Media Tour Builds should be Public

I still to this day do not understand what benefit there is to locking the builds of future expansions to a select group of streamers and journalists when games like WoW have public test servers like their current Alpha for Dragonflight where things like new classes, races, and areas can be previewed by everyone at the same time.

The most we get around here is a benchmark.

Wouldn’t it be more beneficial for everyone if we could be able to access these media tour builds in order to try out features and provide more feedback? Casting a wide net is especially important when it comes to job changes, since basing them off the opinions of such a small group of people might cause more harm than good.

I really wish builds and benchmarks were available on console Id love to make a womangar early when they finally exist.

WoW PTR ends up spoiling everything before they even hit the average consumer.

If you want to enjoy wow to the fullest now you pretty much have to stick to the ptr.

The streamers and journalists aren't the beta testers. They are only there to hype the players when an expansion comes and and are only seeing unreleased content when they are supposed to tell us about it.

No, I have zero interest in the story and areas and content being stale before it's even released.

PTR is just unpaid beta testing.

As a story-centric game no. All it would take is one data miner and you'd be out a whole salvo of content. WoW's story has always been a nod or a means to an end not the end all be all. Heck there's a good idea who the final boss of Dragonflight is probably going to be just by overworld hints.

Healers aside, FF14 more linear class designs(no way to hybrid spec) and lack of gameplay changing trinkets way easier to attempt to balance with an inhouse team than wow's past, current, and new talent trees(hoping they don't change survival so I can have a nearly BM pet with Survival spec).

No it's fine the way it is.

There is no reason for it to be other than to allow ourselves to find spoilers.

It's too late to provide feedback when the media tour happens because they are not going to make significant changes to the classes or gameplay a month before release. The build used for the media tour is 4 months old, so it's actually out of date. It's intended to be a preview, not a test.