So with every content patch, Blizzard expects their customers to test their content for them, which many people enjoy doing. So the PTRs are put up and every content patch, they are an abyssmal failure, with a rare exception: the Burning Crusade PTR. Let's first take a brief look back at the history of some of the PTRs devoted to testing raid content:

Naxxramus - pre-mades were enabled, very restrictive server limits: 3000+ person queues and 6 hours queue times
Black Temple - T5 gear was purchasable for those who were honored+ with the Violet Eye (Karazhan), somewhat successful however there were still severe stability issues
Patch 2.2 - pre-mades were enabled, servere stability issues
Zul'Aman - no pre-mades, PVE server is broken, extremely restrictive character-copy process yet open to all

In nearly every situation the stability of the server was brought into "danger" due to the extreme amount of people who were trying to access the PTR. In a sharp contrast to this, the invite-only beta testing of the Burning Crusade was quite pleasant. The server population was kept low, stability was as good as on the normal servers, and things could actually be tested. All the other public PTRs have been nightmares for guilds who have been actually trying to attempt a raid instance. Constant crashes and severe lag were prevalent through Naxx, BT, and here again in ZA. The only reason Juggernaut was able to actually test BT/Hyjal was because it was the last week of the PTR and everyone stopped logging onto it. So I am wondering when Blizzard is actually going to learn from their mistakes and make the PTR an environment which is not an experience in masochism.

It is laughable to expect the entirety of your customer base to be shoveled onto one or two servers and then ask them to beta test your product for you, for free all the while having constant server crashes and sporadic 5 minute lag spikes. It seems that things could be tested with much more care and scrutiny if either A) the PTR is open only to a select number of people (guild invites like the highly-successful TBC beta realm) or B) many, many more PTRs. I am really not sure why the multi-million dollar company cannot allocate additional hardware for 3-5 more servers, especially considering the number of free man-hours of testing they are getting in return. Furthermore, it seems like if they really wanted to focus testing, they could make the PVP server be for testing PVP, and vice versa:

- Disable all raid instances and 5mans on the PVP PTR.
- Disable all arenas and battlegrounds on the PVE PTR.

To make this a possibility of course, the character copy process would have to be revised so that when you copy a character, it gets propagated to all the PTRs instead of a single targeted one. This way if someone wanted to test both arenas and raiding, it wouldn't require two painful character copies. And about them: I think that said process needs revision. As soon as the copies were open, the web server was hammered, causing great difficulties when trying to complete a copy. One could get to step 3 or 4 or 5 and then be booted to an error page, requiring he/she to start the whole event over again. Why doesn't the server allocate resources based on sessions instantiated upon account validation and block future instantiations after a certain number? Wouldn't it seem better to block resource allocation at the "worldofwarcraft.com/ptr login level" rather than on step 4 of the copy process, which would cause the user just to spam his refresh button over and over?

It just seems to me that Blizzard isn't trying very hard when it comes to the PTRs. Given that they are getting free bug-testing one would think that they wouldn't to alienate those testers due to frustation over stability (and other) issues. So what does the EJ community think of the current state of Blizzard's PTRs? What do you think could be improved upon?

I think you may be missing some of the other benefits of the massive ptr populations. Sure there are lots of people wasting time, but it's generally the only way to get the sheer quantity of data to make sure they didn't break anything unrelated. (As we've seen, seemingly random things get broken sometimes). Which is not to disagree with you when you say that it's a terrible environment for the focused testing of BT or ZA. But that isn't the only goal, or at least I don't think it is.

The main point seems to be server population. They can either increase the server's load capability or increase the number of test servers, or perhaps both. In any case, the WoW population is in the millions and only allowing a few thousand to test is bound to cause problems. There are more testers than test spots available.

This wouldn't even be that big an issue if it weren't for those fortunate enough to have made it on to the PTR being kicked off relentlessly because of bad load handling server-side. I'd rather sit in a queue, or know that server stability is guaranteed through an extensive queue instead of being disconnected every 10 minutes because the server can't cope with the load it's facing. As such, the Naxx PTR's were probably some of the most successful ones to date.

I think it would be expected for the PTR to be absolutely booked at the moment. You have a large number of guilds with the game effectively defeated, with nothing to do for essentially 5 days a week.

Keep in mind, that testing for TBC included a friend's and family alpha, and layered beta with specific invites. It also had a lot more time to test.

I think that the testing for Naxxramas was largely successful as well, as most of the bugs of that zone were worked out during the PTR.

