Making yet another post about this because of lazy devs

[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.

[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.