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  1. #21
    Player
    Berethos's Avatar
    Join Date
    Sep 2013
    Posts
    1,195
    Character
    Celie Lothaire
    World
    Maduin
    Main Class
    Paladin Lv 90
    Quote Originally Posted by Kazrah View Post
    Except no gaming company tests for feedback; they test for analytics. Numbers and percentages related to content being done are much easier to read than any (mostly) jibberish that winds up in player feedback, which is why any written feedback is usually taken with a grain of salt.
    A good gaming company will look to both, and Blizzard does do this - but here's the catch: Most of the written feedback they've looked at and implemented is related to class design/balance. Does a change make something feel clunky and weird to use? Does the payoff for a particular rotation feel lackluster? That's the kind of written feedback they look for. Occasionally that written feedback will include whether or a particular piece of content feels rewarding (lately it's been leveling speed and scaling). There's plenty of "this isn't that fun" feedback, of course, and it's rare that those things get changed, leading to an all too common refrain - "Why wasn't this caught in beta?" "It was, Blizz just didn't listen again."

    For the analytics - during the beta, it's about stability, and balance, and things working the way they are supposed to, NOT numbers related to content simply being done. I've been a beta tester in the betas for 5 out of their 7 expansions (including the latest one), and we generally just play through the quests and check out the classes/dungeons, or test what they specifically tell us needs testing.

    The analytics for people actually doing the content (and presumably having fun with it)? That's the kind of thing that would get tracked in the live environment and is data that would be applied toward the next round of design decisions...and even then Blizzard has a tendency to decide to do what they think is fun in the end anyway.

    Analytics for people doing the content should be taken with a grain of salt anyway - if you hate it but it's the most efficient way to get something, that's what you end up doing. Path of least resistance and all that, right? From just a numbers perspective, that "dislike but doing it anyway" element would never show up and instead it would look like the players at least like the content because they keep doing it.
    (3)

  2. #22
    Player
    Vaer's Avatar
    Join Date
    Oct 2011
    Posts
    1,803
    Character
    Ein Vaer
    World
    Excalibur
    Main Class
    Scholar Lv 90
    Quote Originally Posted by Deceptus View Post
    One of the main reasons SE has stated they don't want a Test Realm is they want to keep the story a secret.

    I'm pointing out that the lead developer of the most successful MMO ever thinks that the benefits of having a PTR outweighs the need for secrecy.
    Well yeah. their Mission Statement is gameplay first, so that isn't really surprising.

    There are ways to make a PTR without spoiling story though. They even did it during ARR alpha/beta. They just had placeholder text and deleted the cutscenes. The actual fights were still spoiled though.

    I doubt a PTR would have helped in Eureka's case, if anything it would have just made Anemos what Pagos is like now and people would still hate it. During Diadem 1.0, everyone went to dino island or whatever and just farmed there. When they released Diadem again they just forced the player to play the way they wanted you to with objectives. Same thing happened with Anemos, everyone did the train and ignored what they wanted you to do in there so when Pagos came out they changed it to encourage players to play the way they want.

    At the beginning of ARR, people started corpse running or CCing mobs and locking them behind boss seals to skip trash since they dropped nothing. (You would have the tank pull half the instance, die in a safe spot and get res'd and keep going or you would sleep/bind large packs and go to the boss, the boss seal going up would make them reset) They then added walls that only go down when you kill all the mobs or interactables to dungeons to stop it. Same thing, different coat of paint.

    Honestly Blizzard isn't much better considering the cat and mouse game that is going on right now with the grouping tools/WQ. Even in a game like GW2 the devs had to go in and break up the zerg by forcing the player base to split due to mechanics and scaling mechanisms. I'm pretty sure Anet has nerfed farms multiple times, too even back in GW1.
    (1)
    Last edited by Vaer; 08-13-2018 at 02:45 AM.

  3. #23
    Player
    JunseiKei's Avatar
    Join Date
    Sep 2013
    Location
    The Mist, Ward 9, Plot 2
    Posts
    1,800
    Character
    Xoria Tepes
    World
    Cactuar
    Main Class
    White Mage Lv 90
    Reading this, the point of a beta is to find bugs, exploits and breaks in the game. It's to make sure what is being placed into the game works. It is not to give feedback on how fun the content is.
    (4)
    9.23.2019 [11:15 p.m.]Total Play Time: 1552 days, 0 hours, 0 minutes - You'll be hard-pressed to find a more cynical person than me.
    Quote Originally Posted by Odstarva View Post
    You people are never happy.
    [...] You complain and complain and complain.

  4. #24
    Player
    DeaconMoore's Avatar
    Join Date
    Sep 2017
    Posts
    575
    Character
    Deacon Moore
    World
    Mateus
    Main Class
    Summoner Lv 79
    Quote Originally Posted by Deceptus View Post
    One of the main reasons SE has stated they don't want a Test Realm is they want to keep the story a secret.

    I'm pointing out that the lead developer of the most successful MMO ever thinks that the benefits of having a PTR outweighs the need for secrecy.
    Funny, go over to the WoW forums, go to their ptr beta forums, look at all the posts about things that are an issue for months that make it to live and turn into complaints on general.

    Having a beta won't mean an end to echo chambers. Beta is to find bugs and squelch them. Beta doesn't mean they'll listen to other issues with the content they think is great as is.
    (1)

  5. #25
    Player
    Jojoya's Avatar
    Join Date
    Feb 2018
    Posts
    9,091
    Character
    Jojoya Joya
    World
    Coeurl
    Main Class
    Bard Lv 100
    Quote Originally Posted by Deceptus View Post
    One of the main reasons SE has stated they don't want a Test Realm is they want to keep the story a secret.

