Audio popping issue

[Elliah-Seraheart]

While it's frustrating to constantly be told that problems are on our end when there's 50 pages of evidence to back up the obvious fact that it's not, it's important to keep in mind that devs don't have any more time to trawl through huge forum threads than you do. Furthermore, we're dealing with a language barrier, and on top of that most of the Japanese playerbase is probably on consoles, so they likely aren't complaining nearly as much as we are. As a result of that it also wouldn't surprise me if Squeenix's in-house PC testing environment isn't nearly adequate to deal with the scale of the Western market (might explain the state of some of their other games). Point is, if you're having problems, filing an official bug report is the best thing to do. Software gets tested more in the first day after release than it does in months in development. The more people submit bug reports, the sooner we can give Squeenix an idea of what's actually going on. "I'm doing my part" and all that. Squash them bugs.

I gotta say though, the next time a shady company approaches Squeenix peddling some weird audiophile placebo-effect software that only five people are going to care about and suggest their biggest game be overhauled to accommodate it during the release of a major expansion, all the while begging for ear pics, I sincerely hope someone immediately calls security. This has been a profoundly effective advertisement against Immerse Spatial Audio and I will make sure not to have anything to do with Embody ever.

This is exactly why I feel so incredibly insulted by the replies we got in this thread. I've worked in software testing for a major company before. This was a continuous delivery app as well - like FFXIV. Any company who does anything software has people to JUST collect customer feedback and relay it to QA and Development. There's also people specifically doing "Validation", who do nothing but constantly check in with customers to see whether the product they are making is the right product for their consumers, and help inform decisions on features to come. Their observations also get relayed to QA, Development and testing and inform decisions about future patches etc.

The fact that they decided to actually implement the whole spatial audio thing is a testament to how bad their QA/Validation pipeline really is. Even if Square has the best of intentions, even if the producers and devs bring about their finest work... It doesnt make their product better, if QA/Validation/testing doesnt do their job.

This has been an ongoing issue in the AAA industry that has only gotten worse with releases in the last 2-3 years... And FF XIV has finally shown itself to suffer from the same negligent patterns. Just for clarities sake - the company I worked at had around 230k people employed and makes around 50billion dollars a year. It's not just a problem with videogames companies.

Devs may not have time to read through these threads. But there sure as hell are people who get specifically paid do do just that. And so far I have not spotted a reply from any such person. On the contrary, the reply infers that they are completely uninformed and will remain so. Because they cant bear sitting a guy down and actually "investigate".

Instead they give you the good ol "lel just buy a new iphone"

[Nommers]

This is exactly why I feel so incredibly insulted by the replies we got in this thread. I've worked in software testing for a major company before. This was a continuous delivery app as well - like FFXIV. Any company who does anything software has people to JUST collect customer feedback and relay it to QA and Development. There's also people specifically doing "Validation", who do nothing but constantly check in with customers to see whether the product they are making is the right product for their consumers, and help inform decisions on features to come. Their observations also get relayed to QA, Development and testing and inform decisions about future patches etc.

The fact that they decided to actually implement the whole spatial audio thing is a testament to how bad their QA/Validation pipeline really is. Even if Square has the best of intentions, even if the producers and devs bring about their finest work... It doesnt make their product better, if QA/Validation/testing doesnt do their job.

This has been an ongoing issue in the AAA industry that has only gotten worse with releases in the last 2-3 years... And FF XIV has finally shown itself to suffer from the same negligent patterns. Just for clarities sake - the company I worked at had around 230k people employed and makes around 50billion dollars a year. It's not just a problem with videogames companies.

Devs may not have time to read through these threads. But there sure as hell are people who get specifically paid do do just that. And so far I have not spotted a reply from any such person. On the contrary, the reply infers that they are completely uninformed and will remain so. Because they cant bear sitting a guy down and actually "investigate".

Instead they give you the good ol "lel just buy a new iphone"

Fair point. In the interest of diplomacy, and in my own personal ongoing effort to not be angry on the internet, I didn't want to say it immediately in responding to Zhexos, but the tonedeafness of continuing to blame users' hardware for the game's problems after the 2002 debacle is particularly ironic. If any other company whose games I didn't play tried to pull that one on their fans, I'd be cackling at them, but instead I'm here huffing industrial-grade copium hoping a dev notices our cries. It does feel increasingly like screaming into the void. But they HAVE asked us to post bug reports, they've said they check there (even Soken's tweeted that people with problems should be submitting bug reports) and yeah it's a pain in the ass and we shouldn't have to do it at this point but it doesn't take THAT long to write one up and it seems like the most constructive option available to us for now. It's legitimately the best way to prove to them that the problems aren't on our end, whether they SHOULD get the point from this thread or not. Fortunately there's been quite a few more reports since Zhexos' post, but if everyone in this thread made one, Squeenix would HAVE to notice (or at least I would hope so).

Personally, I'd have unsubbed by now if it weren't for the fact that we just got three weeks of free game time due to the queues. I was able to get on just fine during that time due to being on at weird hours. so for now this is where that time is going for me. If the PR campaign continues along these vaguely defensive and accusatory lines without any substantial fixes, though, yeah, my sub's looking pretty dire.

Also just want to say it's been absolutely infuriating dealing with this while everyone copypastes the same damn memes about grapes. I hate those grapes, I'm glad they're gone, give me my sound back.