Time for a public test server?

[Laerune]

I wouldnt mind seeing PTR, but only if they made it so the players can not test the MSQ or wander into zones. Just put them in building with enemy mobs and let them test the skills there. I just cant trust the players with keeping story (a major part of this game) events to themselves.

[Voltyblast]

I think a PTR would be useful, especially to avoid big failures like Diadem and the insane difficulty spikes we had in A3S (if I'm correct). Those are things that with a PTR they could've been resolved.

Without it, expect more unbalanced and unfinished content in the future, just like Diadem and to a certain degree LoV, aquapolis and PotD.

[JunseiKei]

I think a PTR would be useful, especially to avoid big failures like Diadem and the insane difficulty spikes we had in A3S (if I'm correct). Those are things that with a PTR they could've been resolved.

Without it, expect more unbalanced and unfinished content in the future, just like Diadem and to a certain degree LoV, aquapolis and PotD.

That's not what PTRs are for. They are for bug testing, which can arguably be done in Early Access. What you're talking about is having creative input on what the developer team is making.

[Naunet]

That's not what PTRs are for. They are for bug testing, which can arguably be done in Early Access. What you're talking about is having creative input on what the developer team is making.

No, PTRs are not only for bug testing but player feedback on content. If your testers are all saying "X isn't really working/isn't enjoyable for Y reasons/could really use Z/etc" then that can be taken into account for changes prior to release.

[Jijifli]

No, PTRs are not only for bug testing but player feedback on content. If your testers are all saying "X isn't really working/isn't enjoyable for Y reasons/could really use Z/etc" then that can be taken into account for changes prior to release.

It's likely that unless we get enough people on the test servers, it'd only end up as as bug testing server. It's in a company's best interest to not change balance unless either A) Enough of various skill levels test it, or B) It's very clearly so bad that it's impossible to miss with a small pool.

The issue with PTR's is that there's not enough people. And because there aren't enough people, the skill levels of players in it are too crazy to use.

[Atmora]

(after all Japanese and Korean gamers tend to prefer competitively heavily-grindy games, while western gamers tend to prefer "easy mode" short cuts like skipping anything that is optional. Those "instantly max level" P2W cash shop items are designed exactly for this.)

Holy shit you're killing me, Japan has maybe the most casual game market in the world and those instant level items have been in the Chinese and Korean version of the client forever. Not to mention if you play games like LoL and Overwatch in Korea from places like PC Bangs you get tons of content unlocked for free.It's like you heard the Japanese are good at Street Fighter and the Koreans are good at E-Sports and just made a sweeping generalization. The place probably the most competitive across the largest field of games is actually Western and North Western Europe.

[Atmora]

That's not what PTRs are for. They are for bug testing, which can arguably be done in Early Access. What you're talking about is having creative input on what the developer team is making.

No that's a thing some developers do with their PTRs, they invite top raiding guilds and the like to them so that they can test the balance of the instances and class changes.

[KisaiTenshi]

Holy shit you're killing me, Japan has maybe the most casual game market in the world and those instant level items have been in the Chinese and Korean version of the client forever. Not to mention if you play games like LoL and Overwatch in Korea from places like PC Bangs you get tons of content unlocked for free.It's like you heard the Japanese are good at Street Fighter and the Koreans are good at E-Sports and just made a sweeping generalization. The place probably the most competitive across the largest field of games is actually Western and North Western Europe.

You'll note I left out part of that paragraph.

It was supposed to say:

If something comes up in the English side that the Japanese side appears to have ignored or not considered (after all Japanese and Korean gamers tend to prefer competitively heavily-grindy games, while western gamers tend to prefer "easy mode" short cuts like skipping anything that is optional. Those "instantly max level" P2W cash shop items are designed exactly for this) then the statistics gathered about content completion will tell them so.

You may note that when V3.0 came out, there was a lot of abject fighting about "having to do 2.0" content just to start the V3.0 jobs or play with their friends who are already in the V3.0 content. That is really what those P2W items were designed for. However there is nothing stopping anyone from buying it. In other Japanese, Korean, and Chinese freemium games, often the cash shop is a way to fast-forward through the grinding phase of gameplay entirely. So "play balance" with these cash shop items is not something that can be play-tested for.

Let's look at the argument about WHM for a minute, if everyone started V4.0 knowing only what they know from V3.0 but wants to skip V2.0 and V3.0 content entirely so they never learn how to use the pre-60 skills at all, what do you think is going to happen when people won't party with them or abandon duties with them at the first wipe? Exactly, people will complain about the content being too hard because they don't have any experience with any of the pre-60 dungeon content, and what the healer role actually is.

Yet the reason for it being "too hard" is the player simply never learned what kind of moves are telegraphed, and how to avoid certain things like gazes by turning around. It's not like other MMORPG's where healers are completely useless due to power creep.

A Public/Private test server is not going to help balance play as long as cash shop items allow people to skip learning the content. Typically the testing that goes on for cash shop items is that it doesn't break something they didn't think of. On the server side, a "level advancement" item simply auto-completes every MSQ and then tops up the experience to arrive at the level target. That breaks as little as possible, but it's still possible that because the player didn't do the MSQ, they never talked to some random character standing in the middle of nowhere that unlocks the raids.

Public/Private tests tend to only be open while the GM in charge of it is testing that feature. You don't get to do anything except test X feature/skill, or Y Localization of X's feature/skill. Players on test servers tend to quit playing the game entirely because they see how broken the testing process is and that their feedback gets ignored over and over because you are finding bugs in things that you were not testing for.

