We Need Your Help, Heroes

(Forever, this time)

Ascension Public Test Realm Opening Semi-Permanently

Heroes!

We here at Project Ascension strive to provide each and every one of you with an exciting, engaging, balanced, and--most importantly--an incredibly fun experience on Ascension. Whether it’s PvP, PvE, abilities, talents, or Random Enchantments, we want you to enjoy the heck out of it.

To accomplish this, our team is constantly pouring over numbers, data, player feedback, the forums, Facebook, in-game tickets, and World Chat--as well as playing ourselves--to make sure we make the kind of changes that not only address what WE feel needs tweaking, but what YOU, the players, feel needs tweaking. We are constantly on our test realm checking our changes, finding bugs, testing systems, fixing problems, and planning ahead for future changes. We want to make absolutely certain that when we push a change, it’s not only something you want, but something that gets to you in a working state: bug free. To reach that, we’re constantly testing for bugs in our updates.

But it’s not enough.

Trying to bug-test with only a small handful of developers simply isn’t effective. We can’t find everything, and, regrettably, we sometimes spend more time fixing a system that goes live buggy than we do creating the system in the first place. We have a great team, but it’s a small one. It simply isn’t feasible for us to both push updates in a timely manner as well as bug fix. We could focus on bugs, but then new content would take forever to release. We can keep pushing content, like the new RE rework, but we’re afraid that it’s going to come to live buggy and cause more problems than it fixes.

Even when all we want to do is make something objectively better--like doubling reputation gain in WSG and AB--there are times when we have to go back and revert changes because something we did broke BG queues in a way that we couldn’t have anticipated.

All of this could be fixed if we had more people testing content before it was pushed to live; more voices heard, more interactions between the players and the developers, more problems found. If we had the community giving us feedback, telling us what works, what doesn’t, then we would be able to release so much more content so much faster.

That’s why we’re asking you for help.

We need you on our PTR

Project Ascension is releasing a semi-permanent Public Test Realm(PTR) where players will be able to playtest changes the developers are in the process of making on Ascension before they are pushed to live. We call it “semi-permanent” because although it won’t be available 24/7, 365, it’s going to be up an awful lot of the time. On this realm, we will be testing changes, updates, balance packs, and tweaks two weeks before they hit live. During that two weeks, we’ll be counting on your help.

We’ll be opening up a PTR forum and discord channel so that whatever you find, whatever you need to say, gets straight to us. Do you like a change we’re in the process of making? Tell us on the PTR forums. Are you the victim of some gamebreaking bug on the PTR that you don’t want to go to live? Post it on the PTR discord. Are battlegrounds taking 8 hours to pop? It’ll never see the light of day if we know about it, because we can fix it before it hits live.

We’ll be checking both the forum and the discord channel nonstop, as well as hopping on the PTR ourselves for feedback, comments, criticism, conversation, and bug-testing.

Additionally, the nature of the PTR will change depending on what we’re testing. It might occasionally be an instant 60 event, or have characters copied over from live realms. It may involve leveling specific PTR characters. The realm will change to be what we need it to be, but it will always be accomplishing the same thing: gathering player feedback for the health of Ascension.
We NEED YOU, heroes, to use this PTR for bug and patch testing, and to give us feedback on the directions in which we take Project Ascension. What you have to say is incredibly valuable to us. We want to make Project Ascension the classless WoW experience that you’ve always dreamed of, and we hope by stopping bugs before they start, and getting your feedback on our systems, we’re making a step in that direction.

We need you on the PTR, on the discord chat channel, and on the PTR forums, heroes. We’ll see you there.