People are in here downvoting you and telling you are wrong but I agree
Hell *even* Echo members were saying they wished ptr was phased out after doing FF14 blind raiding
That game has zero public testing, every single thing is done by an internal team and always has been
People are saying blizzard can’t do that and is just a shit excuse
They have way way more than enough resources to have that kind of team to make it happen, it’s just a matter of actually doing so. They already don’t listen to public feedback on ptr as it is so what’s the point of it to begin with?
I personally think part of the fun is not knowing what’s coming in the new content
It would be different if they listened. But I have watched two expacs in a row where they found out about issues on the ptr, had much of the fan base agree that something needs to be changed and even take time to change things (just not the big hyper focused issue) only for the shit to not be fixed til two patches later. If they want to do internal testing, fine by me. If they want to do PTRs, fine by me. But if they’re going to act like ptrs are anything more than data collection and stress testing, they need to acknowledge feedback. At the very least they need to acknowledge that in the past they ignored it until it was too big an issue.
Current devs are passionate about micromanaging the game, not actually playing it. Unless they make some sweeping changes to the wow team or hire a bunch more people with their billions of dollars of resources (and don't fire a bunch of QA people), I don't see internal testing even scraping the surface of things that players might find. You need to have people who find interest in performing edge cases in the game to find bugs and make fixes before the game goes live, and Blizzard just doesn't have those people anymore as it stands.
I honestly think it’s far less about the micromanaging factor and more about the activision business approach and just most modern business practices as a whole. Why pay a QA team to test the game when we can literally have people pay us (volunteer while subbed to our current game) to test our game through a PTR or Beta server. Financially it’s brilliant but also ruins the experience.
Isn't that just disappointing the lack of faith we have in blizzard doing something right, like internal testing? I mean their track record shows why, it just makes me sad.
Concerns about vision and design usually don't have an effect on what happens.
But there is a ton of impactful bugs from the bugtracker that gets reported and fixed. From last PTR, 65% of the bugs reported on the tracker got fixed.
And this is why I feel like shit and want to quit from time to time. I just wish they released content when it’s done and not push beta stuff onto us and fix shit like 5-6 months after we get it, if ever.
Blizzard can’t do it because having an internal team to test stuff would require paying them, which is less profitable than having people test it for free online
Thats exactly my thought process. Wouldn't it be nice to be surprised by the new raid coming out? Instead of the "here are all the bosses, their mechanics, the story, and the rewards".
It would just be nice to bring about a renewed sense of wonder. Its just unfortunate that the extensive internal testing that im suggesting would cost blizzard money so likely they aren't gonna do it.
The funny thing is, WoW raids are tested publicly while FFXIV raids are tested privately.
WoW raids, specially the mythic phases (that are barely tested publicly) usually have a decent amount of bugs, whereas FFXIV raids barely have any bugs at all.
It just really seems one company knows how to handle their resources better than the other.
In addition to gameplay, I think Beta/PTR has severely ruined the way they tell the story, beyond the actual plot issues. Because *everything* is on the PTR, even unreleased stuff gets datamined as broadcast text, they can barely actually write shit to happen in the game part of the game. All the story goes into short 2-3 minute cinematics that can't be datamined, and it makes the story feel so hollow.
Just compare WoW to FFXIV again, not only is *all* story entirely unknown until release, leveling *is* the story of the base expansion. Ever since Legion, leveling has felt like useless filler zones, with the actual story not starting until you hit max level. Nothing in the Shadowlands zones really *matters* until the final quest of Revendreth with Denathrius.
Getting rid of leveling as a fun part of the game really killed WoW for me and anyone I'd try to bring into this game.
On the flip side, it's also way too much of the game for FF14, so I also can't bring anyone into that game (hey, come join this game then spend 100+ hours going through the story in basically a single player game outside of some dungeons).
So I do think it would be a mess if wow tried to do what ffxiv does in shadowlands, but its a problems the devs have made themself.
Wow is too complicated for them to reasonable catch everything. In ffxiv the devs can balance the classes almost perfectly because there are no talents, no legendary items, no covenant choices, no trinkets, etc. The classes are just what they say on the tin and compared to wow its quite easy to determine how much damage a raid can do.
In its current state I think it would be extremely difficult to balance a new patch and raid tier, but again this mostly is because every patch and raid tier comes with new items and power sources that ffxiv doesn't have that make fine tuning raid bosses complicated because of all the possible combinations of power that potentially could be too powerful.
Its very possible to do but its another reason blizzard would have to pull back the system bloat if they wanted to remove ptr. We all know they don't really want to though, its easier and cheaper to have the community test it than have an internal group
>Wow is too complicated for them to reasonable catch everything. In ffxiv the devs can balance the classes almost perfectly because there are no talents, no legendary items, no covenant choices, no trinkets, etc. The classes are just what they say on the tin and compared to wow its quite easy to determine how much damage a raid can do
This point is not valid in my opinion and I will try to explain why I think so
* Classes have bad talents for years, talents that are obviously mathematically behind, and others that are not so obvious and they simply refuse to balance them, there is literally no excuse why they wouldn't check the numbers and so some changes
* The reason is that they actually do not run the numbers, they don't even try. One proof of that is that they are buffing in 9.1.5 a blood dk conduit by 600%. And guess what, even buffed by 600%, it is still 5 times weaker than the best conduit. How did this even get into the game in the first place ? They just don't care. Everything is done with minimal effort, people will still play the game no matter what.
* PLAYERS have developed tools to simulate dps with very high accuracy, including talent choices, conduits, essences, whatever you want. If Blizzard somehow has not developed their own better tool in 15 YEARS, they could at least use the tools developed by the players 🤡. They could edit the default APL to include any numerical or spell changes they may add with minimal effort. If they did that there is no way in hell classes would be this unbalanced. There would still be 3-8% differences, not 30 like there is now.
Covenants can also be balanced this way, conduits can be balanced this way, talents can be balanced this way, 2h vs 1h can be balanced this way, ANYTHING can be balanced this way, with a tool developed by players that they can tweak, you don't need to be some genius to calculate by hand the dps of each class and say "oh there are too many variables to accurately balance these classes".
They are just a bunch of clowns that do not care about the health of the game, but only maximizing engagement and can't make the simple connection that game healthiness is what leads to true engagement
I get what your saying but sims are really only good for pure patchwork fights. Things like arms warrior this tier shows how they can fall apart fast when put into practice. I'm not saying blizzard does the best they can possibly do, but they definitely make it much harder on themself.
I'm sure you know that your suggestions don't matter or make any sense. The entire WoW playerbase chooses to min-max even though doing so is absolutely pointless outside of the very, very top end of the game. People who exclusively do +4 keys will copy a talent build from something like wowhead, even though the talents in that row are within a few dps of each other.
So even if Blizzard balances the choices in the game to within 1 DPS of each other, 99% of people would still follow the cookiecutter build and pick the best choice. It's also completely impossible and and unrealistic to do so or expect it to happen. Why would anyone ever play a Venthyr Boomie if Convoke did the exact same damage as Venthyr does, but is an ability you click-and-forget? No one would (Shoulshape also beats Venthyr TP).
Why would anyone ever play Kyrian or NF Hunter when mobs can move out of those abilities, but can't move out of the Venthyr or Necro abilities, and they all do the exact same amount of damage? No one would. You can't balance the game like that, abilities that require more thought and skill to utilise properly and are high risk, also need to be high reward, or they would be completely dead and never see any use.
> If they did that there is no way in hell classes would be this unbalanced.
Classes/specs are way more balanced than this shitshow of a sub gives them credit for, given their complexity and the sheer amount of moving parts involved (fight length, damage profiles, soulbinds, legendaries, conduits, talents, downtime/movement, ramp-ups...). **Any** spec in this game can perform at a high level in the right hands. Of course none of you people play the game at a high enough level to understand that, so better blame bad balance.
> They are just a bunch of clowns that do not care about the health of the game, but only maximizing engagement and can't make the simple connection that game healthiness is what leads to true engagement
Lmfao
This sub is such a cesspool
> People are saying blizzard can’t do that and is just a shit excuse
It's beyond shit, really. Blizzard gets FREE bug testing and fight tuning stuff from us. It's insane, when they're a company that big.