That is how I believe the WHM feedback got to where it is right now, is that all their testers focused on the new jobs, and they didn't actually play-test some of the jobs the way both casual players and raiders would play them. The internal test team likely has their preferred roles and play style too, and if it's anything like live, they likely don't have people who like to play tank and healers jobs because those are considered boring to test. But unlike raiders, they likely required to be played as literal as possible (pure tank, pure healer) because that is what the game balance requires. They can not test for "raider" style gameplay because that is something that emerges only after the content is released. The Duties and Raids are likely tested with special test gear that lets the GM set the ilevel, and doesn't wear down, to give them the minimum ilevel for that instance, and are setup with timers on the content being disabled, so that they can keep wipeing at the boss content without having to redo the trash phases. If they can't clear the content with that party configuration, it's noted down and then they change the party configuration, repeat all day. Play balance gets adjusted to where all party configurations can pass it.

So in all likeliness SE would not benefit from any english or european public test server because the feedback doesn't help the development team, it just creates more work to triage the bad feedback they they aren't looking for. Larger more "open" tests likely occur only in the developer's language so that no translation and triage phase is required. It's very likely that SE has internal testers like described in the previous paragraph, and some external early-build testers to get feedback about the direction they have gone with certain roles and skills. There is no point doing a media tour to show off the new city area and skills, if you can't really use them, and much of the media content was shown against testing dummies, not dungeon content. So we can't really evaluate if these changes work or not because the media tour people were likely not permitted to do much with them.

Hence seeing the "embargo" threads on the forum in the two days before the ebargo was lifted. Some people literately don't understand what privilege they have in getting to objectively test content early. Unfortunately certain people didn't hold onto their objectivity and basically pooh-poohed some of the changes, and thus the amplification on the forum as a result echoing that sentiment instead of actually getting to experience those changes first.

[Atmora]

Wait why do you think the top end NA/EU community is less qualified when the skill level is much higher than JP at the top.

Edit: I'm sorry I'm really having a hard time understanding these points, I know English may not be a first or even second language for you but this is all very poorly structured.

There's also no plyer beta test even on JP, at least not in the same way as in other MMOs. I think you also are fundamentally misunderstanding the reason you'd want high level players to be testing in the first place. It's to check things like fight tuning so things like Gordias don't happen again and fracture the player base. It's not necessary to have testing like that but some MMOs have opted for it in the past to decent success.

[KisaiTenshi]

Wait why do you think the top end NA/EU community is less qualified when the skill level is much higher than JP at the top.

Edit: I'm sorry I'm really having a hard time understanding these points, I know English may not be a first or even second language for you but this is all very poorly structured.

There's also no plyer beta test even on JP, at least not in the same way as in other MMOs. I think you also are fundamentally misunderstanding the reason you'd want high level players to be testing in the first place. It's to check things like fight tuning so things like Gordias don't happen again and fracture the player base. It's not necessary to have testing like that but some MMOs have opted for it in the past to decent success.

I'm explaining what happens in test servers using experience from non-beta tests that I have participated in that were NOT FFXIV. If I had access to a FFXIV test server, I would not even be on the forums, because that would be breaking the NDA. I shouldn't even be talking about test servers, so I still have to be careful explaining a test process without explaining the reasoning for it.

In short:
1) FFXIV only has one development branch, not one for each localization.
2) All development of the game is done in Japanese, because the developers are Japanese. It would slow development down if everything had to be translated back and forth between developers that do not speak Japanese.
3) FFXIV is localized as features become "final"
4) One a feature is considered final for that patch, localization tests on "final" builds are done for the MSQ, side quests, new areas flavor text, and dungeon cutscenes. Localization testers are not testing mechanics, the mechanics may get some feedback about difficulty, but there will never be any changes made to mechanics unless the localization is not clear.
5) Internal test teams for mechanics and difficulty are only done in the language the game is developed in so that ticket triage doesn't involve translation. This is entirely why V1.0 screwed up so bad. By the time it reached the external feedback, it was too late to change anything.
6) External tests (alpha/beta/media feedback) are only about finding bugs related to capacity and getting people exited to play the game. Anyone who tested beta tested V1.0 will tell you that Square Enix didn't even allow feedback from anyone outside Japan (filing a ticket was responded with a "we aren't accepting feedback on this.") All feedback was ignored, and as a result V1.0 was released and the media tore it to pieces. Why would they repeat this again?

Like on the surface it looks like Square-Enix is repeating it's mistake made with V1.0, where they made changes that external testers didn't like, and have dismissed external feedback as "not trying it", and it's now too late to unroll any of it. We're going to have to wait a year and a half for V5.0 to see any substantial changes made to the jobs again. Unless you want V4.0 to be delayed another 6 months as they go back to the drawing board.

At some point you just have to go with what you have, no game is ever released in a perfect state because you can't account for everyone's play styles, and even if there was an open test where they allowed 1000 people from every country try the game, they would never get any useful feedback because the vast majority of them do not give useful feedback, they just complain that something changed in a way they don't like.

Look at how many threads the WHM changes created. Look at changes to the Tanks, What exactly could SE have done to anticipate the amount of complaining on the forums without even playing the game yet. In someone's mind on the development team these changes made sense, and it's very likely the majority of the players are perfectly fine with these changes. It's just the 2% of the players that actually do raiding are complaining about the small losses of DPS these changes are going to create.

If SE makes proactive changes with anticipation of the negative blowback to those changes, then we will keep getting power-creep nerfs to content instead of actually interesting skills, because right now, all the tanks are samey, and all the healers are samey because if they aren't, one gets favored over the other, and you get stuck in a "one true tank", "one true healer", "one true dps" configuration, and no amount of testing is going to create that organically.