SE: your deadline

[Duelle]

In short, a perpetual model game with no mutability is a boring game.

While this is true, there's something to be said of change for the sake of change, change that adds to current gameplay (SMN, DRG, BLM), and change that turns the design inside out with few positives (BRD).

This sounds like an argument borne of EA and Activision. Yes, a lot of companies release shoddy, unpolished games and expect players to provide free feedback. SE, however, has no history of this behavior. Many issues (such as exploitable loopholes in a class's spell list) will never come to light at an in house testing division without literally millions of testing personnel. In house testing is good for mechanical testing; "does this cause a fatal exception?" "Are all the walls solid?" "Does this boss reset every time the White Mage casts Cure?" etc. Outside of those issues, its really kind of impossible to see how everything works until its in the hands of the masses.

I should feel a little insulted to be compared for EA and Activision. My argument comes from having raided in other games and what raid design does to comps and group make ups. If you have a dungeon with one or two bosses that are designed to favor ranged over melee, raids are going to sit melee. If you have a dungeon with two bosses that are designed to punish ranged and favor melee, ranged are going to get sat and raids will stack melee.

Conversely, if you have a dungeon with 10 bosses, where 5 bosses favor melee and 5 bosses favor ranged, the raid is encouraged to bring a balanced comp in order to properly deal with all mechanics. It's the same mindset used to justify the presence of an offtank or two despite the fact they may not be "active" during certain parts of the raid (some encounters may need only one tank while others may call for 2 or 3).

I must remind you that SE is a firm couched deeply in the traditions of cinema and literature. Its a very real possibility that they believed this thing would never leave the ground if the players already knew what would happen. Yes, the belief that you can't even reveal the class list without ruining everything is a bit silly but we must all remember the pedigrees of the game designers whom are, ultimately, mistake prone humans. They could have done better in the lead up to this thing but all we can expect them to do is tweak their strategy from here on. The past (no matter how immediate) can't be changed and its useless to punish them so harshly for a small misstep.

Except they blocked key parts of the main storyline during the ARR beta to avoid spoilers, so at most people had an idea of how the story started but little else to go by. Most of the beta was restricted to Central and East Shroud.

I wouldn't expect them to have all 6 new zones accessible for a beta. I'd probably have it set in Sea of Clouds with NPCs that gave level bumps to allow the testing of characters in specific brackets (probably starting at lv50-52, then with a bump to 56 and a bump to 60).