After releasing a lengthy blog post about the state of Neverwinter a few weeks ago, Perfect World has started to act on its plans to prevent future problems with the open beta. One of those steps is the impending launch of a new public test server that'll be filled with new fixes to be vetted for wide distribution.
During the open beta's April launch, players were greeted by a laundry list of issues that ranged from long queues to Mumble and Teamviewer related crashes. Many of the major problems—like random server downtime due to unexpected hardware issues—have already been fixed. Character corruption issues and full-blown exploits were also some of the first to go, with players no longer able to “use a set item exploit to deal millions of damage in a single strike," for instance.
That's not to say that Neverwinter is running at 100 percent, because it isn't. There are still more than a few problems with the game that have officially been acknowledged and are being worked on—Perfect World explained that its had to take down the servers frequently because the issues “have been critical enough to warrant almost immediate downtimes.” Two of its top priorities are: “Network performance and overall connection stability” and “Queue system issues.”
Cryptic Studios is dead set on making sure that every problem gets ironed out and the Preview server is one of ways it'll be accomplishing this. The test space will act as a way for the devs to test prospective changes before they go live on the open beta servers. In fact, the latest patch headed to the test server includes some huge changes directed at many core features—class balance, powers, the queue system, auction house, user interface, PvP, and game performance are being tweaked.
The updates will be reaching the open beta servers once the developers feel that they've had enough testing, but with the live launch of Neverwinter coming up in less than two weeks , things can't happen fast enough.
If you want more details, take a look at the full list of fixes that are on the way with the Preview server.