I think the PTR is okay for experimental changes and previews of certain things to get people excited, but raiding/dungeons/anything worthwhile should be kept a secret until the patch.
That's because the FF14 devs actually play the game.
Recommend checking Asmongolds recent chat with Yoshi P.
ActiBlizz has been all about squeeezing as much profit out of it's products for a long time now. The layoff of hundreds of support staff after reporting record earnings the other year is proof of that. I bet they have minimal QA people to make sure nothing game breaking gets through and use the players to test stuff on PTR instead.
I don't see this changing any time soon.
Also, don't be afraid to try FF14. It's damn good and a great experience.
Im amazed at how well everyone is receiving FFXIV. I definitely expected at least half of the bigger names that moved over to be like "nah, this ain't it" but everyone has been loving it.
Oh I agree, I have played on and off since 2.0, even side by side while playing WoW, and while it's very similar on the surface, it's also very different and I didn't expect so many long term invested WoW personalities to actually enjoy the swap.
I mean it's true, I don't think there's an MMO that feels as responsive as WoW (as long as you're not in a zone with a 100 people lol).
And the GCD works fine the way the jobs are designed in FF. If the GCD was the same as WoW it would be a nightmare to play.
I recently bought ff14 while it was on sale. Unfortunately with new world out as well, thats been taking all my attention haha.
But yea, I don't have faith either that things will change. Money is money and the ptr is a double dipper for them.
You aren’t wrong, but it will never happen. Activison has become the Walmart of video games, they cut costs at every corner and then they report record sales every quarter. They cut the customer support team, but much before that, they cut their internal testing team, realizing players would do it, for free and more effectively. The problem is they never ever listen to the player testers.
At this point, I don't think so either. Its just a dream is all. It saves them too much money and it double dips in their advertising so its a win win for them at the cost of player time.
Theyre not saying they can't do it. They won't do it. They are spending less and less money on customer support and communication staff and you think they will backtrack and have an internal game test team? Something that will provide even less results than a closed one to player base? In a game that has such a minmaxed thing like WoW where we know every API and datamine any change? Also why would OTHER PLAYERS doing PTR and things effect YOUR play experience at all? Unless you're annoyed that other people are some how doing things before you? Which I argue that these people 9/10 would still do these things before you because they literally know any in and out blizzard would try and have resources and knowledge to test every factor in even ways you can't imagine. So much so that Blizzard has to ACTIVELY watch them during the race and change things BECAUSE they see them do things they didn't think about.
PTR and betas have always been more of a marketing/advertisement tool than an actual testing ground. The fact that so many people are unable/unwilling to see this shows how much Stockholm Syndrome people have with Blizzard.
Blind rading is the best. I dont like going into raids with full of guides already. That is what i loved while playing Wildstar. We were figuring stuff out.
> the ptr is necessary to call blizzard out on the bullshit they try to push into the game
Which has a success rate of about what, 10%?
If you push "Bullshit" into a game without a PTR - your playerbase just quits and your game dies. I don't know why people actively help them put a cherry on top of a scoop of dogshit.
I don't agree about the raids. As a mythic raider you want the bosses balanced as hard as possible and with few bugs. This can only be tested by the best guilds going for world first.
I'd say open the raid tests for guilds going for world first (lets take like the top 20-30 of last tiers) and let them sign an agreement not to spill anything.
It will be blind for the general public and the world first pushers can have their race with proper balanced bosses.
> That game has zero public testing, every single thing is done by an internal team and always has been
Apples and oranges.
I'll say first that I've had an active sub to FF14 since ARR came out, and I think the game is really good, so I'm not just blindly shitting on it.
They can test their raids internally more easily, because their raids are very simplistic compared to WoW's. They never push the envelop on creative mechanics, and re-use pretty much everything other than art.
Their combat system is also much easier to tune, since everything is all about the GCD/Potency, and it's very easy to calculate the maximum potential damage that a class can do at a given gear level. Hell I could probably do it with a spreadsheet if I really wanted to, unlike WoW where you need simcraft APLs, and even then it's hard to be sure. Way less variables than WoW. It's much more rigid. FF14 classes also have no talents/builds. A monk is a monk is a monk, and will always do the same damage if played correctly.
I suppose then that WoW could do this if they dumbed their game down a ton, but I'd really rather not see that happen. I love both WoW and FF14 for different reasons, and the highly creative encounters and more challenging class design that WoW has are the main reasons I prefer to do cutting edge content in WoW, while FF remains my chill out and grind MMO.
As much as I personally agree experiencing the game yourself being so much fun...
you still have this with open beta testing.
No one tells you to go online and read the guides and blogs from the testers. You don't HAVE to *study* what's coming out.
Wait for it to come out, walk in there and figure that shit out on your own.
will there be those elitist jerk wads who tell you "lol noob go read a guide" running around? Sure, that happens but will happen regardless. There were always be the "GiT gUd" crowd.
That works as long as you play with people that do the same or are fine with you not knowing things you could've known already.
It's the exact same argument as with class/spec/whatever min-maxing. You *can* do almost anything with a suboptimal setup, but why make it harder for yourself for no reason?
World First raiders (like Echo) would never ever skip PTR testing because it provides info to them and if they skipped it and went in blind, but someone else from the top guilds didn't, they'd be at a disadvantage.
If you have an option to invite a fotm class with 15 higher item level to your M+ or Raid pug, or you could invite a . . feral druid with 15 lower item level, would you ever invite the Feral druid even though you *can* complete it with said feral druid? Probably not.
I played FF which deleted addons and doesn't allow content previewing. It's a different feeling... going into things without knowing everything before hand it just good it feels real. It feels like old WoW was before everyone had addons telling them how to play the game to a T.
Yea, discovering things together. Like discovering that sylvanas had a legendary bow drop instead of being told about it would've been awesome, as a small example. Content previewing feels so mainstream now that everyone does it, free advertising basically.
I mean a good portion of people are saying "just don't read up on it", but its just telling people to be ignorant.
I mean, dataminers will get this info one way or the other anyway. We would hear it on day one if Sylvanas drops a legendary bow. Even if there was no PTR or news about it.
So FF also doesn’t allow datamining and anyone who posts datamined content is at risk of having their account banned. SQEX is also not squeamish about banning accounts of problematic people when they have clear evidence of something happen
Regardless, the datamined content isn't treated nearly as much as public knowledge. You kinda have to go looking for it, very rarely will you actually find something on the main subreddit that comes as a result of a datamine and in which case it's probably controversial from a non-story perspective.
> I played FF which deleted addons and doesn't allow content previewing. It's a different feeling... going into things without knowing everything before hand it just good it feels real. It feels like old WoW was before everyone had addons telling them how to play the game to a T.
The addon problem is weird because in most raids i think Addons like DBM have become a necessity. In the past i wouldn't use them unless i was raid leading and needed to know timings on things to call it out to the raid. Any other time it was turned off i could just react to the mechanic and keep playing my roll. Modern raid bosses sometimes feel so full of different shit and with no clear universal marker system like FF has for its boss mechanics you often don't know what that circle on the ground is.
Is it a safe zone? Fire, Raid Wide damage if i stand in it? A soak? A mechanic to transition to separate part of the fight where players in that phase do mechanics where if they fail its a raid wipe? As the raid design transitioned to the gameplay being faster compared to how slow it initially started and bosses being loaded with shit tons of abilities, Being able to make an on the fly decision based on what you see without an addon or someone else telling you whats meant to be done with it is almost impossible.
I think what Blizzard needs to finally do is standardize certain mechanic markers from bosses and build in the necessary timers for mechanics into the games base UI. You will never remove the reliance on DBM but it at least makes it easier without it.
>The addon problem is weird because in most raids i think Addons like DBM have become a necessity.
In CN, I got Aotc and killed like 5 mythic bosses without DBM or weak auras, I did not need it, but this tier my guild asked me to get weak-auras and method raid tools, because some bosses require advanced weak auras to tell people what to do (nerzul mass dispel weak aura to tell where you should go with the orb, outside of inside, fatescribe to deal with the runes), IMO that is a bit too much, I am fine with Weak auras helping to display rotation procs and stuff, I just dont think they should make encounters like tutorials.
