It's definitely something we've discussed and see some potential value. There are a number of factors we have to prioritize and understand the experience we'd need to deliver:
- How many players do we build for? What region? Can we consistently get players in for decent experience? Should we have servers for good latency..do we have enough people to get matches where that matters?
- How do we get feedback? Do we need forums? Do we need to hire folks to translate and watch the other regional ones?
- If we're just in one region? Do we use xp boosts or other things to motivate? Is that fair? Does it promote good testing?
- How far out do we deploy stuff? Do we test services way in advance of complete user experience? Do we need to have extra testing to scrub content we're not ready to reveal?
- Do we want feedback on that character early?--we're gonna get it-- Is the playerbase diverse enough where it nets good insights or are we responding to a minority opinion. Or do we prioritize bugs and risk players feeling unheard?
- Do we ban folks? Should bans carry over from pbe to live in some cases? Can player support handle the ticket increase?
- Will players play if it's regularly unstable? Do we need to invest in high availability?
There's definitely value in the extra test hours that it would net. Things like the flying around would have no doubt been caught by volume of games there. The spawn switch...would really depend on players. That was a specific set of conditions that maybe the type of player isn't the one who's playing in the pbe without us inviting huge numbers.
Many words to say, we think there's potential value in it, but we need to do a good bit of discovery and work to make the set up realize it's value regularly. So no timing or specifics or certainty we do it, but it's something we've done some evaluation on and continue to explore.
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