Private PTR Testing?

[Arcus]

Hey guys, just had a thought, Private PTR testing.

Player testing has been around for a long, long time and quite obviously someone needs to test the content presented by Blizzard. However, with this testing process, encounter, strats for those encounters, and lore seem to be jeopardized IMO. For example, I logged onto MMO champion and saw Arthas spoilers. I, of course, didn't read it, but some ass will eventually spoil it for me in trade. High end guilds also know how to do the encounters before they're released, while not directly affecting anyone, it does lose some of the luster as opposed to entering an instance on Live and doing something without prior knowledge.

What I'm getting at is, Blizzard has more money than God. Why not higher 25, 50, hell 100 paid, that's 4-25 man groups, 10-10 man groups, or 20-5 man testers. private testers to test the new content?

[llDemonll]

that is why mmo-champ puts a big alert that says 'dont read this if you dont want to be spoiled'

[Dorque]

That is why Blizzard, and indeed all companies, do in fact test all of their content internally.

However, for the content to be properly tested, it must be tested under "normal" conditions - in other words, with thousands of people using it at the same time. A massive amount of bugs are discovered during this time that just couldn't be found in a private testing situation - keep in mind that even when being paid POORLY testers are earning $9 USD an hour. For Blizzard to pay 1000 testers to playtest the new content for 100 hours each (which is NOTHING to how heavily a live server is used) they would have to pay out over a million dollars for something that they can get for free, which will do a far superior job of proper testing. Just imagine how much money would be paid out if everyone on the five highest-pop servers were paid $9 an hour for each hour they played (and even that may be an underestimation of the total traffic on PTRs)

If spoilers really upset you so much, I encourage you to turn off your public chat channels when a new patch is on the horizon, and possibly leave your guild. It might even do you some good to stop playing until the new patch comes out.

Also, it might do you some good to learn a little bit about the world around you. Just saying.