Blizzard has been introducing players who would like to get an early access to its updates to the OverwatchPTR. Interestingly, players who participate as testers do not get any reward or incentive doing so. The game developer recently explained the reasons behind this.

Public Test Region

In “Overwatch,” upcoming updates, contents, buffs, nerfs, and heroes to name a few are placed in the game’s PTR for testing. Through this, players or testers get an early access to these soon-to-be-released contents. Later, these testers would report issues that Blizzard would soon roll out fix and tweaks to improve.

This is an interesting practice since the company benefit from the testers’ feedback in improving the contents and the game.

Recently, in the game’s forum, a player named Capfoo shared his views on the game’s Public Test Region. According to the player, the PTR shrinks the fun in the content. Capfoo added that it as well discourages participation by not providing rewards to testers. The player also raised the issue that Blizzard is just using the PTR as an excuse to get to play on features, heroes, and other contents that do not regularly exist in the real game as it gets overwritten later on. Capfoo went further saying that those who participate in the test become a laughingstock.

Blizzard’s response

While the player’s argument was direct and scathing, it is well-reasoned as well. This was acknowledged by the Game Director Jeff Kaplan. In his response, the director said that he agrees with Capfoo in most of what he said. However, he explained that things are not quite as simple as they seem.

According to the game director, there is no doubt that they too would love to improve the Public Test Region’s experience.

However, he revealed that the time and resources that could be used to improve the game’s PTR are also the same time and resources that they could use to further improve the game’s core. Kaplan went on saying that given this choice, they always opt to go for the improvement of the game’s core.

The game director also shared that they are talking about this at Blizzard all the time.

He even illustrated an example that the same people responsible for improving the game’s replay features will be the same ones who will work on making the EXP from PTR to the players’ main account. Typically, players would react to his statement that Blizzard’s problem is easy and they could just hire people. The game director actually provided a link to their post on the job opening.

It is disheartening to know that “Overwatch” does not have the resources to improve the game’s PTR. However, with the issue raised and has reached their attention, it is just a matter of time before the team does something to improve it.