Making yet another post about this because of lazy devs

[Videra]

FFXIV needs a PTR.

[KizuyaKatogami]

Yeah. If they filed a bug report and worded it like their posts in this thread it likely got thrown out.

Bashing and insulting the devs because of a bug you noticed isn't a way to get something fixed. Exaggerating the impact or your inconvenience also isn't productive. I have an FC mate that mains BRD and they were the first ones that told me about what he called the RP walk bug where using a skill then immediately following it with the basic attack spam button would basically glitch you into moving at walk speed until you did 1 of a few things that could clear the glitch returning move speed to normal. They said it's a more noticeable issue in CC because the easiest way to clear it is to just summon your mount which isn't available in that pvp mode. Despite this they are still climbing ranking tiers as a BRD.

Not sure how it’s an exaggeration. It literally renders you immobile in a game mode that is all about mobility. I’ve tried FL with it a bit as well and i thought a mount would fix it but most of the time getting on a mount didn’t fix the problem and neither did dying. Sorry but it’s the truth. QA exists for a reason. It’s clear they didn’t even bother testing the job, which is beyond ridiculous. They refuse to implement a ptr system because “muh spoilers”, yet they won’t test the game themselves?

[KizuyaKatogami]

I think they could stand to change up their test process, no question. However, it is startling easy for bugs -- even ones that show up quickly in the hands of players -- to sneak through at any game company. Largely because most game QA -- indeed, a breathtaking amount of software QA in general -- ends up being done by testing "does the thing work if we do <steps expected to work>", sometimes with variant steps, rather than "does the thing break if we do things that, by all rights, should not affect the thing we're testing".

Maybe they finished and tested the PvP mode, checked it off, then made a fix to something unrelated -- say, having an issue with Wanderer's Minuet if you've got two bards in a PvE party. That's in the PvE combat! Obviously it won't affect PvP; why redo all the PvP tests for a PvE change? But, surprise, games tend to be made up of a bunch of interlocking systems that shouldn't affect each other but sometimes do. And things like that make it, as noted, very easy for bugs to slip through.

This can be addressed by changing the QA process, but I don't know of many game companies that want to put in the time (or, given deadlines and crunch, can necessarily spare the time) to do that sort of comprehensive test matrix, including retesting everything else when you change one specific thing.

(Source: I have worked as a game developer professionally, and have many friends and former co-workers who still do, thus have painful familiarity with ways that game QA can be done.)



This, I think, is also why folks don't take your complaints seriously.

Plenty of people can state that the Hrothgar hair situation is a problem, and one they think should be addressed.

But you outright say the devs are laughing at the players, mocking their desires. This ascribes active malice to their actions, and regardless of whether or not you think the Hrothgar hair situation should be different, I've seen no evidence they're actually maliciously laughing at players about it.

It may be only intended as angry hyperbole, but ascribing active malice to another party just ends up making any potentially-valid complaint sound a bit paranoid at best. And it certainly isn't going to make the party in question inclined to listen to what sounds like an unhinged rant, much less try to take it seriously as a bug report.

They literally laughed on stream when they were showing off their hairstyles with the cut off ears, laughing and saying “just pretend they’re there.”

Again, if we're at the point where theyre consistently missing major bugs in testing, if they even are testing, then its time to make a ptr and let the players test things.

[Shibi]

They literally laughed on stream when they were showing off their hairstyles with the cut off ears, laughing and saying “just pretend they’re there.”

They said nothing of the sort (considering the stream was in Japanese), and they were looking at the niconico livechat monitors. You don't know what was being said on those at the time. But you can't presume any malice there.

[Packetdancer]

then its time to make a ptr and let the players test things.

On this one point, we actually agree. There's huge value to PTRs -- or even to having a select group of players who have access to early builds and a single test world, if doing a full PTR that works for all regions is problematic. (Like the Evocati with Star Citizen, for instance, much as I dislike that system.)

I know some people scoff and are like "oh, that's just outsourcing the testing" and I suppose you can look at it that way, but:

• Software QA in general -- and game development QA in particular -- is not well-suited to really thorough testing, given how it's usually handled.
• Live environments and development environments vary greatly in online gaming; a development server is handling a much lower load, and is thus far less likely to see errors like I/O bottlenecks or database locking race conditions. (See also: housing placards not receiving lottery data.)
• Players will generally try weird things you never imagined anyone would try. (Is it rational for someone to try hitting a wall 50 times in Elden Ring to see if it broke? Probably not really. Did someone do it anyway? Yep.)

