Great idea to add cosmetic rewards as an incentive to test PTR changes. Just spent a few hours testing bb with hatchet, and I feel like things are starting to feel better.
Personally as a quick win, I would slash all cooldowns by half of what they are for most abilities to make the moment to moment combat feel more tactical / engaging / fun / fast. Action combat with few abilities truly shines with low cooldown timers, but otherwise feels repetitive, predictable and quickly gets boring.
Cosmetics and maybe a lil title or something. Dyes would be cool too. For amount of time spent in ptr of course. Every hour or two spent gives a coolish dye. After certain amount of hours a cosmetic then after a lot a title. Keep the rewards coming overtime to keep people coming. As it sits every moment on PTR is Ori not being mined. People would join just because they don’t like not having things. Even if they don’t like the things tbh. Completionists. Y’all have telemetry you can tell if a player is actively engaging stuff too instead of walking in circles doing nothing to get free stuffs.
Set up an event like 1-3 Wars on the PTR and offer rewards that can be carried over to their main accounts. The reason no one uses PTR is because no one wants to waste time on something that will disappear in a week.
Let us choose from a preset of healer, tank, melee, range, mage. These presets will have a full gearset pre-applied to their character and pre-distributed stats. Have them start in town with all outposts and travel shrines unlocked.
^ removes the tediousness of hopping on. It allows the players to ‘get on and play’ right from the start instead of needing to spend a good 15min getting set up then having to run to all the towns.
#1 allow us to choose custom gear. Basically have all gear available in a trading post system where we can filter by perks and type. The biggest hinderance is spending a few hours trying to get decent gear. By that time I just want to log off and get on my real character. Its why I haven’t gotten back on the PTR. I got completely terrible gear and wasted too much time. I got frustrated.
#2 I think a cosmetic reward like a dye or housing item or emote would be cool! Something unique each PTR so everyone feels inclined to try the most recent PTR.
The thing is as the patch drop date approaches it becomes less and less advantageous to even spend time on the PTR. If these changes are coming next week I feel I should be preparing for them in some manner.
So I go onto the PTR and do the quest I will be doing again in 3-7 days to make the legendary Blunderbuss? Just seems repetitive this close to release without any incentive for doing so and a slim player base on PTR.
I’m not sure how you could properly reward people and get them to actually engage if they have other (LIVE) content they feel is more important to engage in. Skins are nice but perhaps some forms of currency from the cash shop? Weapon skins? Special emotes?
The question still remains of how would you gauge the participation. How many people would just log on and sit AFK to exploit the rewards?
I logged in last Saturday night to PTR and it was barren. I was invited without my consent to a group simply because I was one of very few people chatting on the general channel. The group didn’t even fill, we 4 manned the new dungeon but fell apart at the last boss when our tank ninja logged.
So I can’t log on and test the mutation until I complete that. But I have daily Gypsums to cast and daily crafts to craft. Resources to gather, your game is very engaging and by ignoring my daily “chores” I miss out 4000+ Umbrals and my future crafts.
you want a way to incentivize more people to find bugs in ptr? actually fix the problems that they find. lol
^ this and testing stuff yourselves might be a good idea
i spend a bunch of time on there but ya its pretty dead. Its a shame and a hard thing to fix when the player pop is so low. Just try to do your part and help out, maybe the people that are consistently on there can get some sort of recognition or something
I would play PTR if I could test my live build further to provide more feedback as my character is closely related rathers than having a mismatch of amour which doesn’t get me close to the feel of live server.
Maybe a way for us to copy our main characters over to PTR? This would allow me to do more practice in new patches without needed to go back to main game to practice PvP. Some frequent wars events would help test this further too!
Can PTR be made free for everyone? (with a time limit of 3 hours if the game is not purchased). This would give the following: finding bugs, getting to know the game, more players on ptr.
In any case, until we have a trial period.
It’s just a thought.
Slashing cooldowns in half? Are you insane? Have you played OPR recently? Everyone and their mom is just buried up to their armpits in Grav Well and Ice Shower…
The biggest problem with the PTR is that it is obvious there is a set of changes the Devs plan for PTR 1, 2, 4, etc… and little of the feedback submitted in PTR 1 is implemented in PTR 2 for example… Devs just follow thier preset agenda for the PTR waves. It is what puts people off, the first ever PTR had way more people than today, because it feels like you are wasting your time on there now after having some experience with it.
