Time for a public test server?

[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.