Getting the cards right at first try when a new set is released keeps proving to be a very difficult proposition. The design and balance teams are small; the Superpower guys, talented as they are, don't seem to be the solution to identify all possible pitfalls. I should say though I'm not privy to the kind of feedback they provide or how the communication works between the 2 teams.
The GU team has acknowledged publicly in Discord that patching cards into and out of relevance after a set is released makes people frustrated. A much better solution would be more pre-release testing to identify and fix problematic cards early on. This would result in new sets being released locked and treated like a paper TCG. This would be the ideal scenario, clearly.
But then how to increase the volume and quality of pre-release testing without blowing up the budget? This is where a revamped Public Test Realm (PTR) would come in. We've had a PTR before, but the data coming out of that wasn't that useful. People kept using the PTR at that time to play with expensive Demogorgons for example, instead of actually testing out the new cards, identifying the problematic ones and trying to create OP decklists. I suppose a limited access version of a PTR is actually currently in place to allow the Superpower team to test sets before they are released and to test possible card changes during the balancing period.
To be clear, establishing a PTR would create a testing environment closer to the dynamics of the live game, where the wider community of creative and talented players is incentivized to craft decklists that give them an advantage over everyone else. With the same competitive and reward incentives as the live game in place, any unbalanced or potentially disruptive cards or combos should naturally rise to the top of the rankings very quickly and would be easily identified.
One downside of this solution is losing the surprise effect of releasing an entire new set of cards to explore and experiment. But I would argue that this effect is merely anticipated to the time when the PTR is enabled with the new cards. Another point I would like to make is that the benefits of releasing of locked sets far outweighs any perception of loss of novelty effect. A third point is that the design and balance teams will probably save time overall, as problematic cards would be identified faster and require less iterations to settle on a final design, by the sheer number of players offering solutions and reaching consensus on fairness and balance.
But implementing the changes for an effective and useful PTR comes with an investment in man-hours, which would take development time away from the already incredibly delayed release of important game features. But I would argue however that such an investment would be very much worth while if it results in the smooth rollout of new sets going forward and doing away with all the problems that come with balance patches and complete card redesigns after launch.
But how to realize this with the least amount of developer hours, while ensuring the end result actually fulfills the objectives? Here is my proposal for the simplest, most economical and effective rollout of a new PTR I can envision from the standpoint of a community member:
The PTR would work like a clone of the existing game engine, only running on different IPs or server port. The idea is to adapt how it was working before, with minimal adjustments.
To minimize changes, access would work with a separate login as before, only the client would use the same authentication token, so the user wouldn't have to login with the Passport. Similar to what happens now when a player opens the game daily and gets authenticated to their account automatically.
All cards would be enabled for playing, just like in the previous PTR versions. Cards from aan upcoming set would be available too, obviously.
Creating decklists would be disabled. Instead, the GU team would create decklists that would be made available for everyone. The management interface could be as simple as enabling deck creation only for one dev account and then every other user would get their Workshop populated from the data in this dev Workshop. The means players would be forced to play with decks that actually include cards and combos that the game team is interested in testing.
Alternatively, a few selected players could also be allowed to create decks themselves, to reduce the overhead of selected community decklists worth testing. There would need to be an interface in place to grant and revoke this permission.
The design team would have the possibility of changing the decklists at any time, creating a dynamic and nimble environment where new decklists could be created and removed immediately as necessary.
The design team would also collect decklist ideas from the community. There would be a bounty program to incentivize and reward those talented players that come up with decklists that demonstrate design issues and identify problematic cards. For simplicity, the bounties would be distributed at the sole discretion of the design team, which should be easy for them as they hang around in Discord regularly and know which players provide insightful contributions. I acknowledge this would require some manual work, but I don't expect the list of players deserving rewards to be that long and not that time-consuming to process.
To limit access of bots and get better feedback, perhaps the participation could be limited to players in ranks 9 and above.
The players would be rewarded with the current Daily Play & Earn system. This reward distribution system is automated, so it wouldn't need to take away any significant amount of time after the initial setup. Just duplicate the database that keeps track of the match results and set it to connect on a different port or server for the PTR. This would effectively double the potential player rewards, but hey, players would be making an important contribution, right? In any case it would be much cheaper than hiring testers, for sure. When the DP&E system changes, I think it would be best to keep the current system in the PTR. It's simpler and more adequate in a setting where players don't get to choose which cards to play and are just vying for more wins.
So essentially to reduce developer time to the minimum possible, the PTR would be setup as a clone of the current main game including the DP&E we have now, where creating decklists would be disabled for everyone except the design team and every player would get their decklists from the design team's account.
