Time for a public test server?

[Dualgunner]

Don't we already have that called "Early Access"? :P

[Theodric]

I'd prefer it if they didn't create a PTR. The story is a huge draw for many players, myself included - and many testers would just spoil everything unless some very strict NDA's were in place...and good luck getting the average gamer to recognise the legal weight of breaching one of those. It's not as if the game isn't polished, anyway - a few issues here and there, sure, but they're fixed pretty quickly.

[Naunet]

Don't we already have that called "Early Access"? :P

No, a Public Test Realm is for testing content for bugs and balance pre-release. The sheer volume of testers on a PTR is far greater than what developers can field, which means things generally get caught that may have been overlooked. It also allows public testing of class balance, which can at times avoid unintentional disasters.

[Dualgunner]

No, a Public Test Realm is for testing content for bugs and balance pre-release. The sheer volume of testers on a PTR is far greater than what developers can field, which means things generally get caught that may have been overlooked. It also allows public testing of class balance, which can at times avoid unintentional disasters.

I wasn't being serious ^u^

[Kazrah]

I'd prefer it if they didn't create a PTR. The story is a huge draw for many players, myself included - and many testers would just spoil everything unless some very strict NDA's were in place...and good luck getting the average gamer to recognise the legal weight of breaching one of those. It's not as if the game isn't polished, anyway - a few issues here and there, sure, but they're fixed pretty quickly.

FFXIV does have beta tests for players, and from what I've learned from a couple who have participated in them, there is definitely a strict NDA involved with it.

The PTR would more or less be a means of testing jobs and classes first and foremost. Not only is story something that doesn't exactly need much for testing, but I've already explained in this thread how jobs and classes can be tested even before they get to any story components. Only tweak would be having an option for players who want to not see any elements of the story is to have an option after the job/class test that can either end the test early or to carry on with the transition into the current storyline.

[Gamer3427]

FFXIV does have beta tests for players, and from what I've learned from a couple who have participated in them, there is definitely a strict NDA involved with it.

The PTR would more or less be a means of testing jobs and classes first and foremost. Not only is story something that doesn't exactly need much for testing, but I've already explained in this thread how jobs and classes can be tested even before they get to any story components. Only tweak would be having an option for players who want to not see any elements of the story is to have an option after the job/class test that can either end the test early or to carry on with the transition into the current storyline.

Even if they try to keep story content from being present at all, we'll end up with spoilers of some sort due to data miners. It's dangerous to even be around the XIV community when the preload of the patches/expansions are out, due to data miners analyzing everything and spreading what they can find from it around. The only way to be able to have a PTR without that risk would be to create a separate build of the game that specifically only has the content they want to test out in it, and doesn't have any other files at all, which would take a lot of extra work that they could be putting into actually improving the game and adding content.....

[KisaiTenshi]

FFXIV does have beta tests for players, and from what I've learned from a couple who have participated in them, there is definitely a strict NDA involved with it.

The PTR would more or less be a means of testing jobs and classes first and foremost. Not only is story something that doesn't exactly need much for testing, but I've already explained in this thread how jobs and classes can be tested even before they get to any story components. Only tweak would be having an option for players who want to not see any elements of the story is to have an option after the job/class test that can either end the test early or to carry on with the transition into the current storyline.

You're all missing the point. They do not need english-speaking people to test mechanics, the Japanese developers have access to Japanese testers for that. One of the nice things about FFXIV is that we, in the west don't get a west-nerfed version unlike very other MMORPG. Any public/private testing going on on this side of the Pacific is entirely going to be about testing the localization, not the game mechanics. There are no developers on this side of the pacific to "figure out" problems, they have to create tickets for the Japanese developers to translate and deal with. By the time that happens that "bug" may have already been fixed or addressed. That's why there aren't two development tracks for game mechanics. Just one.

If it was merely testing mechanics, then who is checking the localization hmm? You're all missing the point.

Testing in North America is always going to be:
a) Limited capacity tests, which is what we got for V2.0 beta, with all the storyline parts disabled
b) Localization tests, which are very likely internal. What the media tour saw was the equivalent of a localization test, not a mechanics test. It's also very likely that the Media tour was told they could not leave the area with the test characters to avoid spoiling content they were not meant to see. You break the rules, you don't come back, ever.

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.)

When test servers exist that the public can login to, that is when the hackers and data miners rip the game apart and no secrets are left to discover. Americans in particular are not very good about keeping secrets or NDA's, so this data leaks, so all of this stuff carries heavy penalties over on this side of the Pacific. Over in Japan, people are not willing to sacrifice their accounts that they sunk so much time into just to feed a wiki early data.

Look at the wiki's currently, all partial data from the media tour.

[Reiryuu]

I always felt they should have at least a Class or Job representative. I realize that a rep for each Job could be quite a lot to handle, but at least perhaps Healer Rep, Tank Rep, Ranged DPS rep, Melee DPS rep. People who would gather feedback and concerns from their job's community and make sure that the devs were on top of what the community wanted/needed/etc. These reps would also be there testing the changes for their jobs/roles to make sure nothing would be too far unbalanced. The devs seem to be really out of touch when it comes to the player base and having someone who could actually interact with the players more would probably benefit the game a lot, IMO.

[Araxes]

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

PS 4 restrictions.

[Gamer3427]

Snip

I like the idea in theory, but I worry that it wouldn't realistically work as intended. I do think that at the very least, it should be several representatives per job, and they represent individual jobs rather than the role as a whole since expecting one person to treat all the jobs in their role with equal consideration and experience is a bit unreasonable. I would say that each job should have two representatives per region, with a "Raider" representative to view things from the viewpoint of those playing the hardest content frequently, and a "Standard" representative to view things from a gameplay standpoint that the average player would look at, since those who raid, and those who don't raid tend to have very different outlooks on what is needed for their job, and how changes will affect them......

SAM is a good example in that regard from the early previews, since it appears to be geared more towards having high enough DPS that it is still usable in raids even without utility skills, but more than a few players are concerned that its personal DPS will be too high in standard content as a result. Having a representative for both groups would make it so that there is less of a chance that one would skew the gathered feedback to suit the type of content that they prefer. I also think that it's important to have representatives from each of the major player regions as well, (JP, US, EU), since the community for each region is very different in how they approach the game, which could mean very different outcomes depending on where the representatives are from if they're not equally representing each region.....

The main question after that though, is how would these representatives be chosen, exactly? Leaving it up to player voting might not be the way to go in this sort of situation, both because there is the chance we'll see the ones with extreme view points being loud enough and vote more that someone with a very skewed opinion might get into the position, and because the alternative is that we'll likely see someone with a strong following that can simply get votes from them, (such as a Youtuber), end up in the position, rather than someone who would actually do well in the role. The only reasonable way to have the representatives be picked and remain at least semi-neutral is by the dev team, but then how would they be able to judge who would accurately represent the classes in question? Raw stats or play time wouldn't be the way to go, because it wouldn't necessarily indicate that someone would do a good job as a representative, but at the same time they can't exactly go through and read all the posts everyone on the forum has ever made to determine who would fill the role best from a social and reasonable argument view point. I'm honestly not sure what the best way of even choosing representatives who are actually qualified for the positions should be. Either way, the representative has to be someone who actually plays the game, and class in question, because they are the ones who would be testing and ensuring that changes are actually what the players would want, rather than just sounding good on paper......