Are Ultimates a major contributor to Job Design issues?

[Kohashi]

What I wanna know is how do half of the issues in the game get through the woodworks if they have a dedicated QA team that large.

Very easy. You can never cover and test all scenarios even if you have 3 times that size. You cannot cover what essentially hundreds of thousands of players "test" at the same time and how each person tests the limit of their implementation.

Also, they also release patches with known bugs to stay on schedule and which they will address on the first hotfix. A lot of games do that. As long as there is no game-breaking bug, the patch is viable and playable. Who the F cares about untranslated text? It lacks polish, yes, but you can still complete the quest and thus the quest is still deemed functional.

[Kaurhz]

Very easy. You can never cover and test all scenarios even if you have 3 times that size. You cannot cover what essentially hundreds of thousands of players "test" at the same time and how each person tests the limit of their implementation.

Also, they also release patches with known bugs to stay on schedule and which they will address on the first hotfix. A lot of games do that. As long as there is no game-breaking bug, the patch is viable and playable. Who the F cares about untranslated text? It lacks polish, yes, but you can still complete the quest and thus the quest is still deemed functional.

I wouldn't expect them to catch nor trap everything, but I certainly would not expect to see some of the bugs that have been present in this games history with a team of 100+ people on QA. Especially when many of those bugs would be visible by just merely playing the game, and would not necessarily be a fairly situational bug, and no I am not talking about your "But it's only untranslated text" 'bug'.

Edit: and I absolutely would expect quite a lot of the bugs to be patched, especially for a game that deems bug exploitation to be against the ToS.

[Kohashi]

I wouldn't expect them to catch nor trap everything, but I certainly would not expect to see some of the bugs that have been present in this games history with a team of 100+ people on QA. Especially when many of those bugs would be visible by just merely playing the game, and would not necessarily be a fairly situational bug, and no I am not talking about your "But it's only untranslated text" 'bug'.

Edit: and I absolutely would expect quite a lot of the bugs to be patched, especially for a game that deems bug exploitation to be against the ToS.

You would be surprised. Also, let me give you a hint. Those numbers are ONLY when they work on an expansion or they have to release a major patch. It makes 0 financial sense to have a QA team of 100 people testing tiny patches. A more realistic number is probably around 12-15 max, where people are split between tickets received (bug reports) and testing the new upcoming build + some edge cases.

If you really want to be angry and blame someone blame the devs and the stakeholders that push for profit above all. (mostly stakeholders since they are the ones who impose the unrealistic release dates).

As for bug exploitation against the ToS, every single game out there under the sun has the same policy..


@Valence

I'm sorry but this is all but a QA team, this is a ragtag team of various employees of whom QA isn't the core job and skillset they have, who do this on the side of their actual jobs, and there is even less of them testing the hardest difficulties

Typically game companies have 1-2 teams that exclusively focus on testing High End content. They will also be tasked with providing feedback on the fight (mechanics, HP, Damage, timing, difficulty.. etc) as well as any abnormalities observed.

[Jeeqbit]

Why do they keep mentioning that they make their own inner circle of devs test their new content?

When they say that, it depends a lot on what type of content.

For casual content such as dungeons and alliance raids, they do mean all their staff, such as marketing and PR teams. They are looking for people who work for their company who are really not good and can't do a basic rotation.

If you mean high-end duties, obviously they get a static of really good players to test it, who test all their high-end duties regularly.

Why does it even happen if they have a QA team of over 100 people?

They are just testing for bugs. They find several thousand bugs and reduce them to a small number, shown in the "Known Issues" section of the patch notes.

What I wanna know is how do half of the issues in the game get through the woodworks if they have a dedicated QA team that large.

There are always bugs in software of any kind. So what all game developers do is have a priority system. They rate bugs depending on if they are a big deal or not. If they are minor, then they often put them to the back of the pile.

That's why the game always feels so bug-free. What you see as a "bug", is more likely a design decision, and it's important to distinguish this.

The game has a lot of bad designs and bad code and infrastructure, but that's different from an actual bug. Many things people want to say are "bugs" get put in the bug forum by players and SE move it to "Working as Intended".

[Valence]

When they say that, it depends a lot on what type of content.

For casual content such as dungeons and alliance raids, they do mean all their staff, such as marketing and PR teams. They are looking for people who work for their company who are really not good and can't do a basic rotation.

If you mean high-end duties, obviously they get a static of really good players to test it, who test all their high-end duties regularly.
They are just testing for bugs. They find several thousand bugs and reduce them to a small number, shown in the "Known Issues" section of the patch notes.

Okay so let me get this straight, we were obviously talking about encounter design testing, and you replied to me with them having a QA team of over a hundred people. Then you proceed to tell me that actually this QA team mostly tracks bugs (so that's not encounter gameplay testing), that it's actually all their non QA teams testing those encounters on the side of their actual job, and then finally that the high end ones (like ultimates being talked about here) are indeed tested by a smaller circle of devs.

