Sounds like they are now explaining the mistake they made with the harbour/pier (whatever it was called) which ended up being unpopular and finally removed. If they had done this kind of testing at that time - would it have made any difference? Doubtful. If anything, introducing this kind of testing on Live servers may create more of a negative feedback - especially when the item being tested is beneficial, but only selected people are getting the benefit. Should be more of a Beta type testing only - but that also has a drawback, due to a much lessor pool of players to choose from as well as a different mindset for how players would spend their time/$/resources (i.e. - testing a feature that cost diamonds - on Beta, players would be much more freestyling on how they spend diamonds, but on Live, players likely to be much more careful - thereby skewing results of such a test). So, a fine balance to be maintained.