Making a test realm that's wiped frequently (but lets you copy your real character over after a wipe, to ensure people can test endgame content and whatnot) and letting players loose on it really, definitively will help a team find bugs triggered in ways they'd never consider in order to put into a QA plan.

Mind you, even a PTR won't catch 100% of bugs; for instance, a PTR probably would also have a low load compared to a real live world, so even testing the housing lottery there might not have had the situation arise that prevented placards from receiving data, and still let that bug slip through. But even if it's not 100% of bugs, a PTR will absolutely catch more bugs than purely internal testing will, and finding any non-zero number of additional bugs -- yes, there can be huge value in that.

[RitsukoSonoda]

On this one point, we actually agree. There's huge value to PTRs -- or even to having a select group of players who have access to early builds and a single test world, if doing a full PTR that works for all regions is problematic. (Like the Evocati with Star Citizen, for instance, much as I dislike that system.)

I know some people scoff and are like "oh, that's just outsourcing the testing" and I suppose you can look at it that way, but:

• Software QA in general -- and game development QA in particular -- is not well-suited to really thorough testing, given how it's usually handled.
• Live environments and development environments vary greatly in online gaming; a development server is handling a much lower load, and is thus far less likely to see errors like I/O bottlenecks or database locking race conditions. (See also: housing placards not receiving lottery data.)
• Players will generally try weird things you never imagined anyone would try. (Is it rational for someone to try hitting a wall 50 times in Elden Ring to see if it broke? Probably not really. Did someone do it anyway? Yep.)

Making a test realm that's wiped frequently (but lets you copy your real character over after a wipe, to ensure people can test endgame content and whatnot) and letting players loose on it really, definitively will help a team find bugs triggered in ways they'd never consider in order to put into a QA plan.

Mind you, even a PTR won't catch 100% of bugs; for instance, a PTR probably would also have a low load compared to a real live world, so even testing the housing lottery there might not have had the situation arise that prevented placards from receiving data, and still let that bug slip through. But even if it's not 100% of bugs, a PTR will absolutely catch more bugs than purely internal testing will, and finding any non-zero number of additional bugs -- yes, there can be huge value in that.

A bug like the one the OP is complaining about actually would have a high probability of being missed on a PTR as well since it's specific to an interaction with a specific skill on 1 class that is only used in PvP which in itself isn't very widely used by players of the game. The FC mate that told me about it also said it might be specific to the PS4 platform as they've been told by other BRD players on PS5 and PC that they haven't experienced it and they play the game on PS4.

[Mirhd]

... People have already made the (inaccurate) claim, time and again, that we are "testing" the game for the devs because they "can't be bothered"... when FFXIV has some of the best QA I've seen in an MMO, as serious bugs rarely make it to live. Yes, rarely. The forums' personal bias towards making mountains out of ant hills is not reflective of reality, and even as someone who has never worked in game development, I can still see the difference between good QA and poor QA. People would still complain even if there was a PTR, and you all arguing in favor of a PTR know it.

I also don't care for it on a personal level, as the PTR in WoW ruined any sort of surprise; even if you avoided it yourself, chances are you would see/hear about the new content elsewhere and have it spoiled as a result. Not to mention people demanding unreasonable perfection during runs because "it was on PTR! you should have done it/looked into it!"... Well, excuse me for not wanting to spoil myself, I suppose? I love the dumpster fire runs that happen every time during the first week of a new patch here... everything is new to everyone, and we're all on the same playing field. Hilarity is inevitable.

A bug like the one the OP is complaining about actually would have a high probability of being missed on a PTR as well since it's specific to an interaction with a specific skill on 1 class that is only used in PvP which in itself isn't very widely used by players of the game. The FC mate that told me about it also said it might be specific to the PS4 platform as they've been told by other BRD players on PS5 and PC that they haven't experienced it and they play the game on PS4.

Yeah. It's physically impossible to catch everything (even serious bugs can't always be caught!), and it's honestly amazing that anyone still tries to argue otherwise...

People complaining about the lack of love for Hrothgar (or proper instanced housing...) etc., is fair. The devs are aren't lazy though, good grief. Anytime I see someone slinging that word around, I immediately think said person is simply incapable of seeing anything beyond their own desires... such as the OP. The more and more she/he post, the more I think OP needs to do some serious self reflection, but this is unlikely to ever happen...

