So you want us to test....

[-Glyndo-]

but you don't give us the tools. 99% of what has been changed with 1.2 is for the L50 player. Yet, without the ability to copy characters outside of the very select few guilds and their raid crew it isn't being done.

 

And let's face it, if we do it the old fashioned way and level up to 50 and spend the time to get all re-geared, the patch will be live before we can effectively test it.

 

So either A. Allow us to copy our live characters over, or B. introduce a nice little npc who slices our characters brain and makes them level 50 or so.

[Foker]

Sounds great. Kinda sad that the testing is limited to a select few at this point. What about the rest of us, who want to test. Sure some may just want to play around with the changes. But others want to make sure the game runs well when it hits live. You did a lot of changes in this patch, and the small group of people you have brought in will not be able to test it all.

[Kothakk]

Agreed.

 

Heck even Warhammer Online had maxlevel templates you could choose or char-copy in order to test stuff on the PTS.

 

I would have thought that with so many devs from Warhammer Online gone to this game this would have been given from the start. Sadly not.

 

This really confuses me, seeing as Bioware wants to be taken serious as a game developer.

 

Another drawback is that their testdata will be VERY limited. Another thing that just blows my mind.

Edited March 18, 2012 by Kothakk

[lokivoid]

but you don't give us the tools. 99% of what has been changed with 1.2 is for the L50 player. Yet, without the ability to copy characters outside of the very select few guilds and their raid crew it isn't being done.

 

And let's face it, if we do it the old fashioned way and level up to 50 and spend the time to get all re-geared, the patch will be live before we can effectively test it.

 

So either A. Allow us to copy our live characters over, or B. introduce a nice little npc who slices our characters brain and makes them level 50 or so.

 

 

funny part is its not hard for them to add a NPC quest to the starting area's that give enough xp to max out level, aswell as hand you 50mil and 1000 of every token and set all class chapter quests as complete.

[DirtyMouse]

I can see the very flawed logic in not letting ppl char-copy to the pts.

it goes something like this.. " let them level up new toons to get used to the changes from a starting standpoint"

 

which imho can only be rationalized if the patch is many months away and still only poorly.

 

-edit- i just saw that the bioware ppl are manually coppying guilds that APPLIED to have it done..those of us that dont get in like that are meant to test lower levels and how the patch works there.

Edited March 18, 2012 by DirtyMouse

[Markn]

We need to keep bumping this over and over.

 

YOU CANNOT TEST a patch this big without letting everyone who wants to copy their char to test and TEST the MASSIVE changes you're trying to make.

 

 

Everyone keep bumping this maybe they will get a clue.

[Kothakk]

I can see the very flawed logic in not letting ppl char-copy to the pts.

it goes something like this.. " let them level up new toons to get used to the changes from a starting standpoint"

 

which imho can only be rationalized if the patch is many months away and still only poorly.

 

-edit- i just saw that the bioware ppl are manually coppying guilds that APPLIED to have it done..those of us that dont get in like that are meant to test lower levels and how the patch works there.

 

Letting only people who applied might seem like a good idea since those people most likely will give feedback, however Im not sure this is the best route to take. Having this option open for everyone is a much better way to make the community as a whole more involved in the PTS and the game itself.

 

My two credits.

[Darkscape]

Take a wild guess why they have so many bugs when they release a patch and why their Hotfixes need Hotfixes?

 

With the amount of features in 1.2 they will be Hotfixing all the way until November.

[Gaff]

Only logic I can see in this is if they want to start us plebs off with nothing so we test a bit of the non-level dependent stuff, then boost us all to 50 a week from now.

[FrostyDroid]

Only logic I can see in this is if they want to start us plebs off with nothing so we test a bit of the non-level dependent stuff, then boost us all to 50 a week from now.

 

The logic is it takes 20 minutes to manually create each character copy on the PTS.

[rastamanman]

They really need to do sumthing adding a npc auto lvl cant be that hard at all to do.

[Redmarx]

NPC in starting area, click on it to recieve enough xp to ding to 50.

 

Remove costs of items on fleet vendors.

