Blizzard takes advantage of us way too much.

[Lolites]

I think we should reflect on why we should or shouldn't give them FREE assistance.

bcs WE WANT the game in best shape possible? without stres (or other) the game would be in much worse state, there are some things you cant test with just couple people, you need thousands, and blizz cant possibly have so many paid testers, thats why beta/ptr exists in the first place...

without our "free" help, only thing that would happen would be game on release having FAR MORE bugs and issues, which blizz would repair then, so honestly, we would be much more affected by not giving the free help than blizz themselves...
so we are not helping blizzard, but OURSELVES and other players

[VinceVega]

The stress test is the most recent thing, thats also why I included how the beta testers where treated for their efforts. They are requesting that we take time out of our normal day and play schedule for them, if that doesnt sound like something that should come with incentive im preaching to the choir here.

Yeah because the beta tester don't WANT to play at all... all those people begging for beta access... what a grant gesture of them and so altruistic and selfless^^

[Lolites]

but they've made it clear they don't give a crap about our feedback unless a huge amount of people are yelling at them

thats... how it should work? well not the yelling part
but if you have 1000 testers and 10 tells you something and 700 tells you otherwise (obviously some testers wont tell anything), you cant and SHOULDNT listen to the 10, ofc they will ignore their feedback... i know, everyone thinks they and their feedback is in majority, but thats seldom truth

[Mendzia]

Sadly we got these weird times now when the players are testing games for producers... and are willing to pay for this.
Does not matter if you name it early access or alpha/beta testing.

[FelPlague]

I see a lot of you saying that I sound like I am entitled to something? Do you folks not understand how valueable this information is for them? Like thousands and thousands of dollars would be spent trying to recreate the experience on their end when instead the go to the forums and ask you all to do it for them. In the digital age your data is worth far more than you guys seem to realize, and if a company wants to have access to it why should they get it for free?

Yeah no thanks.

Imagine how fucking shitty it would be the article.'


"blizzard hireds 2 million new workers to do a stress test for their servers! Amazing!"
"Blizzard fires 2 million workers hired only 30 minutes earlier, fuck blizzard evil company boooooooo!!!!"

It is 100% optional, if you want to help them, to test their game, so it can hopefully be better for you and your community members when it goes live, that is on you.
if you think that is wrong, then man you need to look in on yourself, that helping your fellow man is "selfish"
there is zero way blizz could ever afford to buy the amount of testers that would even come close to how many people play wow, for example back in wotlk lets use that, the simple 10 million.

to do a good stress test they usuaully want around 5-10% of what they would have during launch, maybe even fine with 1% so lets use the bare min, 1%

So to get 1% of the playerbase worth of testers that would be....

100,000 people... Alright so blizzard hires 100,000 people to do a stress test, that is... at bare minimum 1,000,000 dollars an hour, just to test, and once the test is over they fire them...

yeah not gunna work.

so blizzard gives us the request "hey help us test this now, so we can get the info we need to do our best to make sure it does not crash when it goes live for you"

and guess what, it is 1000000000% optional, you do not need to go to a test unless you want to.

"Like thousands and thousands of dollars would be spent trying to recreate the experience"
No, millions would be, because it is VERY hard to get hundreds of thousands of computers to act like players, yes they could just stress their servers, but needless server pings do not act like humans, they do not pull 80 mobs and spam abilities, they do not spam chat, they do not spam /emotes, they dont go and try to do a dungeon, and a raid, and go to their bank, and so on so forth.

- - - Updated - - -

Sadly we got these weird times now when the players are testing games for producers... and are willing to pay for this.
Does not matter if you name it early access or alpha/beta testing.

i mean its not a weird time, it has been this way since the begining of well those, i remember people buyying test vehicles, test devices, etc, way back when, before they reach mainstream production in attempt to catch things. it is not new, just as scale changes requirements change.

when a game has 10,000,000 players, to replicate even 1% is 100,000 players, and having to pay 100,000 testers for even an hour is too fucking massive of a task, so telling players "hey, help us do this, and you can get an early look at content!" is something people will gladly do.


hell even back in fucking vanilla wow, when the wow alpha came out people were paying to get into the wow vanilla alpha.

