It was seven months ago that EA first launched the controversial FPS Battlefield 4, and since that time the game had been plagued with unfortunate bugs.

Last week on May 9th, DICE opened the Community Test Environment (CTE), which is a closed testing program for new patches. This allows the developers to test patches rapidly under real game conditions without having to release them for five different platforms, possibly causing a new bug. It’s similar to what Mojang does with Minecraft, allowing players who are interested to download the new versions of the game early to test them out, while those who prefer a stable release can opt to remain with the current release.

Most of these bugs came from what are miscommunications between players’ computers and the game’s servers. One of the more egregious examples was the “one hit kill” bug. The bug was related to the game’s “tickrate,” or how many times the game updates the positions of bullets, counts damage, etc. Battlefield 4 uses a tickrate of 10Hz, or 10 times per second, so when you fired a bullet at a certain distance, it would be intersecting with a player for two ticks instead of one, and the game would count that as two hits.

Originally this was fixed by preventing the game from counting the same bullet twice, while keeping tick rate the same. This was a problem as the low tickrate was responsible for other bugs, like the “trade kills,” where players managed to killed by a player they had just killed who managed to fire off an extra bullet or two before the game realized they were dead. Thus one of the first updates in the CTE was one that updated the tickrate to 30Hz rather than 10.

Several other fixes have been made as well, such as one to reduce the amount the screen shakes when explosions are going off near you. This often affected gameplay on certain maps such as Operation Locker, where your entire game is spent in enclosed spaces with grenades going off. Not everything has been fixed yet, but real progress is finally starting to be made. So far the system has been well received by the community.

If you’re playing Battlefield 4 on PC with Premium, you can sign up for the CTE here. Otherwise you’ll have to wait until the fixes are released for a general audience.

What are you’re reactions to this? Have any of you tried out the CTE yet? If so what did you think of it? Let us know in the comments!