I don’t know if it was good timing or bad timing. You could look at it as a bunch of content at once or hype for dedicated servers being drowned out by stranger things.

You and me both mate 👊

@Bongbingbing I've yet to see a single dev team ever switch to servers flawlessly.

There is almost always issues and even crashes/servers down for hours due to overload.

I feel that the PTB, while good and lets us beta test new features, has 1 major flaw: No motivation to keep playing on it, much less play normal.

In the first few hours of it, queue times are fine, but since no one loses items, offerings, points, etc, everyone goes all out with their builds. The PTB is also consequence free, so you can be as toxic as you want, and if a match is going badly for anyone, they DC a lot more than in the live game which pretty much wrecks/skews the experience. Worst of all is that after the first few hours, people have had their fun, checked out the new content, and then decide to go back to the live version which makes the PTB queue times nightmarishly long and not worth the wait. This combined with the "going all out" and "Toxic/DC behavior" Mentalities makes the testing become a pointless exercise in frustration, and soon enough everyone ducks out earlier than they should which results in un-experienced/untested/unreported bugs slipping through to the live version of the patch.

There needs to be Motivation to play the PTB and report back our findings in the PTB feedback forums, like some kind of reward that makes playing on it for x amount of hours or matches worthwhile for our live accounts. Maybe rewarding the live accounts all the BP we earn in the PTB (even if it goes over the cap) would be enough? or Additional shards earned per hour? Hell, it would be fantastic if they gave us 5 Auric cells per match played through without DC'ing as a major incentive to keep playing and reporting back to the devs. All I'm saying is that if the devs want the community to take the PTB testing grounds more seriously and actually keep testing on it for as long as its available, they'll need to incentivize the community a bit more than just "early (beta) access to new content".

Sometime in the summer

Yeah pretty much

I'm hoping the balance changes will be included in the PTB patch notes for today.