- - - Updated - - -

Millions yeah.. thats why EA is always implementing our feedback in an honest way @_@

i mean they do, just not all the feedback people want, EA actually has sucummed to the players a LOT just not in all the ways they want, look up the deal with their latest star wars battlefront game, which is actually seen as pretty amazing. it was seen as a 6/10 at launch, but by the end sits near a 9/10

- - - Updated - - -

i WAS willing to give them free feedback. but they've made it clear they don't give a crap about our feedback unless a huge amount of people are yelling at them. so i'm going to save my time and just stop giving my unwanted feedback.

you say that but that aint even close to true.

Flytrap had 2 abilities, a speed boost and an attack, speedboost in slot 1, attack in slot 2, stayed this way for most of the beta, me and a friend were complaining about it, put a feedback in each.
Next week the speedboost was gone.
Next week it was back... and in slot number 2!
and that wsas not something in the forums, it was something me and a friend who have spent TONS of time testing the abomination factory found, and sent in.


just because you send in 1 message saying "I want my class to be able to 1 shot every class" and blizzard does not do it, does not mean blizz does not listen to the little things.

[Kumorii]

Aloha and beta testing have existed for a long time and it's not only blizzard. Most gaming studios have it in some form. Not all of them are public though.

I got a solution though. You can just not sign up or if you really wanna make it slightly more inconvenient, you can sign up and if you get in not do any testing at all.

[FelPlague]

The topic name is a bit clickbait-y but I appreciate the levelheadedness shown so far.

The problem is that Blizzard asks for “feedback”, when in reality it seems they’re only looking for praise. Any which I mean, they’ve proven over the years to completely disregard player feedback until AFTER things have gone live, and only when there is a HUGE outcry. They aren’t reacting to feedback at that point, but instead to a mob.

As far as the notion of providing “free feedback”, I think that’s something we would all readily offer, simply because clearly, everyone on this site cares about WoW to some extent. Even the folks who do nothing but bash on it, clearly cared enough at one point to sign up for a forum to talk about WoW.

It seems to me, Blizzard’s current leads on WoW just seem to live in their own little bubble, and don’t want to accept any sort of feedback or criticism, and I think it has contributed to a general feeling of players being utterly ignored.

Level headedness? i wouldnt really call it that...

Also "They're only looking for priase" what in your god danmed mind at you talking about?
Ion and many others commonly go to the most fricken critical of the community asking for help, and hold Q&A's with such aswell, did you skip the ENTIREITY of the Preach interview where he just told him blizzard were wrong?

[Samuraijake]

You are complaining about a stress test. The absolute absurdity of your "rant" can be deconstructed by simply reading what kind of test they're conducting.

no offense but your motive towards debunking the op.. and your signature attached to your post seem kind of contradictory to each other... just sayin.

[Cæli]

by far I'd say the worst behaviour they had since a few years is taking advantage of some core player's addiction and fomo to add rng/time gated rewards for their 15 years old advanced character in order to make them play and make them feel they have to play to not be "missing out"

[Ghostile]

My favorite part is your inability to figure out why blizzard doesn't hire few million people for a short stress test.

[Great Destiny Man]

I'm also disappointed about the lack of prepatch but I could never see myself having this much of a meltdown over it.

[Makorus]

Imagine how youll react when you find out that other companies and businesses do surveys.

[Enter Name Here]

then how is it you give your insights to mmo champion...like...for free?

just like that...?

[Topornic]

The stress test is the most recent thing, thats also why I included how the beta testers where treated for their efforts. They are requesting that we take time out of our normal day and play schedule for them, if that doesnt sound like something that should come with incentive im preaching to the choir here.

Eventually it will end up that way that Blizzard receives little feedback out of testing. People will know that their feedback ends up the same way any petition to a politician does - in the garbage bin.

