Quote Originally Posted by BakoolJaJa View Post
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.