Making yet another post about this because of lazy devs

[hagare]

when everything's a complaint thread. Nothing's a complaint thread

[KizuyaKatogami]

You can say I'm helping you to bump the thread, but mostly I'm tired with your negativity on every post you make toward the devs, plus the suspiciously big upvote on your each complained posts...

Call me white knights but they still delivers what majority wants, those bugs on major release happens anyways...

Suspicious? It’s almost like people actually agree with me. Shocking i know, but not everyone is here to endlessly praise the game. I’ve given compliments to the game numerous times. I complimented the overall pvp mode despite its problems, i complimented the music time and time again, i even said pre moon EW msq is some of the best writing they’ve ever done. Not my fault you guys don’t read all of that and instead focus on the negativity. Either way though, i don’t recall a major bug like this housing incident happening during SB when they released shirogane.

Honestly, this is forum cry wolf all the time. If you constantly cry wolf over everything, people will stop believing anything you say is a concern. It’s ok to post in other threads other people have created on topics you keep bringing up OP. Legitimate concerns are being overshadowed by the constant bombardment of micro threads about your hate against the developers.

You act like im bringing up these topics just to bash the devs, when in reality theyre all pretty valid, unless you dont think the hrothgar hair, healer gutting, and pvp concerns arent valid. Im paying for this game i would like to know that its actually being used properly. With the way the recent content has been implemented it doesnt seem to be the case.

[Moonsprite]

You act like im bringing up these topics just to bash the devs, when in reality theyre all pretty valid, unless you dont think the hrothgar hair, healer gutting, and pvp concerns arent valid. Im paying for this game i would like to know that its actually being used properly. With the way the recent content has been implemented it doesnt seem to be the case.

My point isn’t that some of your complaints aren’t valid. Some are, pick your battles. I also think there is already a thread you created the other day “what’s going on with 14” lazy thread you made you could’ve posted this topic in. Your thread about viera helmets not being added in pvp could go in the Hrothgar/viera mega thread or the complaint thread that already exists.

[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.

[Mirhd]

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

The one time I encountered a bug since I started was... well, with the current "0 bidders/winner is 0" issue, as the plot I bid on for relocating was hit with it. People really do underestimate just how much work goes into a game (MMOs are even worse in that regard, obviously), and how many bugs do, in fact, get squashed before release (or open alpha/beta). Expecting no bugs to ever get through is... well, I have a lot of not-so-nice words for it, but I'll settle on "naive."

snip

As you and others have mentioned, I could see a PTR just for mechanics, fair enough... divorcing that from everything else though, and maintaining it... Honestly, I don't see the the gain outweighing the work expended, no. More testing is never a bad thing, but it gets to a point where there's only so much you can test in closed environments and you just have to release it... and possibly still end up with a potentially serious bug on live, even with a PTR... But, uh, I feel weird (as a laymen) saying that to someone who actually knows how this works, ha.

Anyway, it just gets my goat when people throw around words like "lazy" when that doesn't apply here. As I've said before, people can express discontent, but how you do it matters... Something I don't think certain posters OP will ever accept.

[TaleraRistain]

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".

This! So much this!

My team is one that tries to test what's expected and then the corner cases, even some really weird things. We try to think like our internal users and external customers. And then we have "How would Dave break this" cases. This is one of our users that we love using in QA because he *always* finds something we miss. So we test as many things trying to think like him. And then we bring in Dave and he finds something we missed. And even then sometimes a bug slips through because maybe we couldn't get back to x or y point. Not to mention as we make things more interconnected to give ease to users, we often make the backend a lot more complicated. More complications, more bugs.

[Jeeqbit]

The one time I encountered a bug since I started was... well, with the current "0 bidders/winner is 0" issue, as the plot I bid on for relocating was hit with it.

And it turns out this wasn't entirely a bug but inefficient server processing that caused a backlog, so a lot of the results weren't ready to be communicated in time for the end of the lottery. Rather than fixing a bug the solution might be improving how efficient it is.

[Packetdancer]

And then we bring in Dave and he finds something we missed.

This is an entire mood.

And it turns out this wasn't entirely a bug but inefficient server processing that caused a backlog, so a lot of the results weren't ready to be communicated in time for the end of the lottery. Rather than fixing a bug the solution might be improving how efficient it is.

The root cause isn't a bug, per se, but the fact that the process was not fault-tolerant is, at least in my opinion. It's an understandable one to make, given that data replication is often handled by some underlying database system and not by the game's own code directly. Still, the code surrounding it should probably have required an acknowledgment of data transferred successfully, and add things to a retry queue if it failed to get said acknowledgment, and I do think the lack there qualifies as a bug.

[Kolsykol]

My point isn’t that some of your complaints aren’t valid. Some are, pick your battles. I also think there is already a thread you created the other day “what’s going on with 14” lazy thread you made you could’ve posted this topic in. Your thread about viera helmets not being added in pvp could go in the Hrothgar/viera mega thread or the complaint thread that already exists.

Also you can communicate the issues without calling the devs lazy, which yes is a pretty bizarre and very personal attack towards game devs considering how incredibly hard they work ( the crunch issue is VERY real and pretty brutal, and even when they do there are still problems ).
Calling the devs lazy serves no other purpose than to insult and bash them.

All things considered the problems in FFXIV are very minor compared to what we see in other games, that doesn't mean people shouldn't talk about them but holy hell do people ONLY play FFXIV?
Because that's what it seems like sometimes.
I wish people could get to spend some time in the devs boots and then have people reeee:ing and yelling to their face about how '' lazy '' they are, it'd definitely change their perspective quite a bit.

[Dionysius]

Throwing insults towards the dev every single day, and you thinking you're doing good for the game. Bugs and complains seems like excuses, you just want to throw insults.
Man you're just miserable...