would it be a bad idea to release new ships and content in tribble server? For example, content (new maps, new zones, etc..) available for everyone while new ship releases for the chosen ones? I haven't been in tribble for a long time but I am not mistaken, the new forthcoming ships are not released on tribble.
So how about using the resource which this community may offer? This may reduce the burden of "existing QA team" of PWE, and developers may receive the bug reports fast enough.

Yes it would be great but there also should be at least a KDF starbase and a Fed starbase from where you could buy new weapons/consoles/etc for testing them
These bases should be made available by Cryptic because I don't think anybody would like to grind again on tribble too (I won't for sure )


Edit :

For being viable option a player would need to get test weapons/ship/console free without any grind involved in process.
If so I guess everybody would like to be part of it

This is what tribble was meant to be used for, but for some reason they don't really use it. Not sure why they have to be so secretive with everything they release.

They could even let us test powers and ships with different skins etc, to hide the actual items if they wanted to still be that way....

This is why everything is broken when they release anything new. The Kumari has to have a full patch day dedicated to it because it wasn't tested by the players.

The same thing happened when the Armitage was released. They didn't allow players to test it on Tribble. What happened? We found it couldn't get into STFs.

The same thing happened with ALL of Season 7. Every new Tier that got unlocked had bugs attached to it. Did we find these on Tribble? Nope, nobody was going to grind their way through the Tiers on a test server. So instead of unlocking it all for us, they instead decided to be super secretive about it. And both the devs and the players suffered for it because dev time had to be spent fixing things that could have been fixed before launch.

It's a common theme with Cryptic these days. They are truly starting to deserve their name when it comes to releases.

Also, especially for a major release, 1 weeks is NOT enough time to be on a test server. Major releases require about a month on other MMOs on their test servers to find as many bugs as possible.

We are many, we are legion, we can find your broken crap. Do not ignore us.

From their point of view the problem with letting people try something before they pay for it is it will directly hurt sales when it either isnt as good as it first appears (tac andorian ship) or they openly lie about how good it is (JH-HEC).

Given that you can only use 1 ship at once in this game its not worth letting people get bored of a new ship and going back to their old one all inside a week on the test server. It would severely damage sales / income, which in the end is all they really care about.

Then for ships, they need to hire a QA person specifically for new ships and do proper regression and balance testing.

They wouldn't have anything to worry about if they actually cared about the player base in the first place.

Your theory is valid but I think it's incomplete and I'll explain why.

Remember season 7 launch? During Tribble testing for season 7 the dilithium rewards were reduced in STFs. Players didn't like that and left lots of feedback. They announced the new amounts of dilithium we would get upon completing STFs. What happened? A couple days before season 7 launched the dilithium and loot drop rewards were completely removed from STFs. Players were outraged, and rightfully so, about them going back on the promise they made when they announced the new amounts of dilithium rewards. It wasn't until the first or second patch after season 7 launch when they added the STF rewards back in. I remember them saying after they added the rewards back in something about "players are coming back to the game".

Another example: they completely removed the Investigate Officer Reports mission, thus any way of earning fleet marks doing foundry content. If I remember right, they never even announced it ahead of time other than the patch notes. They didn't give a reason for it until after the patch went live, despite the complaints already coming in when the patch notes were announced. In their excuse of why they did it they said they were going to increase/add fleet marks in appropriate areas sometime before the big May update. After over 2,000 comments, and a thread that had to be closed due to it getting out of hand, they decided to increase the fleet marks in various fleet actions the next week.

So I do believe your theory is possible. The reason they don't allow new ships to be tested is because Cryptic has proven time and again they are hell bent on doing things their way and ignoring player feedback. If they actually took the time to listen to player feedback and incorporate it into the game (within their means) they wouldn't have to worry about people not buying the ships. Nooooo......they just release the ships, wait for people to buy them up, THEN they fix any problems and make adjustments, after a large amount of complaints. They never listen to player feedback until they start losing players and the complaints start getting a bit mean.

I'm still wondering how many players cancelled their subscriptions when season 7 launched and never came back. I'm sure it's at least a few. But Cryptic will never tell us, at least not honestly.

Edit: Another common complaint among players, including myself, is the lack of customer support this game has. Got a bug in the game? Oh just click the question mark on your mini map in game and submit a bug report. They're sorry you're having a problem and you won't get a response for your bug but it will go to Q&A to be looked at.

Yeah. I bought a Tribble of Borg in the C-store in early November 2012. It no longer appears in the C-store for purchase on any of my characters despite the description indicating it can be purchased multiple times with no limit on how many. Found a couple threads on the forums that are now almost 1 year old. I filed a bug report in the game. I have a couple new characters I made about 2 weeks ago and still the Tribble of Borg doesn't show up at all in the C-store for any character. Like I said: they don't care about the player base at all, unless their profits are declining due to players fed up with getting screwed. Jeez. They could at least kiss us first.

I'd hate the see what their response would be if my account was ever hacked and I couldn't log into the game. "We're sorry. Please use the in game bug report feature. You won't get a response but we'll send your report to Q&A".

They can take their Q&A and stick it.