Something the FFXIV developers should learn from the WoW developers

[Vaer]

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.