Dec 8, 2011

Posted by in Blue Milk & Cereal | 18 Comments

Blue Milk & Cereal: Will You Enable The Public Test Server?

No day would be complete without the breakfast of Jedi: Blue Milk & Cereal.  Every morning, the team at Ask A Jedi will get Force-induced thoughts coursing through your head with delicious issues from around the galaxy! Join in the discussion below to make your voice heard!

As you may be gleefully aware, yesterday BioWare announced that Early Game Access will start for players on December 13th (that’s next Tuesday!) and that the full retail game client is now available for download!

One additional bit of information that was revealed/confirmed is the eventual availability of a public test server. There is an option in the settings panel of the launcher user interface that allows players to “Enable Public Test Server Access.”

Now, we don’t yet know when such a server would be available or how it would work, but it’s nice to know that players are going to have the option to preview and test upcoming content on a regular basis in order to help make the game better for everyone.

All of this brings us to today’s question: will you enable access to the public test server? As mentioned, it gives you a preview of upcoming content and a chance to give your input, but the down side may be that some of the story, art or other content is spoiled for you before it’s in it’s final state – just like any other phase of Game Testing.

So let us know if you’ll be enabling access to the public test server, and why or why not!

Will you play on the public test server when it's available?

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  1. I played in Beta, in part to help BioWare give us all a better gaming experience – and I’ll continue to test future content for the same reason. No, I don’t like getting everything spoiled – but then, I usually don’t have time to play all 8 Classes all the way through before a patch is released – so I should have plenty of things unspoiled.

  2. It really depends. If information is broadcast about a new release that I am interested in, sure, I will take a look. Otherwise I am more likely to frequent the live realms.

  3. Is “public pest server” an intentional typo? It is rather punny. :)

    I may enable it down the line, but right now I’m a bit concerned with screwing up my client with any half-done last-minute bugfixes that may be pushed to it (heard reports that enabling it triggers some additional downloads). So I’m leaving it off and sticking to the stable release for now.

    Probably irrational worry, but if a lifetime of coding has taught me anything, it is never trust software to play nice :)

  4. I was part of the general test community and found it to be a rewarding experience. I will continue to throw my 2 cents into this game to help it be all it can be.

  5. The “real” game always takes precedence over any testing being done, but I like to get my hands on any class changes that may take place before they go live. I usually leave any new raids or instances alone to keep them fresh when they go live.

  6. I never involved myself in the PTS mainly because I didn’t have the time because of college and the time I had I wanted in the live version. Now that I am done I might find myself there a few times but definitely not every time they are testing in the PTS.

  7. I’ll enable it, but not necessarily use it all the time. From past experiences, i just don’t feel the need to see all the new stuff before it hits live servers. One of the biggest reasons i would use it, however, would be for class changes. There were so many times in WoW that people would act like the sky was falling due to nerfs. But I would hop on a PTR, try out the changes, and realize they weren’t half as bad as people claimed.

  8. Not sure yet. I feel pressured if part of a progression guild to learn the fights before it goes live. However, I am not sure how the PTR will work for Bioware. I am hoping they may restrict how testing is done on operations so that guilds are not able to farm an advantage.

    Other than testing operations for an advantage I have no desire to play on the PTR, It would spoil the content for me personally.

  9. Phoenix8387 says:

    I’ll absolutely enable PTS, that doesn’t mean I’ll frequent it. When there’s new content that needs tested and there really isn’t a lot for me to do on live, yea I’ll hop over to the PTS for a little while to test and provide my feedback. But that’s only if I don’t have things I could be doing on live. The PTS is essentially the beta, no reason to spend time there when I could have productive time on live.

    That said, there’s a good chance I’ll spacebar conversations and skip most things that involve story.

  10. I may after about a year. There will be things ingame I wish to explore on live more. I have enjoyed beta but am burnt out on the whole “your character is going to get wiped every other month” for now. Only the Force knows for-sure.

  11. I will only have enough time to play the live game. Family and other rl stuff will take up a lot of my time and therefore I won’t have time for both.

  12. gamerladyp says:

    I hope people testing future content and giving reviews are doing so in their copious spare time, not because they’ve played the regular content already and are bored. I think the feedback given on PTS content can end up skewed in weird ways.
    Personally, I’d rather spend my gaming budget on regular content. Only time I’ve been tempted to hit the PTS has been for what I consider to be the wrong reasons.

  13. I did my fair share of testing but once this thing goes live, I’ll be focusing all my time on my main character and spending as much time with my guild as possible. I MIGHT consider testing if by some chance I finish all end game content, find all the datacrons, max out all my crafting, get all my schematics, etc etc. But I’m a moderate player so I don’t see that happening any time soon.

  14. OneCharacter says:

    I’m on the fence about it. I participated in the PTR in WoW for years, but most of the time it was because the live game was boring and I don’t see that happening for at least a while with ToR.

    On the other hand, you made a good point about not wanting to spoil possible story or content and those two things are more precious in this game than any other.

    So, I suppose, if I’m bored and the particular PTR content doesn’t contain spoilers or I just want to test out class changes, then yes. Otherwise, no. But then I’ll just have to dodge all the fan sites again. >_>

  15. Holy shzinit, this is so cool thank you.

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