"Balance team tests the fights themseslves"

[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.

[AmiableApkallu]

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.

As I put it in another thread:

5 choices for melee * 3 choices for physical ranged * 3 choices for magical ranged * 6 tank pairs * 6 healer pairs = 1620 possible seven-person party compositions with one player per job. Multiply that by… 4, I think, to get the number of eight-person party compositions? Anyway, I doubt SE is devoting the resources to exhaustively test that many combinations.

They're taking shortcuts, and it's not difficult to imagine how it might work to set the DPS check:

1. They start with the internal testing team's DPS with their chosen party compositions. They have some expectation for how players of some certain skill level playing those same compositions compare to the testing team, so they take the testing team's DPS and shift it up or down to get something appropriate for the players.

2. They then take into account that some party compositions will naturally perform worse than the ones they used in testing, so they shift the DPS down to accommodate those less-performant compositions.

3. They then take into account natural damage variance and shift the DPS down to cover some not-small range of that variance.

So, it doesn't matter how well SE understands job balance (2) and damage variance (3) if they start from a bad baseline (1) because they misjudged where the players would land relative to themselves, which can happen when their testing team's performance improves unexpectedly.