Eureka: successes, problems and possilbe solutons from the PoV of a filthy casual

[Malzian]

Honestly I think the biggest issue stems out of Dev theory vs Player reality.

In the Dev theory, the playerbase goes into Eureka, groups form to tackle zone mobs together and level and that will eventually trigger the NMs which groups can come together to kill. In Player reality, however, we figured out that if we can just steamroll certain mobs to spawn NMs, we can get large amounts of EXP and crystals with little individual effort. The Devs for FFXIV seem to have a really hard time considering what the playerbase is going to do in regards to content. This is actually nothing new and this video is a prime example of how long this has been an issue: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KFNxJVTJleE

Eureka and Diadem both are absolute case studies on the necessity for a public test realm where a subset of players can interact with and test content of this scale before it is released. The dev team simply does not have the manpower in their ranks to adequately simulate the true actions that the player population will take. A PTR would go a long way to helping make this type of content better all around, and no I don't think that anything that has to do with raid progression or such should be player tested. The devs can handle small instances like that, but anything where you're putting large amounts of players like this into an instance is something that we should be able to give feedback on and it's the one thing I feel is holding back content of this type in XIV.

[Nora_of_Mira]

Eureka and Diadem both are absolute case studies on the necessity for a public test realm where a subset of players can interact with and test content of this scale before it is released. The dev team simply does not have the manpower in their ranks to adequately simulate the true actions that the player population will take.

Im at work so I can't watch the video you linked, but is there any evidence for them not having internal tests and a general "lack of manpower"? Do we compare them to people like Blizzard that have so many huge projects at the same time not even including WoW?

[Hestzhyen]

Im at work so I can't watch the video you linked, but is there any evidence for them not having internal tests and a general "lack of manpower"? Do we compare them to people like Blizzard that have so many huge projects at the same time not even including WoW?

There are no hard and fast facts about what SE does to test content before releasing it to players. We can assume that they have internal QA to find bugs and test functionality since we get instances that are polished and (usually) free of glaring technical defects. But there is no advertised Player Test Realm, no evidence whatsoever of SE having people test for "fun factor" and how the content feels to play before releasing it. Not all studios do this but considering the mixed reception their new content has been getting SE might want to look into it. Professional game developers creating content in a metaphorical vacuum can become disconnected from the end-user experience- you know your section inside and out and how the content in general supposed to work and be approached, but the actual functionality and how players will experience it can be vastly different from those expectations.

In terms of manpower, I've seen people compare XIV's staff credits to other MMO staff credits. The consensus from that exercise is that SE has about as many people credited for their work that you'd expect from an MMO this size. How efficiently that manpower is used, how efficient the workers themselves are, how much work they are being credited for, and all those other intangible facts are not available for consideration. All we can do is guess for the most part.

[BucklesTrespen]

The majority of players will always take the path of least resistance. SE can say they intended XYZ from Eureka all they want, but if the fastest way to level is mindlessly zerging then this is what people will do.

[Malzian]

Im at work so I can't watch the video you linked, but is there any evidence for them not having internal tests and a general "lack of manpower"? Do we compare them to people like Blizzard that have so many huge projects at the same time not even including WoW?

I never said they didn't do the tests. What I said was they don't have the amount of people to perform the test on the same scale as an instance of Eureka. We know they use their internal dev team to do these tests. We know approximately the size of their dev team and it's not 144 people so they couldn't actually fill a single instance of Eureka.