You may remember a time when Riot had a public test realm. You may remember when pictures like the one at right – the first shots of Ezreal – would show up from time to time because of that realm. I actually remember when Riot gave out a select number of Test Realm accounts. I had prepared to be around for the giveaway, totally forgotten about the timing, but still somehow managed to snag one. It was nice for a while, but then there was the whole crackdown on information sharing, despite the fact that the Test Realm forums were totally public so long as you had a regular forum account and blah blah blah.

But enough history! Public Testing is about to return. Here are the juicy bits from Udyr’s sticky in the General Discussion forums:

Over the next few weeks, we will give thousands of level 30 summoners who are active contributors in the community the opportunity to join our Public Beta Environment, where this testing will take place. We initially plan to limit access to summoners who’ve reached level 30 and are active within the community, to ensure those participating in the environment have a very firm grasp on League of Legends.

Don’t worry if you don’t meet the minimum criteria to qualify; we’ll be adding additional summoners to the Public Beta Environment over time to make sure the feedback we receive continues to shore up our release process.

I would like to think I fall under the “active contributor” umbrella, but I guess we’ll have to wait and see. I’m also curious what sort of NDA will govern information obtained through Test Realm access.

I wish I could say more about the relative value of Test Realms. I’m sure it will be good for Riot to get a couple thousand people testing new patches before they go live. I hope it will streamline the patching process a bit so that we can have a regularly scheduled patch day. But I also realize that a PTR comes with all kinds of headaches, and it’s just another place for players to run amok and do things that will ultimately detract from the value of the game, the community, and the testing appearance. Here’s hoping the initial test group has as few trolls as possible.