This PTR is not a disaster yet - it will only become a full scale disaster IF they do not fix the bugs that are found during this PTR, and try to launch 2.3 too quickly.

They should have a full-time persistent PTR, just like EQ had - and perhaps more than 1 working PTR server when it looks like 10k+ people are interested in "testing."

Maybe it also says something about the insatiable need for quality or just novel content by the players.

This is a minor issue, and only relevant to the current PTR, (and only after the server load issues are resolved I guess) but how hard would it be technically to make the area around ZA a pacified zone? At the moment it seems the vast majority of people are more interested in testing amazing new ways to gank each other than actually testing the instance.

On that note, a portal to ZA would be mega-awesome. Try getting 10 Alliance players to the zone-in at the moment. Not to mention the idiot cases of "Lol I zoned in and started the event and got saved, lets do this tomorrow instead?" because apparently waiting for the other 9 members of the raid to arrive is more difficult than BT.

It really just seems like a lack of willingness to invest, because for the most part they probably don't lose anyone over PTR. Every time the character copy is awful, and every time (pretty much) there are stability issues. The character copy I would assume runs into issues because of it being relayed through a low number of servers, compounded by transferring to only 2 servers, thus 10000 people trying to get through 2 machines, not working very well. Then stability is simply that they're trying to fit too many people onto not enough servers.

I assume that if they would invest in a few more servers for testing, and then maybe invest in better intermediaries to move from the live realms to the test realms, things would be smoother all around, and you'd think they could afford to spring for it.

I wouldn't think that adding more servers to test on would solve much of the big issues that occur on every PTR, but would solve the crashing of the servers to population issues. But I see the population issues being related to the character copy service.

Now I don't know if anyone has done a crawler to see how many server jumps are actually made when connecting to the site to copy over, but if its less than 2 jumps, once connected to the WoW site, it seems like the are trying to get to much use out of one server. Adding an extra server running the Character Copy service seems like it would lessen the severity of most issues.

I originally intended to copy to the PvE ptr server but after 20+ fails, for unknown reasons "An unknown error occurred at this time, please try again", 1 try for the PvP server worked. I would assume more is broken with the Character Copy than we can see.

If they have done it this way, and they keep doing it this way, I can only conclude they are getting the information they need from the testing, or are generally satisfied with the statistics they gather. Its presumptuous to assume that we know exactly what they care about when they make a PTR available down to the finest details, so trying to say things would be better if it was done in "our way" instead of theirs is just doubly so.

Complaining about how aggravating it is to beta test software (when stable, playable betas weren't promised anyone and the playable portion of the game people are actually paying for is in generally good condition) is like cursing the ocean for getting you wet.

I'm sure the crashes and lag from stress testing the PTR servers in ways that would never be acceptable on a live realm also serve a purpose.

I haven't set foot in Z'A yet, but it'll still be there in a few days when the initial wave of people logging on to see their new class changes and such has died down somewhat.

On the other hand, over at the EU PTRs i havent seen any problems beside the copy itself. We had like 1 crash on Sunday on EU-PVE and been playing 12+ hours both on saturday and sunday with two groups. Either the EU PTRs are less crowded or we are lucky to run our instances at "us offtimes" as EU is 8 hours ahead of US.

Another point about "it's hard to get to Zul Aman". If you planned to test Zul Aman, why didnt you copy over to the PvE PTR? If you dont flag yourself, its quite fun to stand in front of Zul Aman watching the massacre.

Refer to my post up a little ways to see why a lot of us ended up on the PvP PTR and not the PvE PTR.

It's really perplexing to see something that goes off like that. Copying to one server works, while copying to the other doesn't.

beside the fact that i have 4 times the same char on the ptr, firefox and "selenium ide" worked ok for me. as it always does when blizzard thinks that hammering their page is the way to get on the ptr.

disclaimer: i dont think its the right way to script hammer a webpage, nor will i explain how it works. i never run it unattended but it relieves you from actively having to click around that stupid page.

Thats not the point really.
No matter what script, or how many times you tried it, the PvE server is completely broken in terms of transferability. Can try to transfer to it as many times as you want, and keep on failing, but one try on the PvP server is a success, there is something really wrong with the Character Transfer/PTR servers.

That is what leads to so many problems each testing phase for the US as least, something breaks, everyone ends up on the same server, instability happens, people start bitching, but by then it's really to late to fix a lot of the problem. People who wanted to see the new character changes have seen them, probably wont visit the PTR till new changes are released. So after this first week when the majority of people see what they want, stability is a non-issue and the in-depth testing really goes on because there is no lag causing bad influences. Even when people can transfer to the PvE server, a few might, they possibly have seen everything they wanted to on the PvP server.

