The Devs should hire players to test/give Job feedback

[ElHeggunte]

PTRs don't necessarily make for better game balance (especially since most of the people invited don't even play to test, they play to see the new content early). Take Warcraft as a popular example. Blizzard does PTR testing for months and still often times spend weeks after a new patch hotfixing class and content balance. And though SE may drop the ball sometimes, FFXIV is still one of the better balanced MMOs out there. Unless SE could find a way to make sure the players invited to the PTR were actually going to do what they're supposed to, simply having a PTR (especially an open one) probably wouldn't change anything.

[MomoOG]

PTRs don't necessarily make for better game balance (especially since most of the people invited don't even play to test, they play to see the new content early). Take Warcraft as a popular example. Blizzard does PTR testing for months and still often times spend weeks after a new patch hotfixing class and content balance. And though SE may drop the ball sometimes, FFXIV is still one of the better balanced MMOs out there. Unless SE could find a way to make sure the players invited to the PTR were actually going to do what they're supposed to, simply having a PTR (especially an open one) probably wouldn't change anything.

To be honest Blizzard just doesn't listen to any of the PTR feedback. They often get some very on point feedback which they ignore. Eventually they end up fixing the exact same stuff that was pointed to be bad early on much later down the line.

[Nezia]

PTRs don't necessarily make for better game balance (especially since most of the people invited don't even play to test, they play to see the new content early). Take Warcraft as a popular example. Blizzard does PTR testing for months and still often times spend weeks after a new patch hotfixing class and content balance. And though SE may drop the ball sometimes, FFXIV is still one of the better balanced MMOs out there. Unless SE could find a way to make sure the players invited to the PTR were actually going to do what they're supposed to, simply having a PTR (especially an open one) probably wouldn't change anything.

Blizzard has always been on a very high horse, they more than often just turn a deaf ear to the community, trust me, there are TONS of constructive feedback in wow during PTR, it's only that blizzard won't listen, they have always adopted a posture of "we know best what you want" and "everythin we make is good, if you don't like it that only means you don't know how to like it."

[Fatshine]

Blizzard has always been on a very high horse, they more than often just turn a deaf ear to the community, trust me, there are TONS of constructive feedback in wow during PTR, it's only that blizzard won't listen, they have always adopted a posture of "we know best what you want" and "everythin we make is good, if you don't like it that only means you don't know how to like it."

At least the Overwatch team is a little different. Most changes in that game have been good.

[TankHunter678]

At least the Overwatch team is a little different. Most changes in that game have been good.

The Overwatch team unfortunately pulls the same shit as the WoW team.

The PTR is mostly a "this is what is coming" environment and they regularly ignore community input. Unless the bug is truly game breaking or otherwise major, or the devs are playing favorites and decide to pull changes from their favorite hero up for changes, things rarely change on the PTR and go to Live as is. Leading to the very problems people were pointing out manifesting.

To put it into perspective, The Heroes of the Storm team after booting their hero balance designer, Geoff Goodman, over to Overwatch because his balancing methods were terrible and literally killing the game saw a large boost in balancing quality leading to it becoming one of the most balanced blizzard games. With a good PTR that they, from what I know, listens to player concerns, reports, and suggestions on upcoming changes. Heroes of the Storm has been seeing a steady climb in playerbase since they removed Geoff Goodman.


That said, what SE could probably do is create a test dungeon, test raid, and test solo duty using existing game content on a PTR in order to have people test the classes in a pseudo live environment in order to draw larger scale data from. No need to show any new content besides maybe upcoming abilities for the sake of getting data for making balance changes. That way they can keep the meat of the content coming in the next patch/expansion under wraps and perform the main goal of a balance testing PTR.