4 replies to this topic

[Victor Morson]

As many of us are aware, the Testing Grounds are currently entirely inaccurate and are lagging several patches behind where actual weapon balance is currently. This causes them to spread false information and horribly mislead newbies and veterans alike.

The amount of people I've had to tell "That build isn't very good, but the Testing Grounds are broken so it looks much better" is staggering.

Thus I am calling to either have Testing Grounds kept up to date with current weapon balance, or have the whole thing completely removed until such a time that it can be kept properly up to date and be used for it's stated purpose.

All weapon testing, right now, must be done in actual firefights or sync drops. If that was PGI's intention that's fine, but leaving a misleading element is damaging. I thought about posting this in another sub-forum than Gameplay Balance, but really, everyone uses the Testing Grounds for the purpose of experimenting with balance, so the false results are doubly frustrating.*

* Take one glance at this thread and how many people defend their builds based on Testing Ground results. It's really bad.

[Artgathan]

As buggy as it is, it is still a great place for new players to practice stress-free. Of course bringing it up to date would be ideal, but I think removing it completely (until fixed) would be too much.

[Herodes]

No removal, please. But make the maps selectable before dropping. And update the testing grounds.

[Ningyo]

It is still useful for newbies to learn the maps, and hitboxes on the 8 mechs it has in it. However I think they should either update it, OR give a warning message as you enter that it is not up to date and weapon damage and others things may not be accurate.

Not saying no one will miss the message, but its a simple thing to do, and would at least help some. Also I think it would be much better to have a testing mode you can enter just like assault or conquest, except there would be no victory and you would get a complete stats report (damage per weapon type things like on forum stats, also damage taken on each location) after each time you died (or even better if you used tab or some other key you could bring it up mid play too) and if you died you could use a respawn option to continue testing with the same people.

Some people might choose to use such a mode for a respawning deathmatch, but you could just exit after dying and try another if you wished to test things. And with no C-bills or exp I doubt this would be a huge problem.

[Victor Morson]

Artgathan, on 11 June 2013 - 11:47 AM, said:

As buggy as it is, it is still a great place for new players to practice stress-free. Of course bringing it up to date would be ideal, but I think removing it completely (until fixed) would be too much.

My point is that they are practicing bad things. They are trying builds, liking them, then going on line and sucking.. because they were flat out lied to in the testing grounds.

I'd much prefer that they update it and continue to update it with the rest of the game in the future. I am saying if they cannot do that, they should be disabled until they can.

Giving newbies wrong info is worse than no info, honestly.