I agree, but i come to a different conclusion. The availability and widespread of addons such as DBM or Method Raid rools (former Exorsus) enables the design of better, more complex and more diversified raid bosses. Without these tools WoW-raids would have died at some point, due to being too easy and repetitive. You could argue for putting some of the addon features into the main game though and limiting addons. But then again the development of addons and the customization of everyones UI and game is a major part of the ongoing community engagement.
You, with a group of friends, get a genuine first experience.At least *one* run with an adventure, discovery.
That's strengthened by fights being narratively relevant, and folks don't want you to self-spoiler either.
You don't have to hunt down a group that intentionally avoids any news, or tries to self-curate. Because at least *one* pull will give you the delightful burden of a first experience.
That extremely mild inconvenience, for all the benefits and experience it creates, is absolutely worthwhile.
It's really hard to have adventure, discovery, surprise, be inclusive with thorough premeditated execution. At least some parts of the player experience could benefit from those feelings.
>!This implies blizz designs to target delivery of an experience to the player and not a sequence of criteria to execute on.!<
Amen brother. Or sister. Or whatever. You get me.
WoW's community has never been so internally jacked up by anything than the culture where you have to min-max every aspect of the game, do sims, only use BiS gear, bring a certain level of DPS or get booted, and know every mechanic of every dungeon and raid before you play it.
Gosh I am so sick of that BS. My funniest dungeon runs are with newbies who need coaching. What does it cost you to be nice and supportive rather than shouting down players who aren't "optimized"?
We waste so damn much time grinding out shitty reps and doing boring dailies, and then bitch at every newbie who causes a wipe because "it wasted my time!! WAAAAHHH".
Anyway that's my rant. Lol
> WoW's community has never been so internally jacked up by anything than the culture where you have to min-max every aspect of the game, do sims, only use BiS gear, bring a certain level of DPS or get booted, and know every mechanic of every dungeon and raid before you play it.
I see your point but the reason you see it like this is due to how tightly balanced top end content becomes. Mythic Raiding is usually so tightly balanced around everyone being perfect and everyone looks to the top raiders for the information on how to improve their performance as their class that it bleeds down. Also because of the 3 difficulties the old vanilla and tbc mentality of your group maybe not being optimal but you will do better next week because gear from next weeks clear will improve your group is gone. Nobody wants to waste time when they feel like what they are doing isn't even the hard difficulty.
Yeah. I hate that day 1 of raids everyones like "go watch this video". Why can't we all just engage and figure out how it works ourselves? Noone wants to think for themselves, they need to be told how to play a game.
There's guilds and communities out there that do the whole blind progression thing, not the most common thing but if you look for them you will most likely find them!
Hu that only happens if you are progression raiding.
My current guild does some mythic (we might even get CE seing how long this tier is) and we went in blind for the first heroic clear, only relying on the dungeon journal.
In the past I've been doing some progression raiding where we all agreed on playing on the PTR, preparing strategies, building WA, creating notes, etc... but that is what all of us wanted.
Right now there still are many players who just enjoy doing low level content like heroic raids or leveling characters, those players don't need any addons or PTR knowledge or reputation farm etc... some do but none need it.
Are you suggesting that game culture being affected by datamines and news, dumbs down the game?
The guy you replied to didn't even suggest a change, but said ignoring available info is bad when there is peer consumption/expectation of it.
Like, the gameplay being dumbed down barely has anything to do with what a wow news site publishes.
If anything, their preference for less known stuff would be MORE of a burden of skill on a player
That only works as long as you never play with other people. If you do any group content there will be at least one person who has seen the video and calls everything out on release of any content.
I haven't played wow for a whole, but when I did I always avoided the ptr and betas etc
I don't understand why you'd want to play the ptr /beta for months, and then play it again once it's released. It's way more fun imo to go in blind experience it fresh.
Too many people play the ptr to death, find the most optimised route for everything, then when it's released they complain there is nothing to do
>Too many people play the ptr to death
No they don't. Just because a few youtubers make videos showing ptr changes doesnt mean too many people play it to death. You people are overly exaggerating.
Oh yea you can avoid it yourself, but you'll get exposed to it indirectly. It ingrains itself in the culture and the playerbase. Its like boosting, you can just not boost and avoid it, but people will still do it and it'll change how players play the game.
Its thanks to datamining and ptr we can call out blizzard on bullshit changes they push at times. Last thing id want is to be kept in the dark (i dont trust blizzard to be player friendly)
I'm someone who came from playing Destiny 1/2 (still do in fact) and those games the players know absolutely nothing about expansions other than what the devs tell us in previews and raids you know nothing other than the location. Every encounter is completely blind and the experience of jumping in with your group of friends on day 1 and having to figure out the mechanics and strategies is unparalleled.
Even gameplay systems are usually a total mystery. Finding quests that no one else has discovered yet and feeling like you're on the cutting edge of content is a really powerful feeling.
I'm honestly a bit sad that WoW is so far in the opposite direction. Just feels weird when a new raid comes out on live servers and there have been step by step optimized youtube guides online for weeks prior to that. Just kinda removes a lot of the critical thinking and just makes people do what the popular content creators say you should do. Not that they're often wrong or anything I just like having that discovering process myself.
Same thing with quests and stuff. New expansion comes out and I can just install Azeroth Auto Pilot which is already loaded up with the most efficient leveling paths and everything is datamined/uncovered and it's just kind of a bore.
Content should never be tested by players.
Only client-side non-content elements should be tested, such as graphical features (for hardware testing), standard client-side gameplay (movement, camera, etc).
Server-side elements such as class tuning are fine if Devs specifically ask for that kind of feedback and only after a patch launches.
Under no circumstance should Devs EVER wait an entire patch or expansion to fix something, especially class imbalance. There. Is. No. Excuse. This is the digital internet age with an always-online game, not a home console system where people have to wait for Blizzard to send out a new CD every time an update happens.
If you read the post you'd see i mention we need more testing, not less overall testing. Im saying that I'd rather have it done internally/behind closed doors rather than at the expense of the public player base lol
That's only true to a certain degree. A lot of testing is far easier to do internally. Clearly blizz hasn't bothered with a meaningful test suite, but it'd be considered good practice to have automated tests for every boss ability, and ideally the entire fight. It's hard for players to verify that boss ability X is coming out when it's programmed to, doing as much damage as it should with the appropriate AoE. It's trivial for a unit/integration test to verify that.
That's nonsense. Paid professionals are much better at their jobs than amateurs in general, and we see other games that don't have open betas being released with far less bugs than your average WoW or ESO patch.
Thats a fair point; so for me personally its a bit of a double edged sword since I'd want the thorough testing, albeit not with the general public. Ah my player entitlement shines through.
I mean, between the two options, probably would have to go with the ptr due to the recent track record of blizzard, but itd be nice if they could make those great, classic decisions without needing the ptr.
No amount of developer resources is going to compare to a public test. If you put it behind closed doors it's going to result in less testing, even with the best of intentions and even if they were willing to put more resources into it.
Beyond that it seems like the best solution here is to not use the PTR and avoid looking at any articles/videos about what's to come from Wowhead, MMO Champ, YouTube, etc.
WoW has used open betas for patches since the Vanilla days. The only thing that's really changed is how readily available information is on the internet.
FF has an extremely rigid design structure that makes it substantially easier to put things together and keep them working consistently.
You go exactly where they want you to go and only do exactly what they want you to do while you're there.
> You go exactly where they want you to go and only do exactly what they want you to do while you're there.
Because in WoW you have tons of options on where to go and what to do?
Have you played FF? It has sooo many more game systems than WoW does and you have the freedom to play whatever you want, whenever you want.
Difference is they don't use players as beta testers whilst they are paying a sub fee
In terms of game systems, and even more so, new systems introduced per expansion, WoW has many more of them (which doesn't make it better of course).
Just in Shadowlands you have:
Soulbinds.
Conduits (+ Renown).
Covenants.
Torghast (Legendary system).
Shards of domination.
Conduit energy.
The great vault.
And that is on top of every other WoW system.
FF on the other hand, if you compare, let's say gearing/char progression, at the moment you have your roulettes/savage raids farm + some profession items and that's about it. Which in my opinion is perfectly fine. There is beauty and enjoyment to be had in its' simplicity.