    I'm pointing out that the lead developer of the most successful MMO ever thinks that the benefits of having a PTR outweighs the need for secrecy.
    He's a Game Director that just inherited a dying MMO because those who made it successful have moved onto other things. While he shares some of the credit for success for the years he spent as the Lead Encounter Designer, the overall success of WoW is due to people like Rob Pardo and Jeff Kaplan. They were the visionaries that led WoW to its popularity.

    He's also a Game Director that isn't trusted by the player base due to many design changes made to the game since he was promoted from Lead Encounter Designer to Assistant Game Director and then to Game Director. He has been deceptive in his communications with the player base, twisting words to imply things later found not to be the case at all. The last thing you want to do is bring up something said by Ion Whatsitcostas/Fuzzikoalas with the WoW player base if you want to be taken seriously.

    The benefit of public testing to Blizzard is publicity and to get enough bodies grinding through the content to find game breaking bugs missed by their small Internal Testing team. They want the game trending on Twitter. They want the streamers putting out content on Twitch and YouTube to advertise the game in advance of release. They don't make changes to content. A lot of the content in WoW still ends up raked over the coals by the player base after release just as we see in FFXIV.

    The OP wants a better game experience than he feels he's getting in FFXIV. Public testing isn't going to create it.
    (2)
    Last edited by Jojoya; 08-13-2018 at 09:14 AM.

  6. #26
    Player
    Lunalepsy's Avatar
    Join Date
    Mar 2016
    Posts
    1,140
    Character
    Yxiah Eruyt
    World
    Balmung
    Main Class
    Red Mage Lv 90
    They should be their own person. It's time to stop cloning!
    (0)

  7. #27
    Player
    Kazrah's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jan 2015
    Posts
    1,464
    Character
    Nonni Brilante
    World
    Moogle
    Main Class
    Paladin Lv 60
    Quote Originally Posted by JunseiKei View Post
    Reading this, the point of a beta is to find bugs, exploits and breaks in the game. It's to make sure what is being placed into the game works. It is not to give feedback on how fun the content is.
    Bug-proofing is a primary goal, but not the only one. By showing people having fun with the content in a beta (WoW for example), they can build hype for the content. If that content is, say, an expansion, that hype can be used to build up sales and bring in new players.
    (3)

  8. #28
    Player
    Deceptus's Avatar
    Join Date
    Sep 2013
    Location
    The Goblet - 16th Ward, Plot 55
    Posts
    4,418
    Character
    Deceptus Keelon
    World
    Behemoth
    Main Class
    Sage Lv 90
    Quote Originally Posted by Lunalepsy View Post
    They should be their own person. It's time to stop cloning!
    It's never a bad idea to take the best features of the competition and incorporate them into your product.

    See: Personal housing, glamour logs, daily quests, dungeon finders. . .
    (0)
    Veteran healers don't care if we need to heal, but right now we don't. We want interesting things to do during the downtime other than a 30s dot and a single filler spell that hasn't changed from lvl 4 to lvl 90.
    Dead DPS do no DPS. Raised DPS do 25/50% lower DPS. Do the mechanics and don't stand in bad stuff.
    Other games expect basic competence, FFXIV is pleasantly surprised by it. Other games have toxic elitism. FFXIV has toxic casualism.[/LIST]

  9. #29
    Player
    KaldeaSahaline's Avatar
    Join Date
    Apr 2014
    Posts
    439
    Character
    Kaldea Sahaline
    World
    Behemoth
    Main Class
    Gladiator Lv 80
    Quote Originally Posted by Jojoya View Post
    The benefit of public testing to Blizzard is publicity and to get enough bodies grinding through the content to find game breaking bugs missed by their small Internal Testing team. They want the game trending on Twitter. They want the streamers putting out content on Twitch and YouTube to advertise the game in advance of release. They don't make changes to content. A lot of the content in WoW still ends up raked over the coals by the player base after release just as we see in FFXIV.

    The OP wants a better game experience than he feels he's getting in FFXIV. Public testing isn't going to create it.
    The thing is though, they HAVE made changes based on feedback. Sure they don't make all, or even intelligent ones sometimes, but to imply that they never make changes is nothing short of a exaggerated lie.

    From a FF14 perspective an open beta would have likely identified a few low hanging fruit for fixing if SE was interested. Stuff like WHM lilies, Raubahn/Pipin EX, Eureka being barely serviceable as content instead of a barrens chat simulator.
    (0)

  10. #30
    Player
    giwaman's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jun 2014
    Posts
    202
    Character
    Donna Shanao
    World
    Carbuncle
    Main Class
    Summoner Lv 70
    Quote Originally Posted by Aster_E View Post
    Yes.

    I would rather the delays be due to getting the content right, rather than now, where we already have delays on some things, and half-assed attempts on some others, because so much time is spent fixing things. For instance, when they made the loot of 24man raids all Greed Only, and went back shortly afterward to undo that change, do you think it was a simple on/off switch, or do you think someone in the dev team took a portion or more of their day--time that could and should have been spent on other things--on both changes?

    Even without that in mind, my answer is still, emphatically, yes. I want quality over quantity.
    Ya know people will complain if patches are taking forever and content droughts are worst, and so your complaints are half ass content that you dislike and get tired of so fast, but you also want less "content/quality" but are you sure it will appeal to everyone and not fail or get bored of it so quickly? Plus in regards of the 24 man raid greed only issue, I do agree it was a risky move and i give props to them for fixing it asap but around that time most players are around max ilvl370 such as myself thnx to savage so it din't really affect majority of playerbase unless ofcourse casuals etc, well nobody is perfect but all that matters to me is they deliver a fun timely patch content to keep community satisfied/happy.
    (0)

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