So far Blizzard has been smart, toying with peoples love for this game. Some are eager to help because in their naive perspective Blizzard might care and fix their class. Or perhaps because they want to be in top x raiding place and test everything to see what setups and raid comps will get them an advantage.

These top tier players might keep doing what they were but some who just wanted to make the game better will eventually loose all hope after not getting any communication from the company itself, despite the testers’ best efforts.

[XDurionX]

I see a lot of you saying that I sound like I am entitled to something? Do you folks not understand how valueable this information is for them? Like thousands and thousands of dollars would be spent trying to recreate the experience on their end when instead the go to the forums and ask you all to do it for them. In the digital age your data is worth far more than you guys seem to realize, and if a company wants to have access to it why should they get it for free?

It's not worth anything as long as people are willing to do it for free. Do or don't, nobody forces you.

[Raisei]

The stress test is the most recent thing, thats also why I included how the beta testers where treated for their efforts. They are requesting that we take time out of our normal day and play schedule for them, if that doesnt sound like something that should come with incentive im preaching to the choir here.

There are very good reasons for both the company as well as the testers to do the testing.

1) For the company:
The sheer size of the game makes it close to impossible to test every aspect of it with internal testing. What do you expect? That they hire ten thousand people to test the game for a month? The red tape/taxes alone would cost them millions to get that going.
Then they would test things they THINK need testing. The testers would be pointed at areas and will be looking for specific things, while other things that happen during a normal person playing get overlooked.

2) For the testers/community:
While they do not get money for it, they receive many benefits. Being able to play the new stuff earlier then everybody else (especially Alpha) is one, being able to deliver news to the community is another. Websites like WoWhead are based on the information these people deliver (and make some money through the adds there).

Indeed, Blizzard is one of the few companies who do not gag their testers with an NDA, in fact they encourage the sharing of knowledge and ask for feedback, not minding in the least that datamining is happening. In fact they even use it to drop little hints and have fun, like the Kul Tiran robe that was datamined before BFA and Ion stating at Blizzcon that we don't need to worry about N'zoth because he has seen datamining about us coming out on top. This shows an awareness and a connection between Devs and community that is very rare these days.
SWTORs Devs for example kept banning people for datamining and kept denying everything that testers reported. It was quite embarassing and showed their unwillingness to communicate and discuss the development.

On top of that, and maybe most important, the testers get to shape the product. Feedback is not limited to bug reports. There is also things that just "feel" wrong like the GCD changes. During testing for BFA a lot more CDs were on the Global, but testers reported that it felt bad to play and so many were removed. Not enough, but many. The same is happening now. No, this does not mean that Blizzard will or should fulfill every wish that the testers make, but there is still influence. Blizzard holds the wheel, but testers are able to poke it a bit for small course correction.

So even without outright paying you, the PTR, Stress tests and Alpha testing has huge benefits for the players doing it. Players volunteer to do it, they want to do it because they love the game just as much as the Devs do. They aren't taken advantage of in any way.

[LordTakeo]

I've seen by now the same two argument structures repeated over and over.

"They are rich, screw them, blizz bad, hire testers, dumb sheeple do work for free! Hehe."

And

"Hiring 1.000.000.000.000.000 testers is too expensive! We the community know best what changes are good! Failed game/mmo did this that! Facts, both irrelevant and relevant!"

Can't we close this already, if nobody wants to even indulge with the other side? This feels more like venting, than a meaningful discussion, as every sound argument gets overlooked or ignored so far, to repeat the core issue again, spamming it away. Cause alot just want to push out their own, way too similar sounding take on this.

[EternalBany]

I am just banking my hopes on Mike`s new studio before I can fuck off from Blizzard for good.
I mean look at battlenet, I dont play ANY of that shite other than wow and even that is not nearly as fun as it used to be
This month before shadowlands is gonna take forever...

[Vrinara]

Oh lord another one of these posts. Let me grab the popcorn.

[LordVargK]

WoW is a game. The PTR test strives to make the game better. If you like the game, you participate in the test to make YOUR game better. If you write posts like this, you should stop playing the game and maybe rethink your approach to videogames in general.