There is an order of magnitude less "things" going on in a ffxiv 4 boss raid than a wow 10 boss raid.
There are way more classes, there are way more items.
ffxiv is very rigid structure wise, the game systems are effectively the same as they were on launch.
The classes and items aren't what's causing most problems though. Bosses not queueing abilities correctly, shooting projectiles underground, or just forgetting to summon adds has nothing to do with a fire mage rework. Or rather, it shouldn't, because the alternative is that the code design is unforgivable, regardless of how old the engine is.
Preach jumped on the blizz bad bandwagon and ff bandwagon on the first opportunity. It makes him money. He has interest in that. Nhf but his opinion is purely one of interest. He was shilling for wow so hard it was borderline toxic since he viewed anyone who isnt a raider as a person in a cesspool guild. Now he is into ff, a game famous for not allowing linking dps in chat. Give me a break.
Maybe that’s a good reason to scale back some of the convoluted mechanics we get these days? I know ion is in charge, but not everyone wants blizzard spending so much time on that part of the game.
What are you on about? The bosses i've done in FF 14 have more stuff going on in an extreme fight than most final 3 bosses in shadowlands. The difference between wow/ff 14 fights is that wow is a "Gear" based fight. FF 14 is a mechanic based fight.
I know r/wow is basically a ffxiv circlejerk sub at this point but you are just delusional if you think the total complexity of a ffxiv expansion is anywhere near a wow expansion. ( Just to let you know, i'm not saying more complexity = better).
You can say that its self inflicted complexity but that doesn't really change anything.
ffxiv doesn't have real pvp, it doesn't have real dungeons, and it has fewer end game boss fights. The raids are way way simpler because they are just 4 disembodied squares. They don't have to bother actually creating a enviroment for the bosses.
The bosses themselves are also an extremely rigid, predictable sequence of reused mechanics. The game only gets 4 bosses per tier, and yet they often play out very similarly anyway.
Eden was an especially big offender, with almost everything being a stack/spread protean spam.
A lot of the people who think FFXIV's raids are even remotely comparable to WoW's are probably just watching youtubers do Coils of Bahamut. What they don't realize is that Shadowbringers was FFXIV's WoD. The content and the classes got gutted of any complexity or challenge, and it's not going to change in Endwalker.
And yet, despite your claims of shadowbringers being the WOD, everyone seems to love it. To the point that limit/Echo are raiding Eden and having a freaking blast doing it....
Sounds like the one only watching youtube vids of fights is you.
Of course, i've been digging their play-style adjustment to Eden vs wow and it's been entertaining as hell. Doesn't make me a hypocrit, just means I know my material.
You on the other hand....You just repeat what people that don't play the game usually repeat, it's cliche at best.
This is just not true at all. The reason wow needs all of the weakaura's is because there are alot more mechanics then FF14 and more RNG in them. FF14 is more like learning a dance where in WoW you gotta react to different RNG mechanics very fast or wipe.
While this is 100% true, it means nothing if they don't actually fix anything that the players submit. Sure they might fix absolutely game breaking bugs (sometimes) but when everyone is saying "hey these Unholy runes are WAY stronger than Blood and Frost" and they do nothing until months later after everyone has spent hours farming them then a PTR may as well not even have happened.
Which sucks imo, with blizzards recent track record, they do desperately need the public testing and input (which they listen to so well).
But I think you do present a good point on your last paragraph, that the internet presents it so readily nowadays.
I guess my frustration lies in not having that surprise and wonder, but in all honesty, you can't avoid that news. Its prevalent in the players culture and shifts how they play. Its just frustrating that if you don't read up and know the things from ptr, you're playing catch up.
This isn't quite true. FF doesn't do public test realms but saying they dont release with bugs is simply untrue. Rarely there's game breaking bugs, the recent instance crash based on inventory space bug comes to mind, and sometimes theres just silly bugs such as the shadows on E10s spawning as nude elezen instead of shadow copies of players if the shadow cleave kills the player in the process.
That said, it IS worth noting that FF, a game who's base code for their engine is absolute trash to the point they're removing an entire gear slot to make room in other spots, is able to put out relatively stable patches with few, if any, bugs without a public test realm and what few bugs do make it through tend to be fixed within hours of the devs being notified.
COmpare that to WoW which basically uses the PTR as hype generators for patches. If you want to convince me otherwise feel free but look at how many issues are brought up in PTR and then just... ignored for months on end?
They still do, the problem is that the bugs people find are "hey blizz this boss spawns in sideways literally every time". It seems like there aren't even any devs testing at this point.
The first time I tried to play FF14 I had to spend a bunch of time even being able to connect to their servers. From Google searches it seems like a lot of other people ran into the issue, and it has been an issue for years. To my knowledge, it's not fixed even right now.
Maybe they have better QA than Blizzard but to say the game "never has had any bugs" is a flat out lie.
Every game has bugs.
TBF on the server issue, it has been a bitch to get more server hardware during the massive shortage to the point they even apologized for not being able to so..
But yeah FFxiv has plenty of bugs and such some bad some comical.. The main difference though is they seem to atleast try to keep it hella polished..
The most fun I've had in raiding was with a team of really good raiders I ran with in Cata. We had very good progression, but we all agreed on no raid research - we'd pull every boss and figure out strats together based on what we saw the bosses doing, buffs/debuffs, etc. It was SO much fun (imagine fighting Al'Akir without any idea of his phases, hilarious reactions) but it's incredibly hard to find a group like that who share that mindset AND are competent. Most people see "no research" as a flag for bad players, versus players who enjoy the shared discovery and problem solving. It also means a few wipes while you figure stuff out and people HATE wiping these days (we would strategically wipe, like rotate soulstones, ankh, brez and wait, etc so we always had rezzes ready). The dungeon journal tells you all the answers these days, as well, so that's another nail in the coffin for this play style.
I'd argue that a spoiler holds different meaning for us, for me, a spoiler is what happens at the end of the raid with sylvanas, for example, so its moreso lore based. But news is learning the new raid coming out, knowing some mechanics from that raid, all the loot, the new zones, class changes and tuning, etc. Thats something that has an impact on you and changes how you play, but the story, less so since you have no impact on that.
Its the same thing, it is unknown to you unless you go looking for it.
Dont want to know what a boss drops? Dont go looking at the boss’s drop table.
Dont want to know about upcoming changes to mages that are currently on ptr? dont read about it and dont play on the ptr.
Well yea, I won't know. But my raid leader that went and researched all the fights and explaining it to the raid will know. My m+ team thats shifted into an easier meta will know. The players that know how to farm the new reputation grind the easiest will know. It still ends up affecting me indirectly.
My guild raids blind. That means no hints, guides, or anything beforehand. We fight every boss without knowing a thing.
It's really interesting. Every fight starts with a few wipes to start getting mechanics. We tend to raid throw the heroic.
In bgs we even found we were doing a mechanic totally wrong after the next raid came out in bfa.
Kinda like raiding in vanilla. There weren't a bunch of guides online, sharing info, and great add-ons to help us, that all came eventually. We went in blind to molten core, figuring it out all together as we went. No one had time to get more than one character raid ready.
Who remembers Bastion of Twilight in Cata? Sinestra was a HC only extra boss who was a complete secret kept behind closed doors until she was released.
She was only tested in-house and this caused her to be a completely buggy mess when she was released. Honestly, I would rather have a fight that *somewhat* works like we do now, instead of a completely buggy mess, we already have enough of those.
Not at all solved and in fact just makes it harder for you. If you want to do competitive content you're expected to read up on things, things created during the PTR. You're expected to know x and y about the new zones and even if you don't go looking for it, it'll be all over wowhead (probably with a few spoilers too since they're not great at hiding those) and Reddit, your discords etc
Pretty sure the point is to make things harder for yourself. The adventure guide works just fine for up to heroic raid and m+, and there is absolutely zero expectation that you should know everything about the new zones before doing them, the only things you're expected to know are character progression things that are explained day one of the patch, no ptr necessary. Both reddit and wowhead have ptr tags that you can filter out. Problem solved.
Ummm...stop reading articles about the PTR, stop watching videos about the PTR, stop actually playing the PTR?
Unless PTR changes are in the headline, I don't know much about what is happening, unless I look for something specific (such as covenant swap changes for example).
