Blizzard’s Public Test Realm (PTR) is usually a good place to go if you’re looking to test out new characters, new builds, or see what Blizzard has in store for the next update. For the most part this is generally voluntary but it seems that Blizzard could be trying to incentivize it where players in the future could be rewarded for their participation.
This was revealed in a Developer Update for Overwatch that was posted onto YouTube. According to Overwatch’s director Jeff Kaplan, he explained that this is something Blizzard is considering, “For us to put incentives on the PTR is something we’re looking into, so it’s not off the table; it’s just a little complicated.”
He adds, “Those ideas, while very cool, would take development time to implement, and right now we wrestle with, is the best way to spend our time engineering features for the PTR so players have more incentive [to play on it], or using that same development time and putting it towards the more core features or content of the game that go out to all players?”
That being said, it should be noted that this seems to be focused on Overwatch right now. There are other games that also have PTRs such as World of Warcraft, so it is unclear if maybe the Warcraft team could be thinking of doing the same. Basically the idea is that with more players testing out beta builds and patches, it could lead to more bugs being discovered or more balancing that can be caught before it makes it to the main community which is actually a good idea.