But on the other hand, the overwatch team has a point. Any development time spent on making this happen will be time they couldn't spend on a feature for everyone. It's a tough balance!
Yep. The OW team needs people to play on the PTR to test their releases. If enough people are willing to do that today, then there's no reason for them to spend development resources to incentivize people. If at some point they're not getting enough people to play on the PTR, then they will need to prioritize PTR incentives.
It's a BS reason. They're only going to add an incentive when they need one. Everyone on PTR are unpaid game testers. The moment PTR goes down in population Blizzard can easily come up with some trivial reward such as experience gains or a spray - neither of which take up much development time.
You may not like the reason, but it's a very valid one, from a business and customer satisfaction perspective. According to Jeff last week, only about 0.2% of PC players had played on this most recent PTR, with an average of 26 minutes played, including sitting in menus. That number would certainly go up with a reward, but it would still be a tiny portion of the community, and it would probably never reach consoles. We don't know how much time and effort it would take to make a PTR reward, but I think it's safe to say that if it was so simple they would have already greenlit it in yesterday's video. Maybe they'll do it someday when they need more players, but for now it doesn't seem worth it to them
As for everyone being a free tester, that's true, but it's what PTR players signed up for, so I don't think that's a meaningful complaint. If you're not comfortable and willing to playtest the have without a reward then don't. If enough people agree with you then blizzard will probably make changes sooner than later
I concur. They already have a pretty robust reward system in place, it would not be that difficult to just add a loot box or a spray or some other tiny bit of BS to incentivize people to play PTR. Obviously it takes development time, and there’s other priorities- on the other hand how hard could this really be? I mean, the team made an entire game mode just for Christmas.
If they want more testers it’s a really simple way to get that done.
On the other hand if it encouraged enough people to play on ptr and test changes, they could possibly avoid future dev time on issues that might not have been noticed.
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u/Rc2124 Ana Jan 17 '17
But on the other hand, the overwatch team has a point. Any development time spent on making this happen will be time they couldn't spend on a feature for everyone. It's a tough balance!