I'm sorry but this is all but a QA team, this is a ragtag team of various employees of whom QA isn't the core job and skillset they have, who do this on the side of their actual jobs, and there is even less of them testing the hardest difficulties. I don't have anything against this mind you, but then how does this invalidate what I initially said (and got from their liveletters/interviews when they talk about it)?

[VerdeLuck]

Talking about QA is getting around the point which was that changes like making esuna instant cast, changing nastrond, giving astro extra light speed, giving black mage extra leylines, making jobs fit into the 2 minute window like PLD, all seem to be related to high end raiding exclusively.
Rotations and balance are changed specifically for 1-2 duties at the high end. It completely disrupts everyone below that point just because they really need to have things function a specific way for their one new special high end duty they're pushing this patch.

It's annoying and shows a lack of care about how balance and changes affect people other than hardcore raiders. It's not that things shouldn't be balanced and fun for high end players but they can't keep tossing away any care about fun and balance for anything below savage over and over again and expect casual players to like it.
This is not an enjoyable or sustainable way of balancing or thinking about your game. Constantly catering to one type of player exclusively and the other players just have to deal with the fallout of it over and over. I don't want my rotation changed and have to relearn a job because it did slightly poorer in a savage fight and had to be compeltely redone to fit into the 2 minute meta of raiding. I don't want my favorite job of White Mage to perpetually get lackluster new abilities and updates because "You know cure 3 is broken in ultimate, WHM is sooo good in this new ultimate fight".

I want the jobs I play to be fun in the content I play and that shouldn't be such a hard ask to SE, provided they actually play their game at all levels.

[BigCheez]

Talking about QA is getting around the point which was that changes like making esuna instant cast, changing nastrond, giving astro extra light speed, giving black mage extra leylines, making jobs fit into the 2 minute window like PLD, all seem to be related to high end raiding exclusively.
Rotations and balance are changed specifically for 1-2 duties at the high end. It completely disrupts everyone below that point just because they really need to have things function a specific way for their one new special high end duty they're pushing this patch.

It's annoying and shows a lack of care about how balance and changes affect people other than hardcore raiders. It's not that things shouldn't be balanced and fun for high end players but they can't keep tossing away any care about fun and balance for anything below savage over and over again and expect casual players to like it.
This is not an enjoyable or sustainable way of balancing or thinking about your game. Constantly catering to one type of player exclusively and the other players just have to deal with the fallout of it over and over. I don't want my rotation changed and have to relearn a job because it did slightly poorer in a savage fight and had to be compeltely redone to fit into the 2 minute meta of raiding. I don't want my favorite job of White Mage to perpetually get lackluster new abilities and updates because "You know cure 3 is broken in ultimate, WHM is sooo good in this new ultimate fight".

I want the jobs I play to be fun in the content I play and that shouldn't be such a hard ask to SE, provided they actually play their game at all levels.

When have jobs been changed specifically for specific pieces of high-end content? Esuna becoming an instant cast is the only time I can remember this happening in recent years and I'm not sure how that could reduce someone's enjoyment of the game in any way. Generally, when a job is changed, it's because it doesn't function well within the wider scope of the game. It doesn't have anything to do with specific pieces of high-end content.

[Buttobi]

When have jobs been changed specifically for specific pieces of high-end content? Esuna becoming an instant cast is the only time I can remember this happening in recent years and I'm not sure how that could reduce someone's enjoyment of the game in any way. Generally, when a job is changed, it's because it doesn't function well within the wider scope of the game. It doesn't have anything to do with specific pieces of high-end content.

Paladin in the middle of Endwalker got a full rework because it didn't fit into the current 2 minute rotation design. The 2 minute rotation is only really relevant in higher level raiding. Old paladin functioned completely fine outside of that content.

[Valence]

When have jobs been changed specifically for specific pieces of high-end content? Esuna becoming an instant cast is the only time I can remember this happening in recent years and I'm not sure how that could reduce someone's enjoyment of the game in any way. Generally, when a job is changed, it's because it doesn't function well within the wider scope of the game. It doesn't have anything to do with specific pieces of high-end content.

They inflated most healing and mitigation abilities to ludicrous ranges to accommodate for P10S, and further continued to water down any tactical consideration tied to the battle system.

[Kohashi]

They inflated most healing and mitigation abilities to ludicrous ranges to accommodate for P10S, and further continued to water down any tactical consideration tied to the battle system.

I doubt it, but they did expand the range of some abilities. This happened because they wanted to experiment with different arena designs, and p10 was the first to fall under that category. It was a pretty common occurrence for DPS to die after Divinding Wings 2, especially if mits were missing or healers didn't sprint. I wish we had Aetherial shift back then...LOL.