Time for a public test server?

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.