On April 1st, the devs of The Division 2 began phase 1 of its public test for Title Update 15, which brought on a new Countdown game mode and adjustments to the Expertise feature among other things. That test is now moving into its second phase, and it’s mostly about tweaking and adjusting what’s in the test build.
The notes in question don’t have any particularly spicy bullet points as a result of the tuning patch, but adjustments like fixes for Countdown, new UI features, and fixes for upgrade bonus inconsistencies are still likely worth noting for fans of the shooter. This round of testing hasn’t gotten any hard dates yet, but it’s perhaps still good to know for content hungry fans that progress is being made.
Worth noting for console gamers is that Ubisoft has up a blog post explaining why the PTS is for PC players only and not you. It comes down to a whole host of reasons, including the fact that the last time the company held a PTS on console, consolers didn’t actually offer much feedback anyway.
“To deploy updates on a console, we need to go through a process called certification. Certification is when an update is thoroughly tested and must match a list of requirements to guarantee a high-quality gameplay experience. This, of course, takes time to ensure that the PTS fits all the requirements. […] Due to the nature of the PTS, updates deployed can be partially unstable or do not represent the overall quality of the game. This might add time to the overall certification process, eventually slowing down bug fixing and the implementation of community-requested features. […] Since PC builds do not have to go through the certification process, this allows us to react to community feedback swiftly and deploy updates faster and more efficiently. Unfortunately, on console it would take twice as much time to release PTS updates as regularly and quickly as we usually do with PC builds. […] A PC PTS does not require any ‘approval processes.’ Every player who owns The Division 2 on Ubisoft Connect can simply download the PTS client and take part in the testing at their own convenience. Console testing requires a selection procedure, which would limit the availability of the PTS to the wider audience. Permitting and prohibiting player access to an application based on a certain set of criteria has the potential to cause disappointment if you were rejected. […] Lastly, it would be remiss of us if we did not briefly talk about the one and only PTS we held on console for The Division 1. During that PTS, we found that console player specific feedback was fairly limited. In addition to this, what feedback that was provided closely mirrored the feedback given to us by our PTS players on PC. With this in mind, the results we found from this testing period on console fell below expectations.”
