Third party tools are a game design failing in a multi-platform game

[Sebazy]

They banned very specific players from groups where everyone were using addons. They players that were banned had information not provited to the player intentionally even if it was UI, it was not QoL change. FFXIV devs were very responsive in the past about changes, but now people just download addons and never actually ask for changes. Lets not hide straight up cheating behind "QoL", otherwise we will not take any QoL updates in FF.

Put the narrative koolaid down and back away because it's clouding your judgement it seems.

They banned very specific players because those were the players that got mass reported. Lets not forget what started all of this, it wasn't a sudden crusade because Yoshida got out of the wrong side of his bed that morning. It was a crusade set in motion by angry little forum kiddies who decided to set up lynch mobs because that's what they do. Go find some PoVs of Bagelgoose, there should be plenty since his group was actually leading on day one of DSR prog and they got a ton of exposure for it.

If you still don't believe me? Note the timing in which all of these bans started. Right after Neverland (Whoops) beat TPS to the clear. Before that? You had plenty of streams and povs that were far worse than anything seen on Bagelgoose's stream and nothing was being said.

People just need to stop being salty little crybabies because their favourite team got dethroned. And yes, that goes to both sides of the fence here.

I played most of the content blind without external tools, cleaning it, absolutely YES, not that fast absolutely why using tools is called "cheating". I will go to the main arguments for console really fast:

Cool, now go back to E8S, use your PS4 video clip to try and analyse what went wrong with a mechanic like Lights Rampant. It's figureable with video for sure, but you need frame by frame playback to find the first failure on mechanics like that. PS4 playback just isn't viable in cases like these.

I've got nothing against controller input and there's good reason why some people use it on PC. I don't think it's optimal but it's certainly not a hindrance either, not really sure how that's relevant here.

I am working in the game industry from almost 10 years now, not only I don't know how testing works in all big companies, I can't tell you how it works even for all of the games in the company I work in. There are projects with "balance dev test team" that have nothing to do with QA, because they are working exclusively in the studio and their job is to push the limits of content. In FF we know from years Yoshi P have his dev group that are some the best players in the world, not only in Square. The argument "I worked and I know all about it" is so ilogical.

I know because at the EA Chertsey building we actually had our QA team located on the ground floor of our office and at least every other person in there had aspirations of moving upstairs to the development floor at some stage. Given that Chertsey was a ghost town and the building was in the middle of a glorified M25 industrial estate, developers, office staff and testers alike all ended up mingling in the same areas so we all had a pretty good idea of what everyone was up to. Large scale QA has been an established standard for a long time and outside of the impact of covid. Nothing has really changed. You have a large shared pool of testers which will get tickets for various projects assigned amongst them. FFXIV won't have it's own unique sizeable pool of veteran QA testers FYI, that's not realistic (Due to poor retention in the profession) nor is it efficient (Because you want to vary the eyes on the project to maximise the number of bugs spotted within a timeframe).

Your comment about Yoshi's dev group being some of the best players in the world is particularly far off the mark btw.

- For the last 5 years checks on balance for dungeons have been done by the same team members. The tank is a casual player, the DPS is Yoshida himself as a serious player, the other DPS is project manager M-chan, the healer is a player with experience as far as the Extreme Primal fights, but everyone ended up becoming more skilled than before. Recently the job distribution has been changed up, the healer became too good so a replacement was requested.

Do I know all about it? No. But I know enough to form some opinions and theories that both hold water given Yoshida's comments in the past and make sense in the scale of the team.