Give people a price discount if they play on Test exclusively. Hell, make it free and let people exploit bugs to high heaven. Then Test might actually be useful.
Give people a free, well geared pre-gen character of their choice when a patch is on the test server. Wipe the server after every patch goes live, then close off all non-SOE Dev/QA access to the server until the next patch needs external testing.
So copy WoW again again?
"i can't be a star citizen. they won't even give me a star green card"
I recall EQ1 had buff stations on Test, you could get basically the best gear by hitting a button on the test server, it was great.
/betabuff was in at least around PoP I recall using it to test GoD. Wasn't there also a big issue once because on of those beta only vendors got copied to live in a patch and destroyed the economy so they had to rollback the servers?