"Balance team tests the fights themseslves"

[Oizen]

So why is a game that refuses to add any real DPS meter/measuring mechanics, and will ban you for using one yourself, need to have DPS checks this tight anyway

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

0 confirmation of this apparently so not sure what it all is based on.

Well, there's 0 confirmation that you have cleared or even entered them yet. Why should we believe you have any idea about balance?

[MagiusNecros]

Devs should share their comp. Otherwise they have a party of lvl90 Blue Mages.

[Canadane]

The amount of times they've shown developers gameplay in the past 20 years of XI and XIV is countable.
They aren't some indie dev company, memes all aside, where they'll engage with the community and play their games leisurely on Twitch to help self-promote. They have advertising parts of the company to do this, the developers just go back to more development as soon as they're done.

Not counting Yoshi-P himself doing a few events, you'll not actually encounter internal development teams showcasing anything.
Plus don't tell anyone but their clients aren't the same you use. Too much info would run along their chat log to actually show anyone.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

while i wont disagree with this, my fc on primal has an ultimate legends raider group that has been together for years and they cleared p8s on monday last week only after swapping some classes. so it is not just a player skill issue in some cases.

You can clear ultimate without actually being amazing.

They are long fights, and they require skill, but they are not exponentially harder, from my experience.

Mechanics come out faster, sure. But I was starting to zone out doing weapons refrains first two phases, they had basically become muscle memory.

I've seen plenty of ultimate raiders fail basic mechanics in older fights.

[Ransu]

The amount of times they've shown developers gameplay in the past 20 years of XI and XIV is countable.

I remember when no one could clear AV in FFXI without using the glitch to make it get stuck in place and the dev team dumped on the entire community showing a video of them killing it legit and everyone was in AF gear lol. That was pretty demoralizing.

[Midareyukki]

I remember when no one could clear AV in FFXI without using the glitch to make it get stuck in place and the dev team dumped on the entire community showing a video of them killing it legit and everyone was in AF gear lol. That was pretty demoralizing.

Didn't that method eventually get patched as well? I didn't play at the time, but from what I was told when I played it a few years ago, they did make a video of them clearing AV legitimately, and then they patched the fight so the video was not valid.

[Anienai]

I remember when no one could clear AV in FFXI without using the glitch to make it get stuck in place and the dev team dumped on the entire community showing a video of them killing it legit and everyone was in AF gear lol. That was pretty demoralizing.

Remora server iirc.

[Packetdancer]

1st party cheats? lol. They have the people that built the damn fight telling them how it's supposed to go. They go through it to make sure it works.

It depends. Some companies will have a group of testers prog some content blind, though often that's not an in-house team. WildStar actually did some of that with the first Adventures and raids before the game was out; they had specifically chosen folks from the beta tester group run some bits of content blind and see if there were parts that were unclear. I don't think SQEX does that, admittedly.

And an in-house team almost certainly has a breakdown of the content's mechanics and progression, because you frequently don't have the time to let in-house testers prog something blind; they're in there to make sure the mechanics work as expected (which means they need to know what "as expected" is), and that the phase transition doesn't crash swapping arenas (which means they need to be able to get to said phase transition), and that a mechanic isn't so tight on timing that it's not possible for a party to move in time, etc.

The sort of testing and balance an in-house team needs to do almost requires they have the fight timeline there to work from.

And honestly, I would be shocked if the in-house team played through the entire tier with every possible standard party composition, especially if they did so every time the fight was tweaked during development; with the ever-growing number of jobs this game has, that would start to take a prohibitively long time to test every fight with every single party combination every time they tweaked the fight in question.

So, am I surprised they might've played with a party comp they were comfortable with, and just taken it for granted that it was doable with all party compositions? Not really; I can easily see that happening.

[Jojoya]

Right so as we know Balance team tests fight themselves before release right?

but is there an actual confirmation of this? like recording or stream or anything of the sort that proves that or is it just "hehe you gotta believe us"?

Because looking at current tier and some comps, I dont believe p8s was tested/cleared with most classes

What reason do you have to doubt it was tested considering the number of teams that still managed to clear week 1?