Update: The patch is tonight, our scanner has picked it on the servers and the DiabloNut DB will be updated in due course and while the servers are down join us in the forums.
Blizzard has announced that Diablo 3 PTR shutting down today, adding weight to the assumption that Patch 2.1 will be implemented tonight during the weekly maintenance period.
[blue] In preparation for the launch of Patch 2.1.0, the PTR servers will be brought offline this afternoon at 3:00 p.m. PT. At that time, players will no longer be able to log in to the PTR client, all PTR accounts (including character information) will be reset, and our PTR forums will be marked as read-only.
We’d like to thank everyone who participated in the Patch 2.1.0 PTR. You’ve done an awesome job of testing the new content, and we greatly appreciate the feedback you provided during this phase of the game’s development.
We look forward to releasing Patch 2.1.0 to the public shortly. We hope you all enjoy Greater Rifts, Seasons and all the other content included in this update. We’ll see you in Sanctuary soon! [source]http://diablo.incgamers.com/blizzard-tracker/devthread/us/14056995617[/source][/blue]
It was a lengthy testing cycle, starting back in late June, though we’d been discussing patch features for weeks before it actually became playable, so it seems a lot longer than two months to me.
Did you guys take part and find excitement? How many of you are like me — ruined for playing the live game with so much more stuff on the PTR — and just waiting for Patch 2.1 and/or seasons to go live to start playing “for real” again?
Like most players I wish the patches could come sooner, but at the same time no one wants rushed, incomplete, or buggy patches, and this one is adding a lot of content and new game systems. If I have a complaint, it’s that so much was clearly made up as it went along. Early implementations of Legendary Gems and Greater Rifts and other major things were rudimentary and obviously very early in the testing cycle… so it was fun to see them evolve and take form in real time, but if they’d been more developed internally before hitting the PTR it seems like the process would have been a lot quicker? Or would that just have taken longer on the whole, with month(s) more the testing taking Blizzard longer with just their internal QA, rather than incorporating fans and utilizing our testing labor in the process?