Quote Originally Posted by Kazrah View Post
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.