Time for a public test server?

[Deceptus]

2.0 Warrior (Lol we're playing it wrong)
3.0 Bard (WM as a DPS loss)
and now 4.0 White mage

Are proving that the devs can and do screw up. Working in an echo chamber never helps.

[Felis]

But they wouldn't have to give full access. They could give level 70 jobs, with the MSQ disabled/completed and also disable any trials/dungeons that would reveal too many spoilers.

Also disable many UI windows (like crafting log), DoH an DoL classes and most NPCs

[Khalithar]

Also disable many UI windows (like crafting log), DoH an DoL classes and most NPCs

Absolutely disagree. Those need to be available for testing as well to locate any bugs. For example, in 3.5 or 3.51 (I can't remember offhand) there were two bugs they fixed that caused fishing under certain conditions to crash the game and another bug that wouldn't allow you to turn in a collectable the npc wanted even if it was the correct one.

If they release a PTR, crafters and gatherers need to be up and available for testing to find things like that ahead of time. Besides, it's better to know what he new stuff and the recipes are ahead of time. I mean I've always felt SE should tell us every new item and recipe added in every patch. Having the players do the PTR would let them do that and find bugs.

[KisaiTenshi]

I've always thought it odd that an MMO of the size and scope of FFXIV didn't use a public test server

It's not going to happen.

Public test/Private test servers are a job, not a sandbox. If you ever want to hate the game you love so much, get invited to one, and spend all your time playing the same content repeatedly looking for spelling and punctuation errors, and incorrectly localized names. That's all English test servers are for. It's the job of the North America localization team to actually do this, and when a company starts making such things public, what it does is turn off the player base when content they saw in it doesn't make it into the game, or gets nerfed from what was actually tested. This is why I was disappointed with the "media tour" people. They essentially got to play a half-broken build and based their reporting on it. Chances are anything negative they say about the game is only reflective of their experience with the game as it is currently, and not everyone will be excited for every change in the game.

Square-Enix is a big enough company that they don't need "public test"'s for their games, they are perfectly capable of hiring people to test the game for them and don't need unpaid anonymous volunteers and hackers to get into their test builds. Worst, they don't need people leaking the content from the game to wiki's.

Many public-beta's of MMORPG's happen because they need a server-load test, and that's the only reason for it. Any cosmetic bugs you find, unless it crashes the game client or server, will be ignored.

Full Disclosure: I can't tell you which game I private tested (not just beta tested,) but I assure you it wasn't FFXIV.

Edit: cause I know people on the forum LOVE being nitpicking jerks sometimes...

Blizzard is a North American company, hence "public tests" will happen in English.

Square-Enix is a Japanese company, hence "public tests" will happen in Japanese.

That is what I'm getting at.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

They should have done this ages ago. We may well have avoided the disaster that became Gordias. All they need is a bare bones assets and concepts they want feedback on. Take, for example, the change to ejection mechanics. Have players test out just that portion of Sophia EX and get a feel for whether they think it's too easy or an improvement over Titan and Sephirot. Another example is tuning. They could use existing mechanics or fights, thereby avoiding any spoilers to new fights themselves, and simply scale the damage to what they think the scaling should be. Had they done this with Gordias, people would have been quick to point out it's far too high.

Small things like that could go a long way to improving the overall game and avoiding mishaps like Gordias, Zurvan and White Mage's current design. The devs are only human after all. Mistakes and miscalculations happen.

[Belhi]

One of the problems is that it is inevitably hard to test things on a PTS without spoilers. To test Jobs at max level they need to do max level content which means unless they specifically spend resources on making content for the PTS, anyone accessing the PTS will be exposed to enfgame environments and by that almost certainly end game lore. PTS's inevitably mean spoilers. Maybe not quite as bad as WoW has them but it always has the same effect.

Honestly I don't like the idea.

[Gamer3427]

I honestly don't really think a PTR is even needed for this game. This is the first, and likely only time for quite a while, that they've ever made such a big change to the combat system. While they're not perfect of course, the dev team really seems to put a lot more effort into personally testing out new content and changes than any other game developers I've come across, and they make a pretty consistent effort to listen to player feedback and implement changes quickly if something doesn't hold up after public release. As much as people complain, (because let's face it, people will complain no matter what), I'd say that the classes in XIV are probably some of the most balanced I've seen in any game, much less an MMO. They seem to know what they're doing, and even their missteps in the past haven't been anything major enough to need an immediate change aside from maybe a hotfix for a bug or two......

[Edewen]

They test internally. Honestly, I haven't seen a big shitshow worth of bugs. So asking for a ptr sounds more selfishly motivated than anything. Especially given it is about an expansions changes which don't even go on other games ptrs. Besides the fact, this is a Japanese game. I can assure you if anyone was going to test it, it would be from Japanese servers and they wouldn't come to the table with the typical entitled attitude you find from English speaking servers.

[Gumbercules]

as a WoW player, imma go with a resounding NO!. I understand it might be frustrating to have to "go through" the re balancing process on "live" but ive yet to see wow deliver a "flawless" patch, where "Everything" isn't spoiled (i like story mmmkay!) while still delivering a properly balanced play experience (hell in legion think patch by patch it has gone from one extreme to another with few classes?) Just not worth the extra month or two "delay" it would bring into the patch cycles and 3+ months it would bring to xpacs.

[Atmora]

What i dont understand is why introduce a confusing set of stance dancing on one class while removing the stance dance from another? namely bard having to and removing it from healers. Understand who can

You literally just use the new songs off cooldown, there's nothing confusing about that, your only real goal is to use mages as little as possible, since you can cut one song off early. Well unless Mags is more dps than I think, then you just cut off whatever else the lowest raidwide song is early.