I may have read something about them having test servers soon but can't recall.

Since you are getting a lot of feedback from your community to make all the changes to your game it is almost a must to implement test servers in the near future. A place where players can test before hand so you can get feedback early on which should make your patches a bit smoother. Getting 2.0 out as close as perfect will be critical to the success of FFXIV!

Please do this!