Play test servers

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide General Discussion
1

You guys are proposing some major changes, which I think is awesome.

What isn’t awesome is going to be releasing the patch with internal testing only. Don’t take it personally, but you guys miss things. Crowd sourcing testing is the way to go for major patches in my opinion.

That way you guys don’t miss obvious broken interactions, like what happened with empowered psionics and smite.

In short, please?

8 Likes
2

Admit it, you just dont want to wait and want to play the new updates faster.

I dont think play test servers will make any difference. They barely ever budge at people telling them things need nerfs / buffs on the live servers. What makes you think things would be any different on test servers.
Besides, they already have their team of preselected testers outside of the company.

2 Likes
3
  • Crusher (weapon) was reworked in collaboration with playtesters and worked out nicely.
  • Zealot’s Invocation of Death was nerfed because playtesters heavily pushed for it.
  • Vet patch 13 release version was incomplete because playtesters didn’t like anything.

There are probably a lot more, and I strongly suspect playtesters had a lot of power to bend balance in a lot of ways (usually negative in my suspicion). Don’t make them out like they have minimal input.

Thankfully in general the balance changes are also heavily influenced by forum feedback, altough usually these changes take a lot of time to happen.

Eg: I’ve seen most class abilities and subclasses we got in patch 13 was asked by the forums multiple times. Be it krak granades, ogryn rocks, big boom, gun psyker, gunlugger ogryn, or assassin zealot (this last one should have been it’s own whole archtype but whatever).

Some stuff I’ve seen implemented I personally pushed for very strongly, like plasma to have cleave like voidstrike, or Vet mid tree mechanic to be similar to VT2 saltspyre tagging, or to have additional dodge distance on right side keystone.

4

Nope, i’m being truthful.

I think playtest servers are an awesome idea anytime that a developer is proposing major changes.

2 Likes
5

As long as they make the signups public and don’t just invite streamers and youtubers.

2 Likes
6

Because they had been datamined before.

With some errors of interpretation (Voice of Command being thought to be a Minion summon for some reason)

They do have play tester.

So there is a Test Server, but not a public one which you’re asking for. But it will never happen due to several problems:

  • Increase of opinion doesn’t mean they are better.
  • Public Play tester would have to be under the same rules as live game already is
    → GW greenlighthing process
    → less flexibility of changes
    → No possibility of NDA or keeping surprises
  • Private Discord+server has peoples that are already quite knowledgeable (Incan, the 2 dudes from the Ogryn guide, Skeleton dude…)
    Like the Recon Lasgun rework can be credited on Skeleton, at least from what I heard from testers, where he wrote pages upon pages on design changes
7

i think they should stop taking players feedback and do their thing, including my feedbacks of course, even if its going to suck in the end

they should be and feel more free to do as they please and drop this community driven bs, its a big turn off for me

cause its going to suck either way, balance wise, so they better off just do their own thing

1 Like
8

I’m optimistic for these changes. There’s so much new stuff that I reckon we’ll be chewing it over for months.

Best thing about playing all 4 avatars regularly is that if one gets a disaster patch, you can at least fall back on the other 3 for a while. I guess if you’ve just got 2000 hours on a laspistol veteran then yeah, that could go bad.

In terms of OP; I don’t feel a test server would really help. Opinions here are generally so polarised that I bet FS wouldn’t know where to start. And level 500+ players aren’t necessarily best placed to see things from all angles as we’re more set in our ways.

9

Would be cool when its this meta shifting. Like numbers wise there seems to be some totally absurd stuff that would be really easy to test in a week or so.

10

Testing couldn’t hurt.

Again, think back where the psyker is now versus how it started on patch 13.

Infinite empowered smite
Brain burst has been buffed
Assail got rebalanced, twice was it?

All things that should have been caught early on imo.

2 Likes
11

You make a good case on that front.

But maybe it’s when the bulk of the player base hit something hard, that’s when the balance issues get revealed? Clearly the team if elite play testers tried patch 13 it wasn’t so clear.

Ive also premonitions of a test server splitting the player base further. It’s not a huge community as it is.

12

We gotta remember that updates for console have to go through testing and approval and thats ideally what holds back them from throwing out hotfixes and quick patches for everyone. If they did do test patches they would most likely have to keep it to pc only with a new install which basically means anyone that wants to test stuff has to throw away 70gigs for a limited thing. Its not a bad idea other games do it for when they are needing more feedback and it helps with crunch time and mistakes that might pop up from a rushed release. I truthfully dont hate the idea and it could lead to better stuff but we all know they are a bit slow with patches and if everyone is testing stuff less people are playing the real server

1 Like
13

Within the first 2 weeks of playing new update release, we are the play test server. Problem solved.

1 Like
14

it doesn’t have to be that way though…

15

This topic was automatically closed 14 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.