Does gw2 need a PBE?

[The V.8759]

PBE= Public Beta Environment

This would mean that Arenanet can Let players test out balance changes and pull off data from the PBE to determine the impact of the changes.

Think about a PBE in PvP and an instanced raid for example to differentiate between pvp and pve

[zenleto.6179]

Maybe. It could be something.

[Arzurag.7506]

Absolutely, they need to test stuff before they bring it on the live-servers.Though, I guess it´s not worth the effort due them releasing a balance patch once in a blue moon.

[Ashantara.8731]

@zenleto.6179 said:Maybe. It could be something.

It would definitely be better than having skill updates being shoved down our throats without them going through some practical testing beforehand.

[zenleto.6179]

@Ashantara.8731 said:

@zenleto.6179 said:Maybe. It could be something.

It would definitely be better than having skill updates being shoved down our throats without them going through some practical testing beforehand.

Probably yeah.

[Malafaia.8903]

I never play on test environments, but i know there's people willing to do it, so... WHY NOT?

[Josif.2015]

ArenaNet would benefit a lot if they allowed the community to help them with the balance patches and giving them feedback, both for PvE and PvP.

[Imperadordf.2687]

Yes, if it's not gonna be "anyone can enter". Needs to have criterias, needs to be elitist.

[Dami.5046]

No because people will just want it all nerfed, no point.

[The V.8759]

@Mea.5491 said:

@"Etheri.5406" said:The community is 95% clueless about balance;

This. It would be like "I main this profession so it needs buffs" lol.

Well thats not true. Playing on a PBE doesnt mean that your opinion matters roughly said. ArenaNet can still take a lot of data from the server to see what the effects of changes are

[Etheri.5406]

@The V.8759 said:

@Mea.5491 said:

@"Etheri.5406" said:The community is 95% clueless about balance;

This. It would be like "I main this profession so it needs buffs" lol.

Well thats not true. Playing on a PBE doesnt mean that your opinion matters roughly said. ArenaNet can still take a lot of data from the server to see what the effects of changes are

So we get more spam with the vast majority of players claiming stuff they don't grasp. I'm sorry if I want wacko balance ideas i'll just read these forums.

Anet needs to ignore it's casual community and start talking / listening to high-end guilds for the respective gamemodes. I have more faith in the couple hundred top end pvp players than in the thousands of silver and bronze players with strong opinions. Same for PvE. Same for WvW.

The loud mediocrity just demands to feel relevant; but in truth they just shoot themselves in the feet time after time.

[Game of Bones.8975]

Data needs to be collected from the widest possible swath of players.Players shouldn't give opinions of new skills only play the skills as presented. There should be random instances where solo or PUGs take on a group as the devs design.The devs can then determine how the average player uses the skill, how often it is used, and if it needs to be modified.On the downside, I think the majority of the people who would be interested in how skills are tweaked are the "elite" players who modify builds for the best possible outcome. The "average player" follows what the elite players have said what works for them.

[TheQuickFox.3826]

I don't care too much. I would not 'waste' my time on beta testing because I need all my play time to achieve my goals on the live server.On the other hand: if many player would like to preview stuff or beta test, why not?

In the end, it will be relevant how much time and resources such a thing would require off the company, and if this is worth delaying other things for that have also be requested by the community members.

[Game of Bones.8975]

@"Etheri.5406" said:I have more faith in the couple hundred top end pvp players than in the thousands of silver and bronze players with strong opinions. Same for PvE. Same for WvW.

If 90% of your customers are "silver and bronze players" those are the people you need to get your information from. On a bell-curve, the high-end players are the outliers.

[Airdive.2613]

@Game of Bones.8975 said:

@"Etheri.5406" said:I have more faith in the couple hundred top end pvp players than in the thousands of silver and bronze players with strong opinions. Same for PvE. Same for WvW.

If 90% of your customers are "silver and bronze players" those are the people you need to get your information from. On a bell-curve, the high-end players are the outliers.

You don't necessarily need to get any information at all.It might be valuable, or it might undermine the developer's creative inspiration. Ultimately ANet has every reason to develop their game to the best of their abilities, not their playerbase's. They are the content creators, not consumers.

[Danikat.8537]

I'm not sure which answer I'd pick but I'm leaning towards no. Just having a public test server isn't a guarantee that a game will be bug free or that most players will like the balance changes, there's a lot more that needs to go into it and even with a really good process it's not fool-proof. Plenty of games have test servers and they have exactly the same problems as GW2, sometimes even worse.