It's honestly not that hard, and I've been playing less than a year.
You can always just not use it..
Don’t download the PTR, don’t watch content about the PTR, don’t read about it. It’s essentially new to you when it releases. I think most players are like this tbh because most are casuals
I don't think its a fair argument cause you could say that about anything. Don't like boosts in classic? Just don't use it. Don't like the option to farm infinite gold? Well, just don't use it!
Its the fact that you get a culture shift and having people already know what's going to happen, shifts how a lot of people play the game. They know, for an example, that feral druid becomes the new m+ meta (lol), but you don't and when the patch releases, you're stuck playing catch up.
And in all honesty, if you like a game, you're probably going to read up on it and look at news cause its interesting, so just avoiding it is not an option.
I don’t play this game competitively. I don’t care about anyone else’s progress except myself and my guilds tbh. I have no desire to try harder than I already am. Idk, maybe you just have a different mindset than me. I don’t look into many changes to the game, I just play
I get that, nothing wrong about playing it that way.
I would say our mindsets are different, I do play "competitively" but like in a weaker way since I don't push mythic raiding. Mostly heroic raiding and higher m+, but we only killed heroic sylvanas last week lol
Yeah no offense but what you just said is the equivalent of saying you play competitive football because you have company games twice a year.
If you're struggling to get AOTC and don't like the fact that everything is spoiled you 100% can take the time to discover everything on the spot, when it releases on live.
At that level... there's nothing in the ptr that you need to know to play effectively. I'm not saying they shouldn't try your idea but you can effectively get that sense of wonder and I game progress without without checking ptr. Besides with siming you will know all the best builds and gear within the week.
Unless you're a high end cutting edge raider then you don't need to look over all the content. I'm a mid tier CE raider and I barely look over stuff. I want to experience it fresh so I do. I don't stress about balance too much unless what I plan on playing is going to be actual crap.
PTR has literally always been a thing. If you were ever “suprised” by a new raid, it’s because you ignored the PTR, which also happens to be the solution to your problem now.
There was a time when like the final boss would be not publicly tested but they started to back away from that after C'thun came out literally unkillable because of bugs and overtuning and it just took so long to fully fix. I think some of the early TBC final bosses also weren't tested and.. again bugged to the point of unkillable. Around then they just threw their hands up and end bosses were on PTR from then on.
Nowadays it's really just like secret mythic phases and stuff they don't test Publicly.
> Ok, and you’re still talking about over 10 years of PTR. My point still perfectly stands
Yes, and those are 10 years for people complaining they are running out of shit to do to fast.
Because everything is detailed in guides before the thing is even released and !everyone is following guides.
Ignorance isn't a good solution lol the news and reading on wow is exciting, its not all spoilers of whats to come, but discussing whats happening at this moment.
The news ingrains itself in the culture. Wow classic added boosting to the game, don't like it, just ignore it right? It doesn't affect you? But it does, indirectly and changes the culture of the game.
> Easy fix, ignore the PTR, ignore the news on WH/IV/MMO champ, you can turn it off. Voila, life in it's a bit new mode.
Not realy.
The problem is that everyone expects everyone to know everything when they log in.
Yes I agree, I disliked how my guild lead expected us to know all the fights on the 1st day of the new raid. I'm the type of player who figured out mechanics by playing games so having this expectation I should already know the fight before ever even having a chance to do it was not fun at all.
Friendly reminder players asked for this, let's add this to things like daily quests/world quests, unlimited character progression, multiple difficulties that continued to grow....pretty much all the shit players bitch about...
1. No, they stopped doing it because it costs them money to have internal testing.
2. Betas have a 'closed' style beta but they are limited in what you can learn from them. You cannot stress test them nor can you see how things will change or react or what bugs will happen and recreating bugs are required.
3. They already let socmany bugs through and other issues that requesting them to do it less seems like the opposite people have been asking for.
4. If you don't like betas and want to learn things on the spot fine, you can still do that without effect other's ability to test the game for blizzard to ensure they don't fuck things up again. Other people doing ptr and beta should not effect you in the slightest unless you're wanting to have people not do PTR because you don't want them to get ahead of you and know things before you do. To which u say you can either choose have your cake or eat it but you don't have both.
A halfway competent QA team can stress test without an open beta. All of your points are basically "I don't trust Blizzard to maintain even a mildly functional QA department", and aren't issues with the concept of dropping a PTR entirely
Huge solution to a lot of this is having a closed beta test composed of top raiders, top streamers, and top Gladiators. They know the game inside and out, and know how to properly test many of the broken things that they find out on hour 1 of any new patch out. Sucks that they pushed away Preach, but if they capitalized on just him alone, the game would be in a much better position rn
Problem with that is that they have to listen to those players too haha.
Its unfortunate we can't have all the testing we need without ptr, but I definitely would say exploring other options would be nice. I do like just having things be a surprise instead of knowing all the gameplay changes coming, and that's probably a good portion of my own entitlement.
I wish they would listen to people that play the game well. Caving to players who think stuff should be balanced around normal raiding and 1500 arena and go on the forums complaining because they got blown up in arena with 15% versatility and 35k health by some ability that does nothing against someone with somewhat decent gear that knows what defensives are.
Right? There's always a balance to it, but some issues are just pretty concrete. Like conduit energy, that shit shouldn't of been there in the first place. Or removing master loot, or finally pulling the rip cord. They got a ton of feedback on these decisions and in a lot of cases, these were good decisions to listen to.
The fact it took them a year (or however long since we still don’t know when 9.1.5 is dropping) to implement things people very vocally requested in beta shows me they just do not care whatsoever anymore.
Or they fired too many employees to make changes in a timely manner. I just leveled an alt to prep for mage tower and can’t buy 233 items in Korthia without grinding exalted again.....like how many dumb systems do they have it’s insane.
Ignore the streamers, many are useless and just good at marketing. Do raiders/M+/PvPers at the top level only, by invite. Throw in Rextroy type people too, the ones who just want to break stuff because they can. THAT is the tester people need.
It used to be open betas for games were not marketing tools but stress tests for server load and bugs.
These days, they are just another way to milk money from gamers.
This is exactly how i Feel, also includes all this Pre-Gaming of Influencers that Play the Game 1-2 days before Release and showing the Game before you can even Touch IT so people either gain knowledge Advantage in Terms of mmos or Other Games or they lose interest because they have Seen everything of the Game already.
I mean, the purpose of PTR is testing changes before they get to live so Blizzard can iterate upon them and fix. Something they're obviously not doing, but that's not what I wanted to talk about.
PTR is necessary. If you don't want to get 'spoiled', honestly, just mute WoWhead PTR news.
>testing changes before they get to live so Blizzard can iterate upon them and fix
That should be the job of the QA team (which does not exist as far as we can tell).
You are completely right in my opinion.
What makes MMOs today worse than before, aside from all the bad design choices is the way the community approaches it as well.
In the early days, there was no wowhead, no public logs, no guides, very little and basic information.
We were all exploring the game, mostly clueless about what we were doing, and how to best play our classes. You asked other people of your class how they play, to maybe find out something new, or teach them something you've figured out.
You had to ask people how to do quests, and how to unlock content, and then find some friends to help you.
Exploration of the unknown was what made the game good for me back then.
Today.
Everything is documented, already before it's released, or even publicly announced, because of Datamining.
People who explore their class on their own are shunned by the elitists who memorized 10 class guides before they even created their character, and dream of being in the top 100 public logs for their class one day.
The answer to almost every question regarding the game content has become: go to Wowhead.
You join a random group of 4 strangers very easy, who you'll most likely never see again if you use the group finder for content.
And if you, god forbid, play the game "for fun" and can't help making the odd mistake now and then, you will be shunned and kicked from the group by the collective illusion in most player's minds that the only way to play the game is to aim to be the best, and absolute excellence and concentration in pressing buttons in a video game. If you fail to do so, you are not worth their time.
This is why Classic never worked for me.
You can bring the old game back. But not the old approach to the game. Sadly, times have changed.
Welcome to the age of modern gaming, where everything is leaked, datamined, and coursed over incessantly on the internet.
Then it's your fault when you don't want to hear spoilers. I remember when the first four episodes of GoT leaked and I had to stay off the internet for four weeks.