That is why this thread is going. The character copy always ends up broken in some way, and most of the time people end up on the same server. Would think that after each time of the character copy breaking it could of been fixed. I personally don't think Blizzard does it to stress test their PTR servers each time, but it is a possibility for future hardware to be released with Sunwell or WoTLK.

Do you have any evidence besides hearsay or conjecture that support that statement in anyway? Given Blizzard's problems in the past with some popular servers having issues when things were stressed that affected paying customers, it seems like a very important thing to test and make sure they can deal with, but since they can't induce it "in the wild" the PTRs would seem like the best opportunity.

Maybe I didn't make myself as clear as I meant.

What I wanted to say is that; maybe Blizzard intentionally makes it for a while, incapable of transferring to one of the PTR's, causing a mass influx of players to one server testing out a new piece of hardware of something that they don't tell us. Now this is total hearsay, but if that was the case, they would be monitoring it, and if something wasn't working right, they take the server down, replace the hardware, bring it back up. No public post or anything to say so, but gives them more than enough information that we never know of.

In a past PTR Blizzard said that it would be running on upgraded server hardware that was going to be deployed for all servers at a point, and wanted to adjust settings correctly. Same thing for this last PTR and the VOIP. Some Live servers needed new hardware to accommodate for the VOIP service, the this hardware had no initial impact on the playability of the realm. But the hardware was initially tested on the PTR before even being launched to the Live servers.

Take this PTR for example. The servers come up, very few transfers are over, a few people are trying to log into the Outlands hosted server, and it's crashing as much as the server which the thousands of level 1 alts are being made on. The server was brought down for a while, comes back up and no repeated crashes to everyone logging in, but still crashing to everyone being on one server.

But like I said, I don't believe they test new hardware by "breaking" the Character Copy, but with a company of Blizzards size, it's possible. Plus it's possible that new hardware will need to be added for Sunwell or WoTLK, but we don't know, thats why I said possibility.

Well theres a couple of problems with the transfer, the service is to busy to go through, thats from a mass influx of people trying to use it at one time, expected. The other is that everything goes through, you confirm to transfer, but it errors for no reason.
So if you're able to get through it means that the service still works, but jammed due to traffic, not broken. Different than what the US character copy is experiencing for the PvE server.

Below is what the US Character Copy returns when trying to do the PvE server. Helpful!

It's clear -- to me at least -- that pre-mades should never be enabled again unless some ultra high-end content needs testing and then solely for the purposes of testing said content.

Pre-mades encourage, um, people who will never get said gear and want to putz around in it for a few weeks and have to be the most useless testers. Witness 2.2.

The growing pains of the 2.3 PTR are clear, but at least it's people who want to test the content and changes instead of 11-year-olds who go "ZOMG I'M IN FULL T6."

Ironically now is a great time to be on the EU PTR's as there's a decent crowd there, mostly actual raiders and it's not 3000+ queues nor lagged to hell! (Other than the usual latency with the server being stateside ofc) The unfortunate problem ofc is for instance I've only managed to copy my main char over, got another which had all my mats, gold etc to get copied over but cant get that there. Then ofc we're trying to do a guild ZA run at some point and people are just very slowly trickling over 1 or 2 a day atm meaning by the time we get the group together the PTR will likely be filled and encounter the earlier mentioned issues!

One of the reasons for the stability of the Euro PTRs is, no doubt, from the huge issues with copying over characters.
I tried copying at various hours over the weekend and last Friday but it was universally hopeless.
So I'm guessing the amount of players on the Euro PvE PTR is fairly low because of the above; it also seems to display a "High" population regardless.

It's pretty sad since I got the impression from earlier character copies that they do use a ticketing system that simply creates the ticket and let's it be processed later on.
How on earth this simple queue could clog up so fast is beyond me.

As for private guild-scope invitations to a PTR; the only way I see this working will involve a lot of man hours of manual labor.
The only automated invitation system I can think of at the moment would involve the PTR for the Sunwell Plateau automatically inviting players that are in a guild that has acquired maybe some of their tier6 set pieces already.

Not entirely sure how it can be but I've tried to copy my char 3-4 times a day (morning, day, night etc.) for four days now without luck.

I got through around 0300 night to Sunday, and despite the character copy page saying it took 3-4 days my character was playable a little over 12 hours later. We had several people get through around 1500-1600 yesterday. It does seem a bit like people get through in packs, so I guess you just have to keep trying and hope to hit one of them, most likely at off hours.