 

Problem solved.

 

PTS working properly and enabling players to test all content and submit feedback to make a better 1.2 patch.

 

Does this honestly sound too complicated?

Edited March 18, 2012 by Redmarx

[iloveicarly]

bumped

[bigbramble]

I have been on the PTS and tested a few things, had a look at interface etc. Looks awesome, but I am afraid these guys are right, you need to be able to test this stuff with a high level character. I cant test the class changes, crew skills changes, gear changes or legacy changes without spending weeks levelling a character that will just get deleted.

[Woetoo]

I must admit I did download the 1.2 PTS client and fired it up. I was vaguely aware of the restrictions but I was hoping that my skimming of the forums had led me to a erroneous conclusion.

 

Firstly for anyone that is not aware. Bioware has copied a number of high level guilds in their entirety from live onto the PTS. So there is *some* high level testing going on. I believe (but haven't see anything to confirm) that Bioware asked for guilds who would be interested a while ago, selected a few and went from there. It's already too late to ask. And yes, I didn't read the sticky : http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=335108 - I assumed it was a player request for people to raid with

 

Secondly if you level a new character - it won't be deleted at the end of the current testing phase. So if you choose to level a character on the PTS, it won't be completely wasted time. (See : http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=71470 )

 

Finally, I also understand that someone has to test the non-L50 content. Everyone and their wife will want to see the L50 changes. But programming being what it is, they could have fixed something @50 and broke something @10. Unless a sizeable group of people test the levelling quests, etc - there's a huge great hole in the testing process.

 

But...

 

I wanted to test.

 

I wanted to see the consequences to my main character's AC play style. I'm not a min-max'er, I won't be shouting "nerf" every other post - as long as DPS classes have relatively similar DPS output, that'll be fine by me. I'm not one of those people who think every DPS class should be within 1% of each other - we play as a team, one classes weakness are balanced by one classes strengths. 1 -vs- 1 comparisons of DPS only matter in PvP and guilds who think bosses dying is more important than the people you killed them with.

 

Anyway, I wanted to test...

 

Not just the new stuff for my class. But the new legacy stuff. The new content. The new everything. For some fairly irrational reasons I want this MMO to succeed. My personal experience is that lot of my guild who tried SW:TOR have already returned to Warcraft. mainly due to a perception that the endgame was lacking content and was buggy. I didn't want 1.2 to be criticised as heavily as 1.1 and if I could help with that, I wanted to. But I feel I can't help and 1.2 will be largely on the shoulders of a select few (Bioware QA, selected invited guilds and those people with the drive to level from 1 to 50 within a short timescale).

 

I played with the UI a bit. Found a spelling mistake in one of the new options. But the amount I can contribute is limited to the point where I don't see how hours upon hours of playing will actually test anything in a practical sense.

 

Maybe if I spent my every waking moment reading the forums, etc. my expectations would have been different. But as it is, I feel that a finite number of QA testers within Bioware and a finite number of invited guilds are going to be testing and I can't contribute.

 

I'm not unrealistic. The character copy process isn't ready for roll-out to thousands of requests. Premade characters aren't available either. Bioware are doing what they can, with what they've currently got.

 

So I'm going back to live. I'll pop back in from time to time to play about with the UI. Maybe I'll start levelling a character sometime in the future with an eye on future PTS content. But for the moment, I feel I'll probably just end up waiting for premade characters or a semi-functional character copy for the masses.

Edited March 18, 2012 by Woetoo

[Tservo]

The problem is this team of monkeys coding the game cannot reliably code a character transfer to and from the test server.

 

Them doing it manually sounds about right - he'll they're probably even editing the databases with ad hoc code to get it done for each character. What a sloppy mess, and it's going to really hurt for 1.2 because the changes cannot be tested except by a few guilds hand selected by Bioware.

 

I'm sure this code wasn't in place though because they didn't foresee such low populations and people wanting transfers, or the need for hyped up 1.2 already because of the low populations either.

 

And then Georg has the nerve to come out and bash those complaining about the changes because they, the player not on the test server, hasn't tested them yet. Unreal.

