Time for a public test server?

[Ariane]

They don't do it because of the shit show it causes.

Story is a big thing with this game. Ive seen fcs break apart because of people who rushed to lvl and spoil the end of HW story. People are assholes and this is their game. They take pride in it as they should and dont need some asshat without any accountability ruining it for others before it is live. Same reason there was a strict NDA for beta.

But they wouldn't have to give full access. They could give level 70 jobs, with the MSQ disabled/completed and also disable any trials/dungeons that would reveal too many spoilers.

[Felis]

But they wouldn't have to give full access. They could give level 70 jobs, with the MSQ disabled/completed and also disable any trials/dungeons that would reveal too many spoilers.

Also disable many UI windows (like crafting log), DoH an DoL classes and most NPCs

[Freyt]

I don't really see the need for this. We're not exactly competing to finish the story first or something. We're not competing with each other in order to get the best gear. Even now, with PVP, gear will be essentially worthless. As far as PVP is concerned, it's generally an everybody wins type of game, and there's no major incentive to be on the top. Competitive gameplay exists as a very small minority of content within the game, and changes to such small pieces of a game don't warrant investment into a test server of some kind.

I think it's plain to see that everyone is merely concerned with the overall state of balance between classes, but there is no real reason to fix issues that may arise a week or so in advance to an official patch, which is all the more reason not to actually invest money into such an effort.

[SpeckledBurd]

They don't really need any story in it, at best they need a few zones and a few reused 8-man raids and 4-man dungeons that have been slightly retuned to the next max level.

[Raim]

I imagine it would be easy enough to make a PTR with premade max level characters that have quests deactivated, and locked to only using certain zones. They did basically that for the press event anyway. Just put people in a zone with target dummies and let them at it.

[Skapoc]

Yes it is. Developers aren't perfect and stuff falls through the cracks all the time. Sometimes the player base needs to actual get their hands on stuff to fully test and make sure its ready for release as well.

A PTR doesn't have to spoil anything, it can be limited to one zone or a select number of fights. Hell they can be old zones and fights as long as you can test the classes and see how the skill and job balance is working.

It would save a lot of manpower(no need to hire anyone to test really, players do it for free) and it leads to a better game overall.

[Khalithar]

Yes, yes it is. It's players that figure out things that the dev miss and notice certain classes being over or under powered and making efforts to fix them.

On Blizzard's test server for WoW they allow players to test everything coming up, ALL the content, all the raids and dungeons, and allow players to use the numbers and gear to help the devs balance things, there's spoilers and all of the surprises are removed ahead of time. Know what? That's the way I prefer it, believe it or not I actually hate surprises. Especially when it comes to things like new abilities and numbers, I want to know EVERY change, EVERY number, EVERY mechanic, and all of that ahead of time so I know what to expect.

The devs need to stop being so restrictive and just let players in to test the content and use parsers to determine where things are messed up or don't work right. It's definitely a lesson they need to learn from Blizzard. If you don't want to be spoiled, fine, don't go on the PTR and don't read the posts about it on the forums. Keep yourself away from any sort of information you don't want, but for the rest of us? I say the devs should let us in to see what's up.

[Caitlinzulu]

What i dont understand is why introduce a confusing set of stance dancing on one class while removing the stance dance from another? namely bard having to and removing it from healers. Understand who can

[Atmora]

What i dont understand is why introduce a confusing set of stance dancing on one class while removing the stance dance from another? namely bard having to and removing it from healers. Understand who can

You literally just use the new songs off cooldown, there's nothing confusing about that, your only real goal is to use mages as little as possible, since you can cut one song off early. Well unless Mags is more dps than I think, then you just cut off whatever else the lowest raidwide song is early.

[Remedi]

No, the only difference would have been when the HW job changes would have come instead of how they would change a job, consider that those changes were handed in response to player reactions to the classes and having a PTR wouldn't have changed those at all imho.
I mean no offense but the forum was sure that AST needed a +30% healing buff when it come out so forgive if I'm very sceptic about all of this