In Re: Regarding Issues With Hidden Onscreen Furnishings

Greetings. Frequent forums lurker, completely new poster. Y'all can call me alecto.

This post is in response to "Regarding Issues With Hidden Onscreen Furnishings" and is written toward the devs who have ownership of that issue.

However, I want to take this opportunity to bring to the community a broader, and steadily growing, concern regarding how bugs and other issues are being handled of late. This might be the wrong forum for the broader concerns, but I'm not familiar with the lay of the digital land, and since this begins as a direct response to the housing issue I will at least start it here.

This might take some explaining. Let's start with some background:

I am a QA Specialist. That is my line of work. Or it was, but I was laid off a bit over a month ago due to some budget cuts by my client at the time. (Not SE; don't speculate.) To say that it's been a rough year for QA would be an understatement. In a couple of hours I'll be messaging some friends to see if they can spare me some change because my electricity and water bills are both on disconnect notices. Just so you understand the urgency of things. This is my experience, but I'm far from the only one. There are at least a few hundred QA specialists who are probably hitting that bar right now if, like me, they didn't have savings. I worked alongside many of them.

I wrote a Medium article that gets more into this, particularly as regards the upcoming expac, but QA work goes beyond just playing a game and pointing out bad stuff. It is specialized work.

Y'all see that Template in the original Hidden Onscreen Furnishings thread? That is what is called a Test Case. It is written either by a dev or a QA lead to organize what a QA tester should be looking for while sussing out a bug. Now, the phrasing is that players should fill it out only if they encounter the housing bug, but that does not change the nature of the form itself.

You have been asked to do professional-level work, the likes of which specialists like me, many of whom are actively looking for this kind of work, would normally have been paid for. There is no offer of even digital compensation (even when I was volunteering with AFK Journey's wiki team, they were giving out a stipend of their premium currency).

This is not far removed from expecting artists to work for free, or allowing genAI to learn off of artists' work. At the very least, you should be irritated by this cheapskate approach. Not even a Noble Barding for submitting a good-faith report? Please.

But if you want to dig a little deeper, be upset for us, the QA workers that have been shafted so companies can cut costs. This has been a trend for a long time, with games even coming out in beta or alpha state while encouraging prospective players to "Help Us Improve The Game" or "Become A Founder." And the timing aligns with the mass layoffs SE initiated last fall, which, among other things, decimated SE's QA teams abroad in favor of a "fundamental restructuring" that would instead entrust game development to a 70% AI team. (I knew a guy who was part of these layoffs. QA is a small town.) Indeed, this is about the time where those eliminated teams' work would have dropped off. They might have done little-to-no work on patch 7.5, y'know, the one that had a Known Issues list as long and thick as a Roe's arm.

Some elements of QA work can and should be done with AI. Me personally, I'm glad I never had to babysit an AI squad for 20 hours during soak testing. But most of it needs the human element. Some of y'all reading this are the type of players who will run in right after maint on a game and see what you can break, and it is my pleasure as a QA specialist to spot those things you could break long before you get fingers on the game.
It takes not only a human, but a lover of games, to think up the strangest scenarios and try them out in a dev build to see what will happen. Some of my best bug reports forced me to write something absolutely inane that made the devs say "...how did they even think to check that??"

So, if any of what I said has riled you, what should you do? Boycott the Hidden Onscreen Furnishings report, and refuse to assist in any future requests to test bugs or features until human QA teams are reinstated. Will this hurt the dev team? Likely, although over in JP players are probably scurrying to figure out this bug just because they can. But unfortunately, forcing a reaction from the dev team is our best bet, because they are the ones who can most effectively convince SE to change course.

I have more to say, but it's a little more specialized and more directed at the devs, so I'll attempt to hide it under spoilers. You're welcome to read it out of curiosity though.

(Okay I couldn't make spoilers happen, feel free to skip this and the next post.)