The biggest problem with test servers I've seen is that a lot of people who use them couldn't care less about testing. They use it to get a preview of the new content ahead of time for their own interest, or to practice so they have a headstart on new builds and completing new content (e.g. spend 2 weeks practicing on the PTS, claim "worlds first" raid clear on the first day after release) or just to mess around with tools provided to facilitate testing like free instant level-ups or infinite free currency. I'm as guilty of this as anyone else - I used to love playing on Ultima Online's test servers because I could boost my character to ridiculous levels and get infinite gold (in my defense I was a young teen, and I'd been told they were for the developers to test the server and they just needed lots of people on it, it was only later on I learned that wasn't the case). I've also used the Elder Scrolls Online test servers to try out new builds or cosmetic changes to characters. But none of that helps the developers.

On a related note I absolutely disagree that what you want is all "elitist" players testing. If you only get the best players (or the ones who consider themselves to be the best) giving feedback on changes it will almost certainly lead to an extreme version of what we saw with HoT - a vocal minority crying out for harder content because everything in the game was too easy then a lot of people crying for it to be changed after release because what they actually wanted was better rewards (which they associate with content advertised as being harder, because of other games) which they could farm easily and other people crying for it to be changed because they're not that good and find themselves incapable of completing the new content.

But it also needs support from Anet to monitor and collate feedback and pass it on to the right teams, and time for those teams to review it and work out how to act on it. They do have an entire QA department so I assume they do that already but with more testers there's more feedback so it takes more time.

Finally there's the timing problem. An update needs to be nearly finished before players can test it, ok maybe the voice acting isn't done and some animations and things aren't in, but it all needs to be functional and basically finished. Which means they're going to be close to the intended release date and what they have time to fix will be very limited. Big changes like re-writing the story are probably out of the question. So you end up with the company "ignoring" lots of feedback and even bug reports because there simply isn't time to fix it before release and lots of negative feelings from people who feel like their time and effort is going to waste because the feedback is never used.

I think a PTS can work, but it needs to be done right and that's easier said than done and needs a lot of time and resources from the company and buy-in from everyone at the company to be flexible enough to make the process work.

[Erik.6951]

No. It would further divide the community, and people would still get just as frustrated when things don't work on the PBE anyway. "I wanna do this event, ANET should have made it work before releasing it" even though it's not "released", etc.

[Game of Bones.8975]

@Etheri.5406 said:

@Game of Bones.8975 said:

@Etheri.5406 said:I have more faith in the couple hundred top end pvp players than in the thousands of silver and bronze players with strong opinions. Same for PvE. Same for WvW.

If 90% of your customers are "silver and bronze players" those are the people you need to get your information from. On a bell-curve, the high-end players are the outliers.

Yes; and 90% of your customers don't have balance issues. They have L2P issues. Anet doesn't need to change the game to make it more balanced for them.

You need your high-end scene because of what is essentially trickle-down economics in video games. Your high end players determine the meta; rely on balance, provide the majority of external content, competition, goals for others to aspire towards, ...

You cannot in any way balance for the "90% silver and bronze players". You cannot in any way design the game around these players either. At best; you can try and have healthy learning curves for most champions and the game overall. Look at ANY competitive game or game with a healthy pvp scene. Not a single one balances for its majority; all of them balance for the high-end scene.Only insane outliers (low skill high reward type of stuff) gets reworked because it's difficult to balance for both high and low end. And if they are in fact too difficult to balance for both; they're often just left as setup while banished from high-end meta. Which is ok.

You can keep going "90% of the players is more of the players!!!" but that doesn't mean they have any idea what they're on about. 90% of the players have no idea what they're doing; yet you want to put them in charge of balancing :trollface:

I agree with most of what you are saying. People look to the upper players for advice, I know I do.That is one of the reasons why I think individual instances would be the most helpful. Run things past the best players first, make mods to skills, then allow the rest to experience the already modded skills in their own instance.I didn't mean to say that you should rely solely on the "average, low-information" player, I didn't word my post as well as I could have.

[Etheri.5406]

@Game of Bones.8975 said:

@Etheri.5406 said:

@Game of Bones.8975 said:

@Etheri.5406 said:I have more faith in the couple hundred top end pvp players than in the thousands of silver and bronze players with strong opinions. Same for PvE. Same for WvW.

If 90% of your customers are "silver and bronze players" those are the people you need to get your information from. On a bell-curve, the high-end players are the outliers.

Yes; and 90% of your customers don't have balance issues. They have L2P issues. Anet doesn't need to change the game to make it more balanced for them.

You need your high-end scene because of what is essentially trickle-down economics in video games. Your high end players determine the meta; rely on balance, provide the majority of external content, competition, goals for others to aspire towards, ...