... Japanese companies, and software companies in general do not run on "lazy"...

Yeeeeah... there's a reason Japan is known for its work culture... because of how unhealthy it is. I've heard it's been getting better, but for crying out loud... "lazy" is NOT a word I would use to describe the devs here. Tone deaf at times perhaps, but not "lazy".

[KuroMaboroshi]

I also don't care for it on a personal level, as the PTR in WoW ruined any sort of surprise; even if you avoided it yourself, chances are you would see/hear about the new content elsewhere and have it spoiled as a result.

This is why, though I am on principle not opposed to a PTR, it would have to be for mechanical features only. Sure, let people test PvP abilities, potency changes, etc.. But anything content-driven should be kept well out of it. No MSQ, no new raids. Let players test systems, but not content.

Which sounds rather unlikely to happen cause the dev team already doesn't like people pre-judinging their balancing decisions (hence why they keep it out of patch notes until the last possible moment) and it would force them to maintain a completely separate PTR branch of the game that would likely require extra effort to maintain.

[Jeeqbit]

... People have already made the (inaccurate) claim, time and again, that we are "testing" the game for the devs because they "can't be bothered"... when FFXIV has some of the best QA I've seen in an MMO, as serious bugs rarely make it to live. Yes, rarely. The forums' personal bias towards making mountains out of ant hills is not reflective of reality, and even as someone who has never worked in game development, I can still see the difference between good QA and poor QA.

I had never seen a single bug for myself in years of playing before covid. I forget where I saw this but I remember there were over 100 people testing the game to find bugs.

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...9&d=1613761434

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...=1#post5507820

[Packetdancer]

It’s ok to post in other threads other people have created on topics you keep bringing up OP.

In fact, it's more likely to be productive. Moderators have said before that particularly active threads are likely to get noticed by the mod team, and if they're noticed by the mod team they're more likely to be taken to the developers.

Posting 87 different threads on the same complaint likely doesn't show up on the moderator "active threads" dashboard, and probably just becomes noise among the signal; one thread growing to 87 pages is almost certainly more likely to get noticed.

... People have already made the (inaccurate) claim, time and again, that we are "testing" the game for the devs because they "can't be bothered"... when FFXIV has some of the best QA I've seen in an MMO, as serious bugs rarely make it to live.

I will concur with this.

The fact that I think SQEX could demonstrably do better with their QA/testing should not be taken as a measurement of flaw against other game companies; I think all game companies -- heck, nearly all software companies -- could do far better on testing. Going into embedded systems has really made me a much more firm believer in better testing practices than when I was a game dev for my day job; the vast majority of people rarely update the firmware on various devices they have, so if you are making a medical device or a diving rebreather, you really want to make sure it works. Admittedly, the consequences there -- someone potentially dies -- are far greater than with a bug in a game, but that still doesn't mean there couldn't be some improvement in test practices used across the software (and game) industry.

That said, SQEX's record of software bugs is no worse than many game companies -- and better than quite a few, even without the complexity of the online ecosystem that an MMO entails. (And their track record on fixing major bugs quickly is way better than many.)

I also don't care for it on a personal level, as the PTR in WoW ruined any sort of surprise; even if you avoided it yourself, chances are you would see/hear about the new content elsewhere and have it spoiled as a result.

I also concur on this. While there's a lot of benefit to a PTR in terms of providing better (or at least, more diverse) test coverage, it absolutely ruins any surprise on storyline or plot which is so key to this game's intended experience. Sure, there are things in MSQ that could have been caught in a PTR; I'm thinking of a certain solo instance which concludes with a button-mashing Active Time Maneuver that -- unlike basically every previous one -- did not lock out legitimate keyboard input at launch, thus potentially causing you to open a bajillion windows in the game rather than actually giving input to the ATM. But I think the benefit of getting to discover the story relatively naturally rather than having it spoiled outweighs those handful of situations.

And it's a fair point to note that the difficulty of splitting out just new systems or mechanical changes without including content is a significant extra effort; it is one reason that a lot of companies don't do a PTR, if they don't want to spoil story and decide the time saved and test coverage gained is not worth the expense in time and effort to make a mechanics-only public test. Honestly, I suspect it is probably a factor in why SQEX doesn't, which... I mean, I can respect that, even if I do think a PTR for testing mechanics would be of huge benefit to any MMO, this one included.