Example 1: The current stuttering issues in LIVE was reported in FEB PTR, it still has not been addressed and they will be forcing the March patch this week while this issue still exists. There was no reprioritization or halt to get a real major issue sorted, FEB was pushed with the issue and now March will be as well.
Example 2: The Gypsum Cooldown changes and Grit Damage Reduction changes from FEB PTR, still has not been implemented in LIVE. Why would anyone want to spend time testing these things, if they never get implemented anyway. There are far too many mistakes and oversights, with no corrections. Why do we not get weekly patches to fix these small oversights, it is a bit of a slap in the face for it to be on the patch notes and not implemented for a whole month, waiting for next monthly patch.
Example 3: Feedback doesn’t seem to matter on PTR. It was stated indefinitely that the buff to Gravity Well was a mistake in the PTR. It has also been stated indefinitely on the LIVE forums, and there is no feedback from the devs. Instead the only balance on PTR is to further nerf VG which is barely seeing any play compared from GA and IG. From an outside perspective it seems like the Devs are still reacting to feedback from 2 months ago, instead of reacting to current balance feedback. We probably going to hear soon that we have to wait till April Balance patch which is another whole month with it like this (and tbh the Feb balance didn’t go so well. So why would anyone have any faith in April?)
In summary, I don’t blame the low player rates on PTR. Because it honestly doesn’t feel like feedback matters. In general feedback is reacted to too late, there is still issues from the Great February Bug Hunt post that have not been addressed.
Why would anyone waste there time when there is no engagement, slow/no turn arounds, preset agendas, infinite mistakes and oversights?
But those rewards should really for something. If you just add rewards for playing on PTR server people will only log in to get reward and will not apear ever again. Trust players they will find u bugs is false faith, they will faster record video and show on youtube what NW’s Devs screwed again just for viewers ofc they will not mentioned this is test server. Simple example before released we had alpha and beta and what. Did it help devs ? No cuz people in test servers mostly just play game ignoring everything😎
The best reward would be a faster turn-around time and implementation of feedback given on PTR.
April is not good enough to fix February feedback.
Might I suggest doing some kind of draw? In other words, if players engage with the public test realm and provide good quality feedback on the forums, they are entered into a draw from which a handful of players can win some cosmetics, maybe a pet, or something. That way, you encourage people to participate in the PTR AND you provide an incentive for people to provide feedback.
One of the main reasons why playing on the PTR is horrendous is that there are only US servers at the moment, while the majority of the playerbase is EU based. And playing with 150+ ping pretty much makes every bit of testing useless as you never know if its the ping or the game.
Making preset character classes and not having to look through the boxes would help a lot, but as long as there is no EU server, you’ll never have many people log in to the PTR. Easy as that.
As a follow up to the March Patch here is another clear and current example:
On the PTR for March there were numerous posts about the new dungeon replicas (from Tempest Heart) and crafting systems in general (this is true on the live forum as well). Fast forward to the actual March patch, and the new dungeon replicas were not even added to LIVE. They are just missing from the game, there recipes do not appear the shop, the dungeons don’t drop the new replica materials, nothing…
These are types of things that make you give up on the PTR.
Give people rewards for testing, skins or something.
Right now nobody want invest his freetime for nothing.
Or only support streamers if they test the ptr with there followers.
Here is another clear example of PTR feedback completely ignored:
So there was entire discussions and feedback around the Plagued Strike perks appearing on Blackgaurd’s IG, FS and Bow. I know as I was one of the the people in the debate, and it was across multiple versions of the PTR. To most it seems intended, as Dev implemented no changes to feedback.
Fast forward to LIVE, now they are replacing Plagued Strikes with Refreshing Evasion, and claiming it was unintended.
So basically no-one reads PTR feedback on the forum, it is just ignored as I explained earlier.
THIS IS WHY PPL DON’T BOTHER WITH PTR ANY MORE AND THE NUMBERS KEEP DROPPING.
JUST ANY CURRENT CASE OF FEEDBACK NOT MATTERING.
