Wait... No Public Test Server for this game?

[Tiggy]

I'd rather they not do one. I understand the benefits of a PTR, but the negatives are too strong. People can preview content which can greatly affect the primary game on release, and to avoid that they would have to devote programmers to limiting the game just for PTR instead of working on useful projects.

All they need is a little more insight into how people play the game. How western audiences approach gaming is very different from how the Japanese do it, and it's something they need to try and wrap their heads around. They need to make themselves aware of all the cheat apps out there and what their capabilities are. They can easily do this on their own, and for long term success they will need to. No real need for a PTR.

[Dwill]

Sadly, it's well known that people mostly use PTRs for gaining prior knowledge on everything which sometimes delays content because devs tend to change stuff around or implement the "feedback" - very rarely do you see it used for actual bug squashing. So in some extreme examples, it does work, it's not so much the 'advantage' you gain with the preview, it's the fact the purpose of it is rarely why it gets used, making it honestly a waste of resources. This is why some have them yet have extremely long content cycles.

Plenty of bugs get caught on PTRs, saying they are rarely used for such is purely anecdotal and full of conjecture.

I won't disagree that some people will use it to see content in advance but in the end:

why do people care about the advantage it gives raiders in a race to something they wouldn't even partake in for quite some time in the first place ? Or does that not caring about what other people do only applies when it's advantageous to you ?

The only reason people are, once again, calling for one is because of 'Hunt', which SE has stated three times now was a last minute addition.

Or potential ATMA feedback before release, bugs and exploits in both Coils on release, Titan HM exploit on release, speed runs in AK that were nerfed after being run for a few weeks, the joke of 1 gil that was in dungeons before they fixed it, the repair cost being too high for awhile are just a few of the stuff that could have been caught on a PTR.

There is plenty of other stuff that could have been caught on a PTR before they hit live servers. The Hunt would just have been another on the pile.