I'll agree with Goggles in that testing this time seems pretty pointless unless you have a sense of Blizzard-incline-altruism.

Most everyone in this forum, I'm guessing, will stick with Ventrilo, so we have no real desire to test that.

Getting raids on a PTR for new content is feasible. Getting raids on a PTR to do something like Shazzrah? Not going to happen.

No talent patches for the ones shown at Blizzcon, so why should the average Joe care about something new for their class?


This patch is a huge chunk of nothing, as far as many potential testers see it. I'm not surprised if fewer PTR reports are being made.

I'm not talking about exploits. My post was in reference to the scaling of an ability. Blizzard owns the Grand Unified Equation of DPS - the One Sole Truth of Mechanics, which we do not have access to, we simply make attempts to replicate it using observations of the game. So when someone on this board says "hey this is scaling at really crazy rates," that says to me that someone didn't crunch the numbers enough on their end.

I don't think so, I would organise a testing cycle like this:

• Detect the problem (intern testing group, spreadsheets, statistics gathered from the game, groups who Scan the different forums)
• formulate a few solutions and get them reviewed by different groups (internal testing team, people that have been selected out of the player base)
• implant the solutions via PTR to see if you missed some cheesy thing (see devastate) or if the complaining is to big (see druid changes). PTR would function as a tool to test how the reaction of the player base will be, and as a mean to let min/maxers do their job and to let them find broken skills, which then get fixed.
• patch goes live.

I'd be surprised if their patch cycle doesn't work like this. Off course their are obvious flaws, the lack of a math wiz in the team is so obvious, and having someone like that would have let them avoid 3/4 of all the druid complaining and bitching because of stupid changes. Things like the devastate change should have been picked up internally before reaching PTR. And the review teams are a bit flawed since they seem to be very small (only a few class devs, a very professional raid testing team) but all in all the system works quite good.

Edit:
They could really use a math/spreadsheet wizz that gives them a mathematical model of the dps each class is capable of. Instead of this 'let's release our stuff and hope it's OK'

Yah that's what I'm talking about, its actually very surprising/disturbing when that sort of thing happens. You really would expect that Blizzard somewhere has a mechanic, either a spreadsheet or a model that cranks out some numbers for an upcoming change to an ability.

I don't think they do, actually (or if they do, it isn't accurate). The WoW combat system was probably never designed to be run as a simulator, and modifying it to do so could be very difficult. Anything that doesn't use the actual combat code the game does runs into the basic problem that what the code is supposed to do and what the code actually does are rarely the same thing. If you balanced enhancement shaman around WF having a 20% proc rate instead of a 36% proc rate, they'd end up incredibly overpowered in the actual game. Even if the simulation is accurate, balancing the game around that may not be the best idea. If rogues had been balanced around having 310 weapon skill and perfect cycles back in MC or BWL, they would have been worthless in the hands of an actual player. They can't really just tell people to l2p when they whine about how the best players still suck if they want people of that class to keep playing.

I suspect that may have been what happened with BoS pre-TBC, though -- they didn't see a need to give it to horde because they showed that (theoretically, at least), there was plenty of breathing room even without it. Of course, prior to KTM we had only vague guesses about how aggro worked, so no one came close to thier theoretical estimates other than through sheer luck. With thier knowledge of the game, BoS was a minor benefit, while with our knowledge it was an incredible boost.

Honestly, just tossing shit on the PTR and letting us figure out if it's balanced is nearly always going to be more effective. I may be giving them too much credit here, but in the Devastate case, they may well have known that it was overpowered, and just hoped that we wouldn't manage to break it before they added a better way to help Prot warriors solo.

Blizzard's managing of the forums and community information/education for WoW is pretty terrible.

I believe it was Sanya who trashed the Mythic forums for good with the reasoning that the forums should either be moderated properly or not run officially at all, actually. The WoW forums are a great example of the reasoning behind that statement. The state of the forums actually encourages juvenile behavior, and it's essentially impossible to get a new sticky or take down an old one these days.

They'd get burned less for communicating early thoughts and ventures if real info from Blizzard didn't tend to come with the same frequency as pronouncements from heaven. But they seem determined to shroud the workings of the game, both digital and developmental, behind a veil of mystery. So whenever that veil is pierced, people are going to swarm all over it. They still haven't quite grasped the concept of making smart players do useful work for them.

I'd have to agree here...I mean, do you wonder why the community overreacts so? When we only get little tidbits of information every few months of course we're going to over analyze and pick it to death. Then when it turns out to be true we're angry because it wasn't.

If information flowed more commonly we'd make less of a deal about it.

Oh, the ptrs got plenty of testing done. The one, and only thing that needed testing was really voice chat and the ways in which it can be overloaded/broken. which is why this round of Ptr actually had premade characters - with epic pvp gear - available.

Blizzard doesnt actually need EJ posters to test this patch, its not aimed at the raiding community (we have ventrillo!) the people zerging the ptr to try and play class x, that in the main they have no idea how to play (not because they are nessesarily noobish.. but they didnt level that class!) are a damm good test group for chattering their heads off in PuG parties

I expect there to be absolutely no premades available for the next ptr, as that is for testing zul'aman.. and I am planning to ditch kharazan from the raidschedule and go spend that raidslot on the ptr, in zul'aman with a full ten man from the raidgroup (wont be hard to get together, I think)

Malan, all I can really say is that I've been at this for a while. You certainly have been as well and far, far more actively in WoW. I agree and I don't I guess is all I can say. There's a lot of transparancy.

When I did it in EQ though, I constantly came up with strange things. I came up with mechanics that were clearly unintended and we used those mechanics until they either changed or became part of the game. EQ was built on DIKU and just plain had mechanical flaws that way. Even the monsterous layers built on top were always flawed, although often in usable ways. The main thing was when we showed something was broken, we knew it and in the end we were effectively always right. Now, I'm more hesitant. The system is so much more complex if nothing else.

WoW is a little different anyhow. The more I delve, the more it's obvious that there really is some deep math behind what they do. Perhaps it is horribly odd suppositions (Fulltime spriest, JoW, so on and so on for mages, fulltime those odd daze mechanic synergies and so on for melee) but there is a master plan there. It might be flawed and obviously is in application but it's there.