Incremental Steps Towards Something New: What Should Be Gradually Prototyped?

[BakoolJaJa]

Back to topic: this game sorely lacks "beta features", instead of throwing everything into a wall and see what it sticks.

Crazy, I swear you just opened my eyes. Somehow, until now, I genuinely never realized that this game has no beta testing of anything whatsoever, when every other MMO I know does.

And it's not only huge MMOs like WoW that do it. LOTRO is a small, ancient, niche MMO and even they have a test server where they roll out new features/instances/class changes/etc before they actually go live with them. It makes a HUGE difference. It cannot be overstated just how important this kind of stuff is. It can save the devs so much time and a lot of headache that they go through when they release yet another content flop. Like you say, many of the critical issues become so obvious if you actually let the players try it for even a short amount of time.

They'd never change anything like that at this point though. This feedback will also never get "monitored" along with 99% of all other feedback.

[Jeeqbit]

Crazy, I swear you just opened my eyes. Somehow, until now, I genuinely never realized that this game has no beta testing of anything whatsoever, when every other MMO I know does.

SE has over 100 people across their Quality Assurance staff and they spend months finding bugs before the actual release of a major patch.

So from SE's perspective, test servers aren't needed.

However, finding bugs and finding "philosophical disagreements players have with the patch" are different things and I think public test servers allow the latter to be found.

LOTRO is a small, ancient, niche MMO and even they have a test server where they roll out new features/instances/class changes/etc before they actually go live with them.

Small MMOs probably do it so they don't have to pay for a large QA team like SE does.