No Public Beta Testing: good bad for the game?

[Awarewolf]

I am curious how this community feels about the lack of a public beta test realm. On one hand, I see the advantages: it’s FUN for us all to figure out the story and jobs on our own. I had so much fun figuring out how things changed and hopefully improved for my favorite classes. It even got me to try Bard, which is my favorite job this expansion.

But, it also meant that so many jobs were released with clearly unfair advantages and disadvantages compared to other jobs, something that would come up on a PTR.

Do you feel FFXIV content would improve for having a PTR?

I think it would, but only if they let us test the new job/job changes on the previous expansion’s content. I don’t want story spoilers or to even see a new zone.

[MintnHoney]

Any testing is good testing, especially if it's more testing.

[NegativeS]

They would have to have pretty extreme scrutiny in what advice they decided to take. I remember from my time in WoW, people would be extremely vocal about changes they personally wanted, but would be detrimental to the overall game... And then those changes would be added, and the game would suffer for it.

However, as the person who posted before me stated,

Any testing is good testing, especially if it's more testing.

[Illmaeran]

It's a good thing. There was far too much advance knowledge in WoW and in some circles expectations that you'd play on the PTR to practice for the actual release version.

I much prefer SE's *solid* in-house QC and no-spoiler launches.

[van_arn]

I love not knowing everything in advance.

[ryouma17]

the devs do a very good job of beta testing each patch they dont need us players to do it for them

[Makeda]

It's good that we have no PTR.

In WoW people just use it to datamine everything and have guides out ahead of time, which means no content is ever a surprise and no one ever gets to play the content 'blind'.

The lack of a PTR is one of the main appeals of FFXIV gameplay for me.

Story folks love that in FFXIV on patch day, everything is new and a surprise. It's like back in the days when Movie trailers only told you what actors would be in it, and not the entire plot...
Gamer folks love that i FFXIV on patch day, everyone has an excuse for wiping like crazy, and actually enjoys doing it. We have fun faceplanting together until somebody goes "oh... that's what's happening, hey folks, move left at the effect next time" - we figure it out TOGETHER.

[Larirawiel]

I do not think that a PTR is necessary for FF14. IMHO SQEX delivers really good work.


Cheers

[TheMightyMollusk]

Not unless they can enforce an NDA for story spoilers.

[Ransu]

I don't like public test servers. It trivializes new content and too much stuff gets data mined. Plus, why would I go into a test server to test a game for a company. They have a QA team for that and they don't pay me to QA their game.