The latest information from Karune regarding the patch was on March 4th where " The Dev Team is preparing to send invites to the professional Warcraft 3 players to test out the patch on a test server. If the feedback is positive, we will have the patch out on public servers shortly after that."

The new announcement yesterday has indeed confirmed that there will be test servers for the general public to try and give feedback via a Blizzard forum.

Here is the official post by Blizzard Representative Karune:

"March 19th, 2008- The Dev Team is now preparing test servers with the patch that will be available for testing by the public. In order to jump on these servers, you will have to upgrade your version of the game to the test patch.

Upon completion of the testing on the public test server, those participating will have to downgrade their version of the game back to the latest retail patch. We will also be using Battle.net forums to gather feedback and bug reports from the community. Exact location of this forum is still to be determined"

Although uncommon it has been done before with Blizzard back in April 2004 uploading the beta for the patch onto a new server "Westfall" for patch 1.14b which to jog your memory saw the addition of the Goblin Tinker.

We are now close to four years later and with Warcraft 3 still going strong, the choice to upload onto a test server makes it evident that this patch is going to see some major changes and not just a handful of minor fixes.

I asked TowerPowerNerf the prolific video maker his opinions on the test servers and he decided to respond with a video for you guys (he is obviously going a little crazy with all the waiting):



Karune's Thread