Myriad QA failures
The idea of FFXIV: Koozie coming out in January 2027 when multiple load-bearing game systems will be affected by announced changes deeply scares me, and i say this as one of the many players who bounced off of Dawntrail. The lack of footage shared at NA FanFest tells me that those systems are not near a ready state. And you clearly lack the internal structure to test for ripples in the ecosystem in that time. Seriously, read what I wrote. This is feeling even more pertinent considering y'all are asking for freelance (and free) QA help.

Let's have a look at some of 7.5's Known Issues:
- Senor Otter should have been caught via an item-specific test case that would have had the tester open the Fashion Accessories window as a pre-step.
- The issue with pigments defaulting to purple when "Search Recipes using This Item" should have been included in test cases checking this functionality across menus for all newly-released items.
- The Windhurst KO issue probably would have been caught in dedicated playtesting.
- Windhurst's motion sickness issue is why accessibility testing and features are important. (I've regularly been called upon to run accessibility testing.)
- The new (cash shop) minions' black dot issue should have been caught in cross-platform testing.
- The Japanese text with vendor NPCs is why you regularly test established functions in case something farther down in the Spaghetti Code changes it. Having set test cases to run for each patch before it goes live is a very healthy practice, and probably one that existed before the Snappening.
- I don't know what to say about the Hildibrand quest bug. That was nothing short of an embarrassment. It's common practice to test new quest lines at a variety of completion levels. Someone will have to ELI5 me why that didn't happen. Shorthandedness, I assume.
- Changing jobs while standing after a craft should have been caught in functionality testing ages ago. I saw a guy screaming in Limsa the other day because this happened to him and he doesn't read Known Issues reports like some of us clinically insane people do.
- Ask any QA tester and they would probably tell you that giving your expac a name that not only evokes HVAC materials but is in fact already used to describe heavily frozen ingame items was probably not the best idea to come out of Marketing this year.

Shooting my shot
The games I have worked on in the past have won awards in the areas that I tested in, and most of my work has been on live-service games. I'm limited in what I can say by NDAs, but I have references who can loosen their tongues a bit more.

Want a taste of what I can do? On a 7AM read of your test case (template), I noted that there is not a field present for whether a player has SSAO enabled. And while that may or may not be a cause or related to your memory leak, it does need to be isolated as a factor. And that's as much as you're getting for free.

If you earnestly want a look at this housing issue, and any others that might be forthcoming, I can assemble the following within the space of 24 hours, and no, I'm not boasting or exaggerating:

- I can account for at least 6 QA specialists, some of whom have Test Lead experience and beyond, who would hop on tonight and run checks on item load and visibility in FFXIV's live client. We will find your memory leak. I'm legendary for that, actually. The others can negotiate their own terms, but you can credit me and pay me for my time. Entergy won't accept a Noble Barding to reinstate my account, unfortunately.
- I can put you in touch with a company that is piloting QA-specific software so you can actually see what players are encountering before, during, and after housing interactions instead of relying on them to self-report. I'm only guaranteeing the contact, though. How the purchase goes is on y'all. You can name-drop me and see if they give you a discount though.
- I also have a degree in business, so I can draft up a outside proposal analyzing the likely positive and negative impacts of pivoting away from a human-centered approach to an AI-centric one, especially as regards QA, in your NA markets. I can also toss in a risk assessment on QA's likelihood of further damaging FFXIV's brand and reputation, as a little lagniappe.

If any of this interests you, you can find a way to reach me. My lack of employment does lead to my being ingame much more often of late.

That's it from me for now. Thanks for reading. I need a nap.
- alecto, longtime player, unemployed QA specialist, deeply chagrined payer of sub

If that's true, I feel really sorry for you, as a fellow QA engineer working at another company. It's unlikely that anyone would compose and write such a long text using technical terms simply out of a desire to troll or annoy moderators, i guess.
AI is a nice tool, but many companies see it simply as a way to save on employee salaries, and therefore cut staff without limits, at the expense of quality.