Quote Originally Posted by RedLolly View Post
1) It's extremely common for an experienced player to help newbies. Just never before on that scale and difficulty and it was horrid timing for NA and EU.
Not sure what you mean by timing, Forked Tower was released at a point where it didn't clash with anything from my knowledge. Were you thinking about Chaotic's release just before Christmas last year?

I agree that it's common for experienced players to help new players. But it seems that as soon as one player / a few players are able to wipe the alliance, it seems the player base changes mentality. From my observations.

Quote Originally Posted by FeyFavilla View Post
Probably a big issue at the core of things, yeah. Instead of hiring dedicated game testers they could let the community test for them with beta servers. That way they could not only stress-test systems but also hear a wider range of feedback to give them a better idea about the consensus as a whole, not just 'does it work'.
They need to have a place where they experiment and get players to try it out. Just something simple for combat, same basic animation for all actions, focus on the tweaks and numbers. Test out how it feels. Perhaps one test-session they individually tweak all GCD values on each job, from very fast(1.5 sec) to slow(3 sec), then add some abilities to the jobs. Maybe next test session will be a full change of raid wide buffs. And so on.
I get the feeling at this point, that they only test out the newest jobs and call it a day. Means we're burdened by all the tweaks they've made over the years on old jobs, and it adds up.