Dread Fortress SM Reaches, Hands, Brontes are broke.

Or had the patch up on the PTS and allowed players to have a look at it before it ever went live.

I'm seeing more and more stuff get into the live game that could have been dealt with before going live by letting people have some kind of PTS access. While to a degree I can understand not wanting to use a PTS due to cost or not wanting players to get too much of a preview of upcoming changes, at this point I would start wondering if having a week PTS period before major patches go live would be well worth it. Most all of the bugs in the 4.0 update were discovered by players within 24-48 hours of the servers coming back up. Even a week of lead time might be useful. And as others have said, players are more willing to deal with bugs in a PTS scene because, well, it's a "test" server. I remember when the game launched, the PTS was online somewhat regularly. I never really used it, but it was there. Now a days, I don't even bother checking the PTS status because 99.99(add in about ... ... ... a bazillion more 9s)% of the time it's offline. When this game launched, it was widely considered to be one of the most bug free mmo launches to date. Now, it's just full of bugs, some fairly minor, others down right awful. Seriously Eric (and any other EA/BW people who might happen to look in on the forums), please please please please pleasepleasepleaseplease, put the test server up more often. The player base will catch things that the QA team clearly doesn't know how/where to look for, and your players will be less angry at you because your game work better on the live servers.

seems to many of the last few raiding-players have unsubbed....

You might want to look at the job listings for BW Austin because they aren't looking for someone to replace him and that should tell you a lot about where the game is going.

They aren't looking to hire one to replace him you can clearly see that if you look at the positions they are hiring for.

CM droprate is (most likely) hardcoded percent chance. Such thing is next to impossible to test, as the "chance dice" is rolled each time you open a pack, it is not cumulative. Buying 20 packs does not guarantee you an item with 5% drop chance.

Most CM errors up to this point were discovering that item is missing from the loot table, which, again, the testing might not catch, because you know, RANDOM CHANCE.

However, on the other points, I agree, and things should be tested in a matter similar to that

Thanks eric, but such a thing should have been mentioned originally, and this whole PR disaster which left raiders with even more twisted knockers could have been avoided, mostly...

MTX people are 3D modelers. You cannot simply reassign 3D modeler to debug server code or design raid encounters.

Not 'fine' with that. March 10 is Chapter 11. So 3 weeks of broken raids at least. Sorry that is unacceptable, this should be fixed this coming Tues.

No if, ands, or buts on this one, they've broken the game, they must fix it.

It's also funny that BioWare thinks we are that invested in the Fallen Empire story that they won't use PTS.

News for you BioWare, Fallen Empire is awful, our 'choices' mean precisely dick.

So please allow people to test your bigger updates, we don't really care about your story and this mess could have been avoided.

Yeah it is really funny how they think people are sitting on the edge of their seats the whole month waiting for a one-hour quest and two companions most will never actually use. Personally, I've found Chapter X mediocre on my first playthrough (although Kaliyo is not the type of companion I'd use on most of my characters) and I've only done it 3 times since its launch. They need to understand two things: 1. A one-hour quest is hardly immersive, by the time you start enjoying it, it's already over. 2. No matter how good the story is, people will find it boring on subsequent playthroughs. (Except maybe if you're playing a class that formerly had the companion in question on his/her crew.

Long story short, you really should allow people to test every patch on the PTS for gamebreaking bugs like these. You don't want to allow people to play KOTFE? Fine then, disable the quest, but OPS/PVP/GSF should be tested before the deployment of each major patch. (Also BW put Ziost on the PTS in 3.2, so they should start that practice again.)