Quote Originally Posted by Souljacker View Post
This is why they should consider opening up a public test server. The players would have found the weaknesses, and SE could have made some different choices before implementing the system. It's gotten slightly better than it was with this last patch, but the rewards are still too high and the content is still too polarizing. Some servers have organized themselves, but that even that has brought its own level of drama. If you are even perceived as twitching the wrong way you are banned and blacklisted. It's as much to keep people out as it is to bring people in.

I hope that they obsolete this content soon and come up with a better method of casual progression. This was too much, too fast, and it should never have trivialized the level of effort needed to gear out in coil-class equipment.
PT servers generally won't be enough to really show certain content issues. The Hunt problem would definitely not have been found, due to the amount of players necessary at a given time. Not to mention the fact that you would also have to have even more players to be the "outside", so that they would experience the hate that would result. If anything, the PT servers would have reaffirmed their notion that it was acceptable (due to a much lower active population of players at any given time).

Seriously, public test servers really don't do much to reveal problems that involve needing a huge number of active players at any given time (like a live server would typically have). I know this because, for one example, I would frequent the PTR with WoW for years pre-patch times and issues concerning things outside of mechanics and bugs (mobs falling off the terrain, mobs/items not showing properly, etc) was rarely found problematic due to lower participation numbers compared to a live server. What are the odds that a much less populated game like FFXIV would have players spending every day and night doing Hunts 24/7 on a server that will not carryover their efforts? I'd say the likelihood is zero. All you would find are the folks that just want to see what the new content is like (log in to test servers to do a few things then never go back to it again), people who want to test raids, and people who want to find out what sort of things they should try to buyout on the marketboards to gain an economical advantage (I'm in this group).