Good to see open invitations (to be in a raffle) go out!
But please… please please… when players are giving feedback… listen and act.
Do not do the thing we had in late DF beta where “all healers are good!”, then wham, 40% healer nerf 2 weeks before launch, the tone changes to “only 2 healers are good…” and nothing was done. I was full of hope before launch, and felt absolutely crushed 2 months in. It was horrible and I don’t want to feel that way again.
If it’s out for user testing, you have to pay attention to the feedback this will generate, and you need to not make massive shock changes once the time for testing has passed.
I really don’t want to spoil it. If there were different quests with each faction, I’d make an alliance toon to test things (I do actually like bug reporting). I will have to avoid Wowhead etc as well rrrrr…
because a lot of things the players want (be it feasible, usually it’s just people upset class A is performing slightly better than their class) Blizzard would love to put in the game but conditions won’t allow it.
And if Blizzard used EVERYONE’s feedback the game would be a chaotic unplayable mess.
Personally, I’d be giving Beta access to fully qualified people, not as a lottery to random players who let’s be honest.
Most just want to see the content before everyone else does.
there hasn’t been a game on WoW’s scale that has gone out on general release absolutely perfect.
To believe a thing is even remotely possible is so much pie in the sky.
I’m not talking about people complaining that class A does 6 DPS more than class B, or asking for other stuff just so their class is the best. That’s honestly tuning I expect to happen during internal testing when numbers and mechanics are being ran, and when endgame content is being cleared and more data becomes available.
And I don’t need absolutely perfect.
I do need functional, not like the state we have now where world events are broken and quests don’t work.
I would love check shadow…but u know…we didnt get anything yet.
Also i kinda do agree that saying “unpaid beta testers” convo is cringe…but one have to kinda wonder…there is atm like 5-6 ptr or beta realms. How many stuff do you wannt us to test? Like wth.
That wouldn’t have been very serious, but yes - this is technically the exact kind of thing internal QA probably won’t find.
It’s only a hair’s breadth from this priest being able to pull the boss, skipping the entire dungeon. That would have been serious. It’s good someone tried.
You could actually get up there with a lock gate, lol. Required some intricate placement but it was possible. They fixed it in the next major build after I reported it with including the video. I discovered you could run through there just before the video was recorded, I accidentally ran through the wall during the encounter - that’s why we wiped, I couldn’t get back to the room they were fighting in and then someone left and then everyone left because the dungeon finder was bugged at the time and wouldn’t queue new people into the dungeon if someone left, so I decided to record it when everyone had left.
There’s still a way to bug in halls of atonement and pull the add in the room before last boss, to outside that room. Unless they’ve fixed it now, it wasn’t fixed when halls of atonement still was in m+.
Waycrest manor still has bugs that were reported in the BFA beta. I had matron alma come up through the floor during a big pull in the courtyard on a +25 key and we wiped due to it, lol.
It still has bugs inside as well, if a warrior leaps inside the corridor next to raal he’ll clip through the roof briefly and can pull mobs from the floor above.
Sanguine depths had similar issues in SL but they fixed that at least, you could pull mobs from the gauntlet area(I think that was where they got pulled from) to last boss through the floor somehow when you were above it.
Having played on the PTR there’s some weird things that I didn’t even see happen during season 1 or 2 that’s happening now, idk if they’ll fix before it goes live. Like clearing the whole area around tree boss in algethar and the boss doesn’t become active - that’s an instant bricked key if that happens in a live key. Maybe it happened since DF beta, idk, but I never saw it until the PTR.
It’s common sense IMO. Although there are a certain number of things you can discover in earlier testing, there is nothing more reliable than the playerbase to find things wrong. Unlike the early days of NDA and everything being kept hush hush these days they even have streamers putting in huge numbers of hours because it’s content for them to stream.
Lots of things that didn’t work in Alpha/Beta ARE fixed for launch. Ofc not everything is caught and sometimes they break again but on the whole this is a good reliable way to test and get feedback.
I have taken part in all sorts of tests, some are to test the game, others are new and are stress tests for their servers, we see less of those these days as technology has moved on.
People all have different motives in betas where it’s the players testing. That is helpful in it’s own way, because they will often test different areas of the game.
the thing is, blizzard only listen and read the top ranked players in both sides of the game PvP and PvE, they never care about what low players say or mention. for years i have being very active trying to express my self out there with many different things, but end of the day they never did anything close to anything i say so. and i might be one of the most players that waste allot or real money in this game… you can feed a wolf for years,first chance he got he will kill you this is what blizzard does.
i always bought the most expansive versions of expansions in this game and i only had 1 Beta and it was shadowlands! they only feed the streamers and rank 1 players with this kind of gifts!
It really does vary in my experience. The game does not end up in a very good state if they listen to just the 1%.
The requirements to get into beta are usually to have your account in good standing and to be subscribed to the game. I think for Pandaria and now TWW, you can basically buy beta access however, if we take the latest estimated figures, that’s 7m ish players, and out of all those they only need a small percentage to populate a couple of beta realms. For raid testing they will often give access to guilds who have managed a certain level in Retail.
It’s like trying to win the lottery. I have friends who are just regular players who get in most betas. It’s not just streamers though ofc they are valuable testers, but we just don’t hear about the regular players that get in. I have friends who get into betas and are just casual players. They really do use a cross section of players.
Some don’t understand what a beta is, I see this atm in Classic Cata testing, people complaining about stuff not working, asking if they get to keep their chars etc. The whole point you are there for is to find broken things and identify issues. Not everything will be found and sometimes the fixes break ofc. I love finding broken stuff if I get a chance to test. Filling in bug reports makes me feel like I’m doing my part.
