Level 70 Actions and New Jobs

[Phafi]

No, that most likely won't happen. The issue with even testing out the new jobs and some abilities is that without being 70 we won't know how it'll scale at that level. So even our feedback would be useless.

For it to be accurate we'd have to be at or near lvl cap, with all abilities available, and a gear load-out similar/close to that of lvl cap gear.

Should it happen? I can see where and why it would be useful. But they'd have to go through significant means to keep story elements from being leaked/spoiled.

The only issue I can see with scaling is percent based defensive actions, such as stoneskin or 2.x series lustrate. These abilities have already been modified, and I wouldn't be surprised to see another stoneskin adjustment. Other than that though, scaling won't really be an issue, people will complain about having a low critical hit rate regardless of whether we test it or not because our stats will be low at the start of an expansion anyway.

@story elements, they've blacked out cutscenes and whatnot before during the 2.0 beta tests.

Along side that, we see how some doomsayers here are and would end up with complaints over stuff that is fine as is.

When you gather feedback, there will always be positive and negative feedback. It will just move up the process from after release to before release with a chance of some things being fixed prior to launch.

You have to factor in that they introduced the Test Server in 08/29/2011 (9.5 years after initial release). It was implemented towards the backend of the game's life cycle. The game had already released 4 expansions and 6 add-on scenarios at this point. The battle system was far more complex with 22 jobs to balance and the team's staff was reduced to help with other projects.

When it happened doesn't really matter, I'm willing to bet much of what caused it to be late in the game's life was adjustments to PlayOnline, enabling you to select from the game itself or test server, as well as the website to copy your character data over to the test server. I would like to highlight from this though, that as a company, SE has shown that they are not against using a test server.

[AlphaFox]

Along side that, we see how some doomsayers here are and would end up with complaints over stuff that is fine as is.

[Felis]

Test server: a special Thanalan with Thanalan enemies at lv70 and lv 70 FATEs
except the job nothing get spoiled

[DamianFatale]

Perhaps they could add this to the benchmark?