"Balance team tests the fights themseslves"

[Iyrnthota]

Unless you're a week 1 clearer none of this affects you.


The discussion about class balance doesn't affect anyone but week 1 and world prog - All jobs CAN and WILL continue to clear all content available.


This p8s boss hp thing only affects week 1 and world prog too - I can understand complaints from the top 1% or so but everyone else won't be seeing that boss for another few weeks at which point they have gear.

I mean, ideally it would only affect early weeks progs, but realistically even after gear overcomes any job balance deficits, idiots in PF are still going to restrict jobs they see as being weak or non-meta.

Even if the actual job balance is generally okay, the perception of job balance is almost as important, even to those not currently high end raiding.
Hell, the amount of times I see people in the 14 reddit discord saying "I decided to swap to X because I think it'll be better at endgame" is surprisingly high, even if they are immediately informed that reasoning is a bit uninformed.

[NightHour]

Machinist needs to get taken out the back and changed.

They've had potency adjustments EVERY single patch so far except 6.21 and are still trash.


That's a sign a rework is probably needed.

[Raoabolic]

Machinist needs to get taken out the back and changed.

They've had potency adjustments EVERY single patch so far except 6.21 and are still trash.


That's a sign a rework is probably needed.

"Potency of Automaton Queen actions now increase as Battery Gauge exceeds required cost at time of deployment."
No, the devs have already abused MCH enough. I wish they would just stop trying to rework classes and get people who actually play the class to work on balance. :/

[Jojoya]

Machinist needs to get taken out the back and changed.

They've had potency adjustments EVERY single patch so far except 6.21 and are still trash.


That's a sign a rework is probably needed.

Probably, but seems like the first thing to do is figure out why MCH appears to be playing so much differently on the live servers than on the servers the developers use for testing.

I know players love to complain that the developers are sloppy and lazy, but I don't think that's the issue considering there are jobs with performance that players end up happy with overall. Something else is going on.

We've had issues with animations and latency at times - is something similar happening here that has not been identified?

Are players playing MCH differently from how the developers have intended it to be played and have been playing it?

There needs to be some sort of dialogue between players and developers to narrow down the problem. Otherwise any rework is a game of whack-a-mole, hoping whatever the problem is goes away.

[Yeastyloins]

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

Why would you say something controversial yet true?

Thanks for the new sig btw

[Meowdyj]

Are you good at your job? As in your daily life job? Probably right, because you're doing this day in day out. These testers are doing nothing else for the entire day, heck might even continue after work hours.

Would say it's only natural for them to be masters at what they do and be better than us players, especially with all the dev tools they have access to before, during and after fights. Don't need video proof to know they actually tested all jobs.

[Ravor]

When was the last time any game developer/ test player/balancing team need to show their proof of actually completely playing their own game and finish it or to make video as proof for everyone that they actually test their own game? Even if there is one, it is very very small number, especially in mmorpg, i barely remember any other game at all even goes as far as to tell the player the reason why they make any changes especially job changes

[Deveryn]

When was the last time any game developer/ test player/balancing team need to show their proof of actually completely playing their own game and finish it or to make video as proof for everyone that they actually test their own game? Even if there is one, it is very very small number, especially in mmorpg, i barely remember any other game at all even goes as far as to tell the player the reason why they make any changes especially job changes

Maybe the absence of a public testing environment makes people suspicious. That was generally the norm, but here it would be difficult to keep from spoiling anything.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

Maybe the absence of a public testing environment makes people suspicious. That was generally the norm, but here it would be difficult to keep from spoiling anything.

Apparently most games that have them dont even really use the feedback anyway. just as early access.

[Jojoya]

Maybe the absence of a public testing environment makes people suspicious. That was generally the norm, but here it would be difficult to keep from spoiling anything.

Public rest environments are 98% marketing and publicity to generate hype and product sales, 2% developers caring about player feedback on content and job balance.

It's very easy to point to the go-to MMO target with a highly publicized PTR and see just how much the developers have cared about player feedback. Content would still get released bugged despite weeks of reports saying "the content is bugged", classes would release awkward and unbalanced despite the theorycrafters and players who play at the top competitive levels (whether PvP or PvE) warning there are problems with design and/or balance.

Then the player base has to wait weeks if not months for things to get fixed if they are not literally game-breaking in the intended sense of the phrase.

FFXIV patches have generally been released with far fewer problems needing major corrections despite the lack of a public test environment than that other game does with a public test environment. Personally, I like it this way. Everyone gets to experience new content fresh at the same time. If there's a problem with something, the developers take responsibility instead of trying to pass it off as "testers on the public test realm didn't give us enough feedback" or "no one reported the bug" (even when it was easy to quickly point to where in the PTR bug report forum it had been getting discussed). The patch notes give us a list of known issues so we're usually not completely caught off guard if we run into a problem.

A PTR is a mistake. It means the game company doesn't want to bother hiring a quality control team to check for problems to be fixed. They'd rather use players as unpaid labor and the majority of players aren't there to do that. They're there to get their free demo and bragging rights that they got to see content before release.

If the company is so cheap they don't want to pay for a quality control staff to do the bug testing for their game, you can bet they're cutting corners on other parts of development as well.