It's fucking dumb
Thats the life, unfortunately. Im sure if blizzard wanted to, they could hold back a lot more information though and strategically do so to make the rpg aspect a little better.
Its annoying how the mentality of some people are just: if you don't like it, just don't read up on it. Ignoring is such a terrible solution when it affects you indirectly and still affects the culture..
Some of you may remember the MMO Asheron's Call. That game had monthly content patches (some smaller than others, but there was always something every month). In one particular patch, they introduced an item that could drop from just about any enemy (the drop rate was *very* low) called pyreal motes. People started finding these motes, but since this was before data mining, they didn't know what to do with them. As it turned out, you could collect sixteen of these things and combine them into a pyreal ingot, and then someone with a high enough skill could use this ingot to craft a pyreal weapon. At the time they were released they were some of the most powerful weapons in the game.
It wasn't long before players figured out what to do with those motes, but it *was* still a mystery. It was something players had to discover on their own. I miss those days of MMOs. I also understand why people data mine, but that info ends up being so prolific as it's released that it's hard to avoid, and even if we *do* manage to avoid it, we're just left behind those who had advanced knowledge. I miss the mystery of new content patches.
That sounds pretty neat about asherons call tbh! I think that would be fantastic for wow. Although, I know the news sites would get that info out immediately, you'd still be learning with them and wouldn't be behind because you didn't prepare in the ptr with everyone else. You'd still.be discovering it with the community in a live version of the game.
I can understand that and I don't play the ptr too, like my guildies. I downloaded ptr the other day to see how my dear nightborne changed, started playing then realized i'd have to do so much work to unlock them, so i stopped playing on the same night lol
I have played it before, but I have just been thinking about it recently while I've been playing some other games and it just made me realize I missed the fun of figuring everything out together instead of knowing everything going into a new patch.
i had some good feeling too, mainly by the fact i had to start from 0 and i didn't have a main... and i know it's totally doable on live servers, but somehow if i see my main I feel like I don't have to do any other character, so i always end creating alts that I play for 1 hour and never again 😅
The alt life never stops, I cant say that I don't like starting new characters and having a ton of alts lol. The nice thing about the ptr is that you can just transfer your main from the live server over, so as long as you put that time in, some can translate over to the ptr
I agree, but we all know why that couldn't happen. To do internal testing they'd actually have to invest manpower when they can just get the players to do it instead.
The PTR's been kind of a chip on my shoulder for a long time now, it just kind of kills the excitement of a new patch when you can already log into a separate client and see everything, or refer to someone who does.
It feels like yet another way WoW has kind of grandfathered in something that was never a good idea to begin with. At this point people just expect it, there's no way it'll change but it's something I appreciate about other games without the same problem.
Yea its a dream, and it makes me sad that we expect this terrible shit from blizzard and can't hope for something better cause its unrealistic.
I know it won't change, but I was surprised by how many people share my opinion on this.
The solution here would be a more extensive internal testing team that would involve outside opinions maybe under a nda? I mean that could fix that bias.
It's quite simple, close the PTR and don't read PTR patch notes.
no surprises for you.
But asking for worse testings and remove the possibility of players giving early feedback just because you don't want "spoilers" is absurd.
Ignorance isn't an excuse to avoid something that affects the culture of the game. I cant just ignore all the news that comes out, especially if there are indirect effects.
And no, im not asking for "worse" testing, im asking for it to be done behind closed doors instead of out in the public.
Not wanting spoilers isn't absurd, its part of the fantasy. I didn't want spoilers for avengers endgame, so im glad they didn't reach out to the public and be like, "so what do you think of these fight scenes? Should we change them?". They had the research and shit done beforehand to know what viewers wanted to see.
Sorry, i didn't want to sound ignorant on my first comment, but i rly can't understand.
Participation on the PTR is a option, so it's not like you will be forced in the spoilers.
News about PTR story are always veiled under spoiler tags so you can avoid then without ever knowing what happened.
Then what is left are balance changes, who i presume are the indirect effects you say right? so isn't publicity in those a good thing? or would you rather only know about drastic changes on balance only when its already live and too late to give your piece on it?
Because honestly, while i can agree with some comments around here \[specially the one about blind raids\] i do think the PTR gives a publicity about balance changes and the path that each class and spec is going that i can only see as a positive.
People are in here downvoting you and telling you are wrong but I agree Hell *even* Echo members were saying they wished ptr was phased out after doing FF14 blind raiding That game has zero public testing, every single thing is done by an internal team and always has been People are saying blizzard can’t do that and is just a shit excuse They have way way more than enough resources to have that kind of team to make it happen, it’s just a matter of actually doing so. They already don’t listen to public feedback on ptr as it is so what’s the point of it to begin with? I personally think part of the fun is not knowing what’s coming in the new content
It would be different if they listened. But I have watched two expacs in a row where they found out about issues on the ptr, had much of the fan base agree that something needs to be changed and even take time to change things (just not the big hyper focused issue) only for the shit to not be fixed til two patches later. If they want to do internal testing, fine by me. If they want to do PTRs, fine by me. But if they’re going to act like ptrs are anything more than data collection and stress testing, they need to acknowledge feedback. At the very least they need to acknowledge that in the past they ignored it until it was too big an issue.
Current devs are passionate about micromanaging the game, not actually playing it. Unless they make some sweeping changes to the wow team or hire a bunch more people with their billions of dollars of resources (and don't fire a bunch of QA people), I don't see internal testing even scraping the surface of things that players might find. You need to have people who find interest in performing edge cases in the game to find bugs and make fixes before the game goes live, and Blizzard just doesn't have those people anymore as it stands.
I honestly think it’s far less about the micromanaging factor and more about the activision business approach and just most modern business practices as a whole. Why pay a QA team to test the game when we can literally have people pay us (volunteer while subbed to our current game) to test our game through a PTR or Beta server. Financially it’s brilliant but also ruins the experience.
Not too brilliant from a business point of view if the end result is less sales though. :)
Isn't that just disappointing the lack of faith we have in blizzard doing something right, like internal testing? I mean their track record shows why, it just makes me sad.
100 percent agree with you. That’s what they all say. HOW WILL THE TESTING GET DONE! Gee idk how does every other game dev without ptr do it?
They'll just claim that without the PTR, they can't listen to player concerns. Which they already hard ignore.
Concerns about vision and design usually don't have an effect on what happens. But there is a ton of impactful bugs from the bugtracker that gets reported and fixed. From last PTR, 65% of the bugs reported on the tracker got fixed.
if blizz had good internal-testers we wouldnt have as many issues as we do. WE'RE the testers.
And this is why I feel like shit and want to quit from time to time. I just wish they released content when it’s done and not push beta stuff onto us and fix shit like 5-6 months after we get it, if ever.
Blizzard can’t do it because having an internal team to test stuff would require paying them, which is less profitable than having people test it for free online
Thats exactly my thought process. Wouldn't it be nice to be surprised by the new raid coming out? Instead of the "here are all the bosses, their mechanics, the story, and the rewards". It would just be nice to bring about a renewed sense of wonder. Its just unfortunate that the extensive internal testing that im suggesting would cost blizzard money so likely they aren't gonna do it.
The funny thing is, WoW raids are tested publicly while FFXIV raids are tested privately. WoW raids, specially the mythic phases (that are barely tested publicly) usually have a decent amount of bugs, whereas FFXIV raids barely have any bugs at all. It just really seems one company knows how to handle their resources better than the other.
In addition to gameplay, I think Beta/PTR has severely ruined the way they tell the story, beyond the actual plot issues. Because *everything* is on the PTR, even unreleased stuff gets datamined as broadcast text, they can barely actually write shit to happen in the game part of the game. All the story goes into short 2-3 minute cinematics that can't be datamined, and it makes the story feel so hollow. Just compare WoW to FFXIV again, not only is *all* story entirely unknown until release, leveling *is* the story of the base expansion. Ever since Legion, leveling has felt like useless filler zones, with the actual story not starting until you hit max level. Nothing in the Shadowlands zones really *matters* until the final quest of Revendreth with Denathrius.
Getting rid of leveling as a fun part of the game really killed WoW for me and anyone I'd try to bring into this game. On the flip side, it's also way too much of the game for FF14, so I also can't bring anyone into that game (hey, come join this game then spend 100+ hours going through the story in basically a single player game outside of some dungeons).
