Someone on Reddit spotted a curious beta in their battle.net launcher and decided to share this with the community. The unknown beta in the list was later revealed to not be related to Classic+, but the post itself sparked a conversation. Do we want a PTR or Beta for Classic+?
My initial reaction is - no way. That brief period of discovery in the aptly named Season of Discovery was some of the best fun I've had with the game in years. Getting into a new version where it's already solved through datamining and running the content on the PTR is terrible.
At the same time, modern Blizzard is very far away from their old "when it's ready" philosophy. Bug, server issues, and poor planning are pretty much a given in any new content drop. So what do we want more, a polished experience or a fresh one for Classic+?
Fresh, definitely! I think for retail it makes sense to have a more well-tested and polished experience. For Classic a lot of the fun for me is exploring the world, finding quests off the beaten path, and taking in a sense of the world's living breathing nature.
I'm completely okay to send in some bug reports when encountering some jank as a trade-off :3
I think it depends on what Classic+ is and how much of it is completely new. They were able to get away with no PTR for SoD because most of the content was just added onto the existing game. They did have SoD Phase 8 on the PTR as I recall, because so much of that was new. I'd expect a lot more bugs if they're doing more of it from scratch, and their QA track record of late is not the best.
Still, that doesn't mean that they can't withhold some things for live. They did a remarkably good job of hiding all of the rune locations from dataminers. Maybe there's some middle ground where the game can get some proper testing, but leave plenty for everyone to experience for the first time at launch.
And I believe they still had to change/rebalance the new raid a lot within the first few days because it was otherwise a mess on launch. So it's not like PTR testing helps them much these days.
That's true. Recently I've wondered if they even get that many people on the PTR to test content. It usually seems pretty dead when I'm on there, but that might be because we're in the 3rd iteration of TBC and there's not much new to test.
MoP Classic was particularly rough on launch. Though that was more due to server capacity they refused to increase for way too long.
Might be that. The Legion Remix PTR was quite lively.
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Furious
2 years ago
