How has the Evocati testing been? Was it worth it?asked by Han Tominelli
TL;DRThe Evocati testing went very well, with quick feedback, though they admit they explained it poorly and say it exists for future secrecy needs, not to end PTUs.
I don't want to speak for Will Everett, but from what I've seen, absolutely.
Yeah, they got great feedback very quickly with the Evocati. One of the big things this time around, I was posting to Reddit about this yesterday, I think, we do feel bad that this was not explained so well when it started, because we don't really get involved until something's live. We like to let the game support folks run the test stuff. In retrospect, we should have explained more about the Evocati. And it's not so much that in this particular case we want to keep 2.4 super, super secret. In fact, I think that the day we started the Evocati, we had an ATV where we told everybody what was in the patch. It's more that we are building this group for times in the future when we absolutely will need to keep something a secret so it's a surprise, or to avoid spoiling Squadron. We were testing the existence of the Evocati in the same way as we were testing the game itself, and both, as far as I can tell, went very, very well.
Like I said earlier, we're not just developing the game, we're developing the processes of testing the game, we're developing the processes of communicating these things to you.
But I think a lot of people got scared that we weren't going to do PTUs anymore, that we weren't going to show our work, and that was never the intention.