WoW Intrigued Fans. No Public Testing of 10.2.6 Update
World of Warcraft will receive another update with a new compactness in March. However, this time Blizzard Entertainment will not make it available on the Public Test Server.
World of Warcraft players won't have the opportunity to try out update 10.2.6. The update planned for March won't be available on the Public Test Realm (PTR), unlike practically every previous major update that added content to Blizzard's MMORPG.
Holly Longdale, the producer of the Dragonflight expansion, shared the information in an article on the official WoW site. The post doesn't only concentrate on version 10.2.6, as the announcement discloses development plans for World of Warcraft and its "classic" version for the year 2024.
However, the news of the absence of public testing for the new update has especially caught the interest of fans, who this time appear to agree with Blizzard's arguments (via Reddit / Wowhead). Longdale explains that the developers were fond of the idea of releasing content with "surprises," which cannot be guaranteed when selected players have several weeks to search through the update and its files.
The devs admit that this is a risky experiment and they will be closely watching the community's reactions. WoW enthusiasts also realize how "bumpy" (full of errors) the path the developers have taken can be. Many people are also concerned that the update might not meet players' expectations, which typically dampened the reports from public tests to some extent.
Nevertheless, the concept of the entire community collectively discovering the secrets of the new content at the same time clearly fascinated many Azeroth fans. This could be amusing in the context of Diablo IV players complaining about what they consider to be untested changes, with some of them demanding the opening of a test server.
We will discover the outcome of Blizzard's "experiment" in March.