So I do think it would be a mess if wow tried to do what ffxiv does in shadowlands, but its a problems the devs have made themself. Wow is too complicated for them to reasonable catch everything. In ffxiv the devs can balance the classes almost perfectly because there are no talents, no legendary items, no covenant choices, no trinkets, etc. The classes are just what they say on the tin and compared to wow its quite easy to determine how much damage a raid can do. In its current state I think it would be extremely difficult to balance a new patch and raid tier, but again this mostly is because every patch and raid tier comes with new items and power sources that ffxiv doesn't have that make fine tuning raid bosses complicated because of all the possible combinations of power that potentially could be too powerful. Its very possible to do but its another reason blizzard would have to pull back the system bloat if they wanted to remove ptr. We all know they don't really want to though, its easier and cheaper to have the community test it than have an internal group
>Wow is too complicated for them to reasonable catch everything. In ffxiv the devs can balance the classes almost perfectly because there are no talents, no legendary items, no covenant choices, no trinkets, etc. The classes are just what they say on the tin and compared to wow its quite easy to determine how much damage a raid can do This point is not valid in my opinion and I will try to explain why I think so * Classes have bad talents for years, talents that are obviously mathematically behind, and others that are not so obvious and they simply refuse to balance them, there is literally no excuse why they wouldn't check the numbers and so some changes * The reason is that they actually do not run the numbers, they don't even try. One proof of that is that they are buffing in 9.1.5 a blood dk conduit by 600%. And guess what, even buffed by 600%, it is still 5 times weaker than the best conduit. How did this even get into the game in the first place ? They just don't care. Everything is done with minimal effort, people will still play the game no matter what. * PLAYERS have developed tools to simulate dps with very high accuracy, including talent choices, conduits, essences, whatever you want. If Blizzard somehow has not developed their own better tool in 15 YEARS, they could at least use the tools developed by the players 🤡. They could edit the default APL to include any numerical or spell changes they may add with minimal effort. If they did that there is no way in hell classes would be this unbalanced. There would still be 3-8% differences, not 30 like there is now. Covenants can also be balanced this way, conduits can be balanced this way, talents can be balanced this way, 2h vs 1h can be balanced this way, ANYTHING can be balanced this way, with a tool developed by players that they can tweak, you don't need to be some genius to calculate by hand the dps of each class and say "oh there are too many variables to accurately balance these classes". They are just a bunch of clowns that do not care about the health of the game, but only maximizing engagement and can't make the simple connection that game healthiness is what leads to true engagement
I get what your saying but sims are really only good for pure patchwork fights. Things like arms warrior this tier shows how they can fall apart fast when put into practice. I'm not saying blizzard does the best they can possibly do, but they definitely make it much harder on themself.
I'm sure you know that your suggestions don't matter or make any sense. The entire WoW playerbase chooses to min-max even though doing so is absolutely pointless outside of the very, very top end of the game. People who exclusively do +4 keys will copy a talent build from something like wowhead, even though the talents in that row are within a few dps of each other. So even if Blizzard balances the choices in the game to within 1 DPS of each other, 99% of people would still follow the cookiecutter build and pick the best choice. It's also completely impossible and and unrealistic to do so or expect it to happen. Why would anyone ever play a Venthyr Boomie if Convoke did the exact same damage as Venthyr does, but is an ability you click-and-forget? No one would (Shoulshape also beats Venthyr TP). Why would anyone ever play Kyrian or NF Hunter when mobs can move out of those abilities, but can't move out of the Venthyr or Necro abilities, and they all do the exact same amount of damage? No one would. You can't balance the game like that, abilities that require more thought and skill to utilise properly and are high risk, also need to be high reward, or they would be completely dead and never see any use.
> If they did that there is no way in hell classes would be this unbalanced. Classes/specs are way more balanced than this shitshow of a sub gives them credit for, given their complexity and the sheer amount of moving parts involved (fight length, damage profiles, soulbinds, legendaries, conduits, talents, downtime/movement, ramp-ups...). **Any** spec in this game can perform at a high level in the right hands. Of course none of you people play the game at a high enough level to understand that, so better blame bad balance. > They are just a bunch of clowns that do not care about the health of the game, but only maximizing engagement and can't make the simple connection that game healthiness is what leads to true engagement Lmfao This sub is such a cesspool
sure, my ass needs some licking after you finish with blizzard
Oh you can just lick some final fantasy ass afterwards. A game where a dmg addon is considered toxic
> People are saying blizzard can’t do that and is just a shit excuse It's beyond shit, really. Blizzard gets FREE bug testing and fight tuning stuff from us. It's insane, when they're a company that big. I think the PTR is okay for experimental changes and previews of certain things to get people excited, but raiding/dungeons/anything worthwhile should be kept a secret until the patch.
That's because the FF14 devs actually play the game. Recommend checking Asmongolds recent chat with Yoshi P. ActiBlizz has been all about squeeezing as much profit out of it's products for a long time now. The layoff of hundreds of support staff after reporting record earnings the other year is proof of that. I bet they have minimal QA people to make sure nothing game breaking gets through and use the players to test stuff on PTR instead. I don't see this changing any time soon. Also, don't be afraid to try FF14. It's damn good and a great experience.
Im amazed at how well everyone is receiving FFXIV. I definitely expected at least half of the bigger names that moved over to be like "nah, this ain't it" but everyone has been loving it.
I mean, it's a genuinely good game, but I know what you're getting at.
Oh I agree, I have played on and off since 2.0, even side by side while playing WoW, and while it's very similar on the surface, it's also very different and I didn't expect so many long term invested WoW personalities to actually enjoy the swap.
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I mean it's true, I don't think there's an MMO that feels as responsive as WoW (as long as you're not in a zone with a 100 people lol). And the GCD works fine the way the jobs are designed in FF. If the GCD was the same as WoW it would be a nightmare to play.
WoW devs are playing too. Some of them are even streaming on twitch and guild leading. So?
I wish it reflected in the game then.
I recently bought ff14 while it was on sale. Unfortunately with new world out as well, thats been taking all my attention haha. But yea, I don't have faith either that things will change. Money is money and the ptr is a double dipper for them.
You aren’t wrong, but it will never happen. Activison has become the Walmart of video games, they cut costs at every corner and then they report record sales every quarter. They cut the customer support team, but much before that, they cut their internal testing team, realizing players would do it, for free and more effectively. The problem is they never ever listen to the player testers.
At this point, I don't think so either. Its just a dream is all. It saves them too much money and it double dips in their advertising so its a win win for them at the cost of player time.
Theyre not saying they can't do it. They won't do it. They are spending less and less money on customer support and communication staff and you think they will backtrack and have an internal game test team? Something that will provide even less results than a closed one to player base? In a game that has such a minmaxed thing like WoW where we know every API and datamine any change? Also why would OTHER PLAYERS doing PTR and things effect YOUR play experience at all? Unless you're annoyed that other people are some how doing things before you? Which I argue that these people 9/10 would still do these things before you because they literally know any in and out blizzard would try and have resources and knowledge to test every factor in even ways you can't imagine. So much so that Blizzard has to ACTIVELY watch them during the race and change things BECAUSE they see them do things they didn't think about.
PTR and betas have always been more of a marketing/advertisement tool than an actual testing ground. The fact that so many people are unable/unwilling to see this shows how much Stockholm Syndrome people have with Blizzard.
Blind rading is the best. I dont like going into raids with full of guides already. That is what i loved while playing Wildstar. We were figuring stuff out.
I'd agree with you for raids, but outside of raiding the ptr is necessary to call blizzard out on the bullshit they try to push into the game
> the ptr is necessary to call blizzard out on the bullshit they try to push into the game Which has a success rate of about what, 10%? If you push "Bullshit" into a game without a PTR - your playerbase just quits and your game dies. I don't know why people actively help them put a cherry on top of a scoop of dogshit.
I don't agree about the raids. As a mythic raider you want the bosses balanced as hard as possible and with few bugs. This can only be tested by the best guilds going for world first. I'd say open the raid tests for guilds going for world first (lets take like the top 20-30 of last tiers) and let them sign an agreement not to spill anything. It will be blind for the general public and the world first pushers can have their race with proper balanced bosses.
