No Public Beta Testing: good bad for the game?

[Misutoraru]

All the MMO I play with public test.
Always end up catering to those who cry the loudest.
It usually not the best outcome, just the most popular one. It broke balance between jobs/class, shift dev time to certain content
Eventually those who cry loudest take over the game

[Floortank]

I am curious how this community feels about the lack of a public beta test realm. On one hand, I see the advantages: it’s FUN for us all to figure out the story and jobs on our own. I had so much fun figuring out how things changed and hopefully improved for my favorite classes. It even got me to try Bard, which is my favorite job this expansion.

But, it also meant that so many jobs were released with clearly unfair advantages and disadvantages compared to other jobs, something that would come up on a PTR.

Do you feel FFXIV content would improve for having a PTR?

I think it would, but only if they let us test the new job/job changes on the previous expansion’s content. I don’t want story spoilers or to even see a new zone.

WOW has suffered from having a PTR for years. Not only does it blow the entire expansion a year in advance, but they ignore feedback on top of that. Plus you can't expect most of that feedback to even be good. There are people who can't figure out mob facing in a game that has like three different indicators that show you where it's pointed, and they're going to give feedback about mob facing that is a huge waste of time. Now expand that to every other facet of the game.

SE has professional QA, probably the best QA in the entire world right now. A PTR would only be seen as a negative, from every angle.

[Saimeren]

I'd rather not have to do the developer's job for them.

[Floortank]

All the MMO I play with public test.
Always end up catering to those who cry the loudest.
It usually not the best outcome, just the most popular one. It broke balance between jobs/class, shift dev time to certain content
Eventually those who cry loudest take over the game

ARR exists because of public outcry. I don't think you're really thinking this through enough. D-

[Satarn]

I much prefer SE's *solid* in-house QC and no-spoiler launches.

So solid that it frequently totally misses very obvious issues which are immediately picked out by the playerbase (like Anatman opener for two patches in a row, or removal of Energy Drain from SCH, or just entire lily system on 4.0 WHM). So solid that it screws up the expansion launch balance like clockwork and then fixes it over the patches, after they actually get to see the jobs tested by the playerbase.

While letting us play the entire expansion/patch the same way as WoW does it, would be lame due to spoilers - and rather pointless, as they usually do get content balancing right, except for a couple occasional exploits (o5s wagon cheese comes to mind, still kind of baffled why it even happened), thing is - there is no need whatsoever for full content testing like that.

The issues XIV usually runs into are with job design and balance and that can be tested entirely without any spoilers they don't give us normally. They already show us a zone and a dungeon (during media tour) as well as a normal mode trial (during Fanfests) and people get to play those. They did skip the trial with EW, because there were no "real" Fanfests due to covid and I guess it kinda worked out, as both were rather spoilery this time around, but it was an anomaly.

Just set up a PTR that works like the media tour build, except with an EX trial added (same one that was already shown as normal during Fenfests, so that it's not any additional spoiler). That is pretty much all you need to test what you need and it wouldn't show us any spoilers we wouldn't have seen otherwise.
For patch changes can of course just let us test them on content that's already available on the live servers. Easy.

[Anya_Synia]

It isnt good all people do is complain about things not being polished and dont get the idea of a beta

[Retrisar]

Considering what would happen in the wake of WoW PTRs, I'm surprised you even have suggested adding a PTR here.

WoW players: classes are badly balanced
WoW devs: blame the PTR testers for insufficient feedback

WoW players: this content is bugged
WoW devs: blame the PTR testers for insufficient feedback.

WoW players: look- here's all this tester feedback that had been posted in the PTR forums about these very things
WoW devs: [delete the PTR forum posts]
WoW devs; We received no such feedback

At least the FFXIV team has to hold itself accountable if there are problems instead of blaming unpaid volunteers given no guidance or oversight.

Can you show me Q&A where devs said that players fault ? You kind of sounds like one of this players who never played the game but go no problem to s...t on it.

[DBriggs304]

No, we don't need a ptr here. Thankfully, the devs feel the same way.

[IdowhatIwant]

Blind on release is the current baseline experience for players and it should remain such. You shouldn't have to create a special group to experience brand new content without other players' expectations weighing you down. That's the advantage of the current setup, everyone is on the same page at the start.

This only applies to those competing for world first in actuality. And the competition for world first consist of stream sniping strats of who ever cleared the content first. With in the first week pug groups are expecting players to have seen a video or guide. This is far from a baseline experience for most players.

[Eriane_Elis]

We don't get paid to do QA so why would Square Enix employ us to be testers? I think Square Enix is actually really nice for not making a public test server like other games. They treat us more like family rather than slaves with money. Plus, it avoids spoilers and people raging over tentative things. It would lengthen the development cycle and likely cause the community to be always angry. I've seen it happen before in various MMOs. SE is amazing with transparency and their QA work is pretty top notch. They were a bit delayed with 6.0 (only by like half a year lol) but we understand why and as a result they missed quite a few bugs and that's fine. No game is perfect and no one should expect it to be. Classes are in a perpetual state of balance and they try their best to make it as balance as possible over time unlike some other games I wish to name but won't.

I'll be happy to report bugs when I play because it's the right thing to do. I reported the fending choker glitch where the color was wrong 2 weeks ago and they fixed it by the previous patch. The devs listen!