You cannot in any way balance for the "90% silver and bronze players". You cannot in any way design the game around these players either. At best; you can try and have healthy learning curves for most champions and the game overall. Look at ANY competitive game or game with a healthy pvp scene. Not a single one balances for its majority; all of them balance for the high-end scene.Only insane outliers (low skill high reward type of stuff) gets reworked because it's difficult to balance for both high and low end. And if they are in fact too difficult to balance for both; they're often just left as setup while banished from high-end meta. Which is ok.

You can keep going "90% of the players is more of the players!!!" but that doesn't mean they have any idea what they're on about. 90% of the players have no idea what they're doing; yet you want to put them in charge of balancing :trollface:

I agree with most of what you are saying. People look to the upper players for advice, I know I do.That is one of the reasons why I think individual instances would be the most helpful. Run things past the best players first, make mods to skills, then allow the rest to experience the already modded skills in their own instance.I didn't mean to say that you should rely solely on the "average, low-information" player, I didn't word my post as well as I could have.

I know you didn't say you only listen to the majority. The issue is for a game as GW2; you cannot listen to the majority in general.

In games like league, dota, even overwatch you still have the trickling down in sufficient amounts. The high end players are a very small fraction of the votes; but they influence a large fraction of the votes through various media. Reddit, twitch, discussions, guilds / clans / communities / ...

All of this? Doesn't exist anymore for GW2. Casuals don't watch streams or read discussions on twich. Many don't even consider top tier players as better, just as "toxic elitists". And clearly; they know balance better, because in silver DH is really really OP. The popular feedback you get from the GW2 community is usually... not good feedback. That is the truth.

Side thought : The argument of XXX are the majority so they are important is genuinely a very, very dangerous and malicious argument. It was made when WvW was neglected; but you just kicked out a major aspect of the game. Same for PvP; another aspect of the game gone. Now it's being made for raids and difficult fractals, after all casual players are the majority.

Something will /always/ be the majority; but if you ignore the rest then soon your majority will still be a whole lot smaller. And casuals, even if they don't realise it, do benefit a lot from having a large and healthy veteran population. You know, for guilds and making groups and content and all that stuff. WvW without veterans will be ... not even close to the same. PvP without veterans will be a major clownfiesta with nearly no "close" games. PvE with insufficient veterans compared to casuals still leads to elitism because you can't rely on the average player to carry their weight.

And the smaller the veteran population gets, the more elitist they will be. After all; it's the only way they can continue their style of play. There are "QQ stop elitism" posts in both pve and wvw subfora; but it won't stop nor get better. It's mostly because... well, we do it to ourselves :)

So at the end of the day... majority groups very frequently told minority groups that they aren't important or relevant; but in due time they simply made the game worse and less inviting for themselves. And they further harmed the development of these modes, too. Which is something that is most likely not reversible and the direct result of our toxic yet friendly community.

[PyrateSilly.4710]

NoThere are things/bugs that do not turn up until you have it on the live server, just the nature of the beast.Most will just see what is coming up and stock pile materials just to make more gold. They will only try out new things just to be the first do them when it goes live. Various things like these is what has happened on so many other beta servers and that's why most just don't do them anymore.

[Sinful.2165]

I’ve always thought they’d be well served by a public test server.

So many changes go live that players spot and Anet fixes, currently the test environment is the live server. It would only benefit the game to put a buffer between anets rather low quality internal testing and the live servers.

Consider the deadeye change for example where they removed stealth from kneel and put it at the beginning of dodge. The player should shoot someone and dodge to stealth only to be immediately revealed when their projectile hit the target. LOLWUT? That would have been caught by any half decent player in 10 minutes of testing but it went live?? Do they even have an internal test team?

So yes, absolutely. Anet, let some of your enthusiastic player base do some free testing for you.

[Revilrad.1962]

No because people who participate would start wanting "special" , "prestigious" rewards for their effort and the whole thing will become just another recurring Celebration Event.

[TheGrimm.5624]

One thing to consider here is the value of dedicated testers versus on/off again testers and whether or not people play all the classes. Quite often players will be biased since a change being made will be on the class they "main" if they don't play all the classes and therefore the feedback you might receive might be biased resulting in errors in testing. On/off again testers may also use different metrics and not be consistent again resulting in skewed results.

[AncientYs.8613]

Yes yes yes you have three yes's from me! Make guildwars2 great again!

[Dreadshow.9320]

So that players testing things can go to Reddit or the official forum and complain that the bug or issue they reported several times still made it too live? Over and over again ? Nah we get those already no need for more.