Mystery is nerve racking, not mystifying.
8 Likes
I agree with you.
They absolutely need to do public testing on these types of things, and if they truly wish to keep it secret Which, I don’t blame them one bit for. WoWhead… while nice… really has a knack of just strip mining the ever living crap out of this game. they would need to do what they already do with the Alpha builds.
They should enact an NDA type testing for this type of content. They’ve done it in the past, and they do it for their alpha builds. Why is this type of content exempt? Public testing can help the community at large. Find game breaking bugs taht don’t matter as much since it’s in a testing enviroment that if were present on live servers could bring many players an unsatisfactory gameplay experience.
As denoted, if we did have a PTR, we might have caught the fact that the NPC for the horde wasn’t spawning correctly. We might have caught that players can mount their massive mounts near the dude in Silverpine forest blocking access to not only him but his treasure chest. We could have found that the flower daily quest from yesterday didn’t share resources. Or that their isn’t enough cats in todays to pet. And we might have been able to provide feedback on the public shaming that is the guy yellling you spent 10k gold for nothing.
Edit: Another failure that could have potentially been found during a PTR is this White Elekk. Why does it become hostile to the player? Why does it die? Why must players wait for a respawn just to take a picture just for the mob to become hostile to them, forcing them to kill it, just to make the next player wait to do repeat the cycle?
Or the fact you have to fly around trying to find this mob that isn’t highlighted on your mini-map that can also be killed by grievers?
Maybe next years event will actually be nice instead of this open beta public event that’s currently happening.
3 Likes
I’m two ways about this.
On one hand, I have very little faith that the internals team test properly as players end up finding gamebreaking and or bothersome bugs more often in which it takes maybe a week or so to fix them, yet its to be expected for these things to happen as new releases tend to be disastrous on coding in some way.
On the other hand, maybe something’s different this year considering the change of hands that happened at the start of this year. It’s definitely an uncharted course and a move into the unknown.
1 Like