[RiteOn]

Well, if 1.2 goes live as buggy as the rest of the current content, who cares how many people test it... There's been a beta test before release, and the game came out as crap anyway...

 

My only hope is there will be 50 people left on our server to play with when 1.2 comes out...

[rastamanman]

ya i read that also unreal how he had the nerve to say that his mindset seems to be so far off from how mmo players think.A ptr needs a char copy at the very least a npc or sumthing to test especially when the patch on the ptr is by far mostly lvl 50 players and no1 wants to lvl from 1.

[rastamanman]

Well, if 1.2 goes live as buggy as the rest of the current content, who cares how many people test it... There's been a beta test before release, and the game came out as crap anyway...

 

My only hope is there will be 50 people left on our server to play with when 1.2 comes out...

 

 

 

well u are right and wrong it is true things went in buggy but it is also true we submitted most if not all the bugs that went live they just didn't get fixed we also submitted most the stuff thats in 1.2 when game was in beta.

[RiteOn]

well u are right and wrong it is true things went in buggy but it is also true we submitted most if not all the bugs that went live they just didn't get fixed we also submitted most the stuff thats in 1.2 when game was in beta.

 

This game is dieing anyway, at least on our server, I jut hope to spend the last month with some nice content before I leave for D3 or GW2...

[bunja-padon]

Im willing to test but not willing to spend my time on the ts grinding to 50, cant realy test the new guild or legacy stuff with no points = bugs. simple fix is the npc that can grant u money levels and materials to test tweeks to classes, all this new crafting items and being able to test the legacy characters.

[Hoodwinked]

This is one of those things that they really need to take a page from WoW's playbook and allow people to choose a premade character from a list, or copy a character of theirs over. They seem to be relying solely on the guilds they copied over from live to test this patch. Which would limit the amount of data that they can receive. If they were to give us the premades/copies they could turn something like 100 testers into 10000.

[Varicite]

And then Georg has the nerve to come out and bash those complaining about the changes because they, the player not on the test server, hasn't tested them yet. Unreal.

 

This is the part that's really upsetting.

 

I'd LOVE to test out these new changes on a character high enough level to actually TEST the changes. Unfortunately, that's not really possible for us.

 

How dare they bish at us about complaining w/out testing the patch when they have NOTHING in place for us to actually do so.

 

Maybe people wouldn't be overreacting if they had a chance to actually see the changes for themselves, instead of leaving it up to complete strangers in some random guilds who may or may not even have remotely similar concerns.

Edited March 18, 2012 by Varicite

[Cernow]

I find it crazy that there is no character copy. How can you test and analyse the changes if you cannot copy across a character you are familair with?

 

Most of the changes in 1.2 affect level 50 players. There is not time to level to 50 on PTS and nor should anyone have to. There needs to be either a character copy facility or a method for automatically levelling a new character to 50 on PTS and gearing it for free. Then we can test.

 

Yes, they've copied a few level 50s across, those who have been cherry picked by the devs. But if you only allow elite raider players to test you will only get one perspective on the changes. If the average player cannot test then do not be suprised when the average player feels you aren't listening to them and decides to leave the game.

 

If you want the general playerbase not to knee jerk over nerfs they read in patch notes, then give everyone the ability to character copy (or create an instant level 50 on PTS) so they can test for themselves and give appropriate feedback. To not do this and then bash the players for complaining about the nerfs (as Georg Zoeller has done) is insulting.

Edited March 18, 2012 by Cernow

[Woetoo]

... those who have been cherry picked by the devs. But if you only allow elite raider players to test you will only get one perspective on the changes.

I doubt Bioware have only chosen elite players and guilds. If the guild summit is anything to go by, they probably did cherry pick... but across a wide range of very different guilds.

 

My only concern would be that the request for guilds came via the blogs/forums. The "normal" players wouldn't have seen the opportunity and only those people/guilds who are very active on the forums were likely to register interest. Honestly, I can't see much in the way of alternatives - but still... the forums do seem to attract a certain level of caricature players.