The Devs should hire players to test/give Job feedback

Patch 4.0 in terms of job balancing has been absolutely terrible, and the recent 4.05 patch didn't improve much. With so much money made, how can there have been such a massive oversight? Can you guys hire more testers? It's unbelievable how broken and clunky many jobs feel, and this is coming from someone than mained & raided with Summoner (ahhh good ol Coil days). I played from 2.2 - 3.0 straight, every single day. Then with patch 3.1 on the horizon, I decided to quit for real life reasons; little did I know that it turned to 2 years. I return for 4.0 and there has never been more complaints. Look in-game, look on these forums, look on Reddit (kinda). I mean, Summoner ESPECIALLY didn't feel like ANYTHING that it used to. The last dungeon I played was so rage inducing (Bane HAHAHAHA, Aetherflow cancels, etc) that I decided to cancel my subscription again. I told myself patch 4.05 will determine if SE gets my money again. It's truly unbelievable.

You guys need to hire more people to test your changes, and no I will not "wait" for patch 4.1, then 4.x or whatever. I did that during the Final Coil SMN MP struggle, to then get blessed in Heavensward, and now the job is hot garbage. With drastic changes like these, you lose the confidence and faith of players in your ability to gauge what works well, and what does not.

I don't understand why MMO developers don't get some mathematicians on their payroll. It seems they always miss the mark on some basic math when it comes to buffs/nerfs that the community than calculates out on the first few days after patch release.

I see other multiplayer games like Overwatch use special servers specifically for beta testing and balancing before launching it worldwide.

While I understand this could be an issue with story driven content, for combat balances, a single server for players to sign up for just to try to find how classes properly balance would help immensely.

I mean, for goodness sakes, SE had a moment when Ninja's found a rotation better than the one they had used for testing within a few days!

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Originally Posted by Fatshine

You guys need to hire more people to test your changes, and no I will not "wait" for patch 4.1, then 4.x or whatever. I did that during the Final Coil SMN MP struggle, to then get blessed in Heavensward, and now the job is hot garbage. With drastic changes like these, you lose the confidence and faith of players in your ability to gauge what works well, and what does not.

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Watch the ending credits, there are over 20 people who are just playtesters.

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Originally Posted by Ametrine

I see other multiplayer games like Overwatch use special servers specifically for beta testing and balancing before launching it worldwide.

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Do realize (every time this is brought up) that an English-Language test server would only be for testing localization changes, not gameplay changes. The developers would never want to create a situation of duplicated effort where they have to localize changes THEN test if they work.

With the games that have test servers, they often have the following limitations:
1) The server is closed at all times until something needs to be tested
2) Only the new content is available (sometimes the GM has to set a bunch of things on your test characters to start at that content)
3) For non-native language (that means English for a Japanese game) tests are only concerned with localization, not gameplay, except where the gameplay was explicitly made easier for Western tastes.
4) Feedback on features not requested testing never makes it back to the developers, only the feedback on the features requested testing. So again, Japanese game, only Japanese playtesters test the mechanics. English playtesters only test the tooltips, NPC's and cutscenes. It's also been stated that localization goes in both directions due to how the lore is setup.
5) You will not be allowed to talk about the testing process, screenshots, video, and even letting your friends know about it likely means you are never allowed to test anything again*.

We all saw an example of SE's testing process from video from MrHappy and MTQ 's media tour, and quite honestly I hope SE doesn't allow Western Media to do this again, because it riled up people based on subject-to-change details because the OPINION of the people they allowed in the media tour.

Next time, if there is a next time, SE should not bring youtuber "channels"'s to the Media tour. Bring people who are capable of producing video for Youtube, but have neutral opinions on what the game should be.

* Westerners have a bad habit of bragging, thus people who are in guilds/FC should never be permitted to test, otherwise they will always leak that content to their guildies to give them an advantage. In one game that I was a tester for, it was a never-ending revolving door trying to find testers that wouldn't leak information, and it even resulted in some features being dropped and never released due to the leaks. That's all you need is one of your testers to be a data miner, and having to push back or cancel content because that one tester leaked something that wasn't due out for the next few patch cycles.

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Originally Posted by Ametrine

I see other multiplayer games like Overwatch use special servers specifically for beta testing and balancing before launching it worldwide.

While I understand this could be an issue with story driven content, for combat balances, a single server for players to sign up for just to try to find how classes properly balance would help immensely.

I mean, for goodness sakes, SE had a moment when Ninja's found a rotation better than the one they had used for testing within a few days!

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Seriously! I honestly came back for 2 reasons.

1.) Bahamut

2.) See friends again

Lv60 SMN was so trash that I was dumbfounded, then I read extensively other people's experiences from not only SMN, but other jobs. It's just, no. Disappointing is too light of a word to describe. Bahamut is not worth everything else being a hot mess.

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

Watch the ending credits, there are over 20 people who are just playtesters.

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Then those 20 people need to be fired.

Okay, *sigh* that's just the angry gamer. Back to an actual response, those 20 people need to read feedback & interact with the player base.

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Originally Posted by MomoOG

I don't understand why MMO developers don't get some mathematicians on their payroll. It seems they always miss the mark on some basic math when it comes to buffs/nerfs that the community than calculates out on the first few days after patch release.

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The issue is that they ARE mathematicians, who throw everything into Excel spreadsheets and call it good, when they could just make a PTR and have us break stuff for free

Since they don't make massive PTRs in order to not spoil the story and fights(which I support), I believe they should make a... kind of ptr where players are only able to hit the dummy and do 1 make up dungeon with a level 70 character, this way players would be able to give feedback on classes they feel that have odd gameplay/mechanics or very low/high numbers.

PTRs don't necessarily make for better game balance (especially since most of the people invited don't even play to test, they play to see the new content early). Take Warcraft as a popular example. Blizzard does PTR testing for months and still often times spend weeks after a new patch hotfixing class and content balance. And though SE may drop the ball sometimes, FFXIV is still one of the better balanced MMOs out there. Unless SE could find a way to make sure the players invited to the PTR were actually going to do what they're supposed to, simply having a PTR (especially an open one) probably wouldn't change anything.

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Originally Posted by ElHeggunte

PTRs don't necessarily make for better game balance (especially since most of the people invited don't even play to test, they play to see the new content early). Take Warcraft as a popular example. Blizzard does PTR testing for months and still often times spend weeks after a new patch hotfixing class and content balance. And though SE may drop the ball sometimes, FFXIV is still one of the better balanced MMOs out there. Unless SE could find a way to make sure the players invited to the PTR were actually going to do what they're supposed to, simply having a PTR (especially an open one) probably wouldn't change anything.

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To be honest Blizzard just doesn't listen to any of the PTR feedback. They often get some very on point feedback which they ignore. Eventually they end up fixing the exact same stuff that was pointed to be bad early on much later down the line.