Q u o t e:
Wasn't the Trial of the Champion 5 man also made available for testing weeks before it was supposed to be out? I think I recall Daelo saying yesterday that it wouldn't be up for a while, but after we couldn't test the new raid last night and today it suddenly came online. Seems they caved in to pressure and just pushed it out so people wouldn't be mad about not having anything to test.
We have schedules for content testing that we follow as closely as we can. These schedules often have to be adjusted due to unforeseen circumstances. There can still be valuable testing and feedback completed in the new Argent dungeon, and the errors you receive are necessary to our development process.
Q u o t e:
However, it would be nice to get a patch that didn't crash the servers for a couple days after it's been deployed.
Ideally, we want the same thing as you. We want you to be able to test the content and provide bug reports without running into errors and disconnects. At this stage of the PTR testing though, these errors are one of our focuses.
Q u o t e:
Why dedicate the time and money of recruiting a diverse player test base when you can just give it out to millions of people who'd sell their mother just for a chance to R&D the product for free? Blizz releases the PTR where they make incremental changes, and instead of QA'ing the shiat out of it themselves, they let the player base do it for them since their are some VERY smart people who play this game and can recognize subtle coding errors
We have a very capable QA staff that works very hard to bring quality content and new functionality to our game. We would be ignorant to think that our players were not capable and willing to provide bugs and feedback during the development cycle. That is not to say that we "farm out testing" to the public, it would be impossible for players on the PTR to test everything.
Q u o t e:
So what you're saying is, none of the internal QA play a warlock
Because I think it would be pretty hard to "miss" the fact that one of the classes major damaging spells... you know.....doesn't work
Granted, we are a few builds behind, but the bloody thing still doesn't want correctly and its been what, 2-3 weeks?
Unfortunately, every bug cannot be fixed before the next PTR build that is released. The bug is documented, and will be addressed. Not every bug manifests itself before the PTR is released to the public, and there are many revisions of the game on the PTR before the patch development is complete.
Q u o t e:
I bet that while y'all complain about the 'obvious' things that Blizzard missed, they're shaking their heads and sighing as they count over the thousands of bugs and errors that they caught before you even downloaded the PTR.
We have a lot of work, and no time to shake our heads. But honestly, we appreciate the passion that our players have about the game and their classes. I personally feel that on some level, the devotion we see from players illustrates the quality of product that we've produced.