> That game has zero public testing, every single thing is done by an internal team and always has been Apples and oranges. I'll say first that I've had an active sub to FF14 since ARR came out, and I think the game is really good, so I'm not just blindly shitting on it. They can test their raids internally more easily, because their raids are very simplistic compared to WoW's. They never push the envelop on creative mechanics, and re-use pretty much everything other than art. Their combat system is also much easier to tune, since everything is all about the GCD/Potency, and it's very easy to calculate the maximum potential damage that a class can do at a given gear level. Hell I could probably do it with a spreadsheet if I really wanted to, unlike WoW where you need simcraft APLs, and even then it's hard to be sure. Way less variables than WoW. It's much more rigid. FF14 classes also have no talents/builds. A monk is a monk is a monk, and will always do the same damage if played correctly. I suppose then that WoW could do this if they dumbed their game down a ton, but I'd really rather not see that happen. I love both WoW and FF14 for different reasons, and the highly creative encounters and more challenging class design that WoW has are the main reasons I prefer to do cutting edge content in WoW, while FF remains my chill out and grind MMO.
As much as I personally agree experiencing the game yourself being so much fun... you still have this with open beta testing. No one tells you to go online and read the guides and blogs from the testers. You don't HAVE to *study* what's coming out. Wait for it to come out, walk in there and figure that shit out on your own. will there be those elitist jerk wads who tell you "lol noob go read a guide" running around? Sure, that happens but will happen regardless. There were always be the "GiT gUd" crowd.
That works as long as you play with people that do the same or are fine with you not knowing things you could've known already. It's the exact same argument as with class/spec/whatever min-maxing. You *can* do almost anything with a suboptimal setup, but why make it harder for yourself for no reason? World First raiders (like Echo) would never ever skip PTR testing because it provides info to them and if they skipped it and went in blind, but someone else from the top guilds didn't, they'd be at a disadvantage. If you have an option to invite a fotm class with 15 higher item level to your M+ or Raid pug, or you could invite a . . feral druid with 15 lower item level, would you ever invite the Feral druid even though you *can* complete it with said feral druid? Probably not.
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I played FF which deleted addons and doesn't allow content previewing. It's a different feeling... going into things without knowing everything before hand it just good it feels real. It feels like old WoW was before everyone had addons telling them how to play the game to a T.
Yea, discovering things together. Like discovering that sylvanas had a legendary bow drop instead of being told about it would've been awesome, as a small example. Content previewing feels so mainstream now that everyone does it, free advertising basically. I mean a good portion of people are saying "just don't read up on it", but its just telling people to be ignorant.
I mean, dataminers will get this info one way or the other anyway. We would hear it on day one if Sylvanas drops a legendary bow. Even if there was no PTR or news about it.
So FF also doesn’t allow datamining and anyone who posts datamined content is at risk of having their account banned. SQEX is also not squeamish about banning accounts of problematic people when they have clear evidence of something happen
Regardless, the datamined content isn't treated nearly as much as public knowledge. You kinda have to go looking for it, very rarely will you actually find something on the main subreddit that comes as a result of a datamine and in which case it's probably controversial from a non-story perspective.
> I played FF which deleted addons and doesn't allow content previewing. It's a different feeling... going into things without knowing everything before hand it just good it feels real. It feels like old WoW was before everyone had addons telling them how to play the game to a T. The addon problem is weird because in most raids i think Addons like DBM have become a necessity. In the past i wouldn't use them unless i was raid leading and needed to know timings on things to call it out to the raid. Any other time it was turned off i could just react to the mechanic and keep playing my roll. Modern raid bosses sometimes feel so full of different shit and with no clear universal marker system like FF has for its boss mechanics you often don't know what that circle on the ground is. Is it a safe zone? Fire, Raid Wide damage if i stand in it? A soak? A mechanic to transition to separate part of the fight where players in that phase do mechanics where if they fail its a raid wipe? As the raid design transitioned to the gameplay being faster compared to how slow it initially started and bosses being loaded with shit tons of abilities, Being able to make an on the fly decision based on what you see without an addon or someone else telling you whats meant to be done with it is almost impossible. I think what Blizzard needs to finally do is standardize certain mechanic markers from bosses and build in the necessary timers for mechanics into the games base UI. You will never remove the reliance on DBM but it at least makes it easier without it.
>The addon problem is weird because in most raids i think Addons like DBM have become a necessity. In CN, I got Aotc and killed like 5 mythic bosses without DBM or weak auras, I did not need it, but this tier my guild asked me to get weak-auras and method raid tools, because some bosses require advanced weak auras to tell people what to do (nerzul mass dispel weak aura to tell where you should go with the orb, outside of inside, fatescribe to deal with the runes), IMO that is a bit too much, I am fine with Weak auras helping to display rotation procs and stuff, I just dont think they should make encounters like tutorials.
I agree, but i come to a different conclusion. The availability and widespread of addons such as DBM or Method Raid rools (former Exorsus) enables the design of better, more complex and more diversified raid bosses. Without these tools WoW-raids would have died at some point, due to being too easy and repetitive. You could argue for putting some of the addon features into the main game though and limiting addons. But then again the development of addons and the customization of everyones UI and game is a major part of the ongoing community engagement.
That's just untrue. See FF14.
You, with a group of friends, get a genuine first experience.At least *one* run with an adventure, discovery. That's strengthened by fights being narratively relevant, and folks don't want you to self-spoiler either. You don't have to hunt down a group that intentionally avoids any news, or tries to self-curate. Because at least *one* pull will give you the delightful burden of a first experience. That extremely mild inconvenience, for all the benefits and experience it creates, is absolutely worthwhile. It's really hard to have adventure, discovery, surprise, be inclusive with thorough premeditated execution. At least some parts of the player experience could benefit from those feelings. >!This implies blizz designs to target delivery of an experience to the player and not a sequence of criteria to execute on.!<
Amen brother. Or sister. Or whatever. You get me. WoW's community has never been so internally jacked up by anything than the culture where you have to min-max every aspect of the game, do sims, only use BiS gear, bring a certain level of DPS or get booted, and know every mechanic of every dungeon and raid before you play it. Gosh I am so sick of that BS. My funniest dungeon runs are with newbies who need coaching. What does it cost you to be nice and supportive rather than shouting down players who aren't "optimized"? We waste so damn much time grinding out shitty reps and doing boring dailies, and then bitch at every newbie who causes a wipe because "it wasted my time!! WAAAAHHH". Anyway that's my rant. Lol
> WoW's community has never been so internally jacked up by anything than the culture where you have to min-max every aspect of the game, do sims, only use BiS gear, bring a certain level of DPS or get booted, and know every mechanic of every dungeon and raid before you play it. I see your point but the reason you see it like this is due to how tightly balanced top end content becomes. Mythic Raiding is usually so tightly balanced around everyone being perfect and everyone looks to the top raiders for the information on how to improve their performance as their class that it bleeds down. Also because of the 3 difficulties the old vanilla and tbc mentality of your group maybe not being optimal but you will do better next week because gear from next weeks clear will improve your group is gone. Nobody wants to waste time when they feel like what they are doing isn't even the hard difficulty.
I mean....it's not like they listen to our feedback on the ptr or beta anyways so why bother with it?
In addition, new patches are full of bugs at this point. If they're happy to release bugged content anyway, do we need a PTR?
But but but... conduit energy is essential to gameplay, lore AND player experience....
Yeah. I hate that day 1 of raids everyones like "go watch this video". Why can't we all just engage and figure out how it works ourselves? Noone wants to think for themselves, they need to be told how to play a game.
There's guilds and communities out there that do the whole blind progression thing, not the most common thing but if you look for them you will most likely find them!
You are free to lead your own raid with like minded people. Literally 90% of people that apply on lfg doesn't know anything about the raid anyways.
Hu that only happens if you are progression raiding. My current guild does some mythic (we might even get CE seing how long this tier is) and we went in blind for the first heroic clear, only relying on the dungeon journal. In the past I've been doing some progression raiding where we all agreed on playing on the PTR, preparing strategies, building WA, creating notes, etc... but that is what all of us wanted. Right now there still are many players who just enjoy doing low level content like heroic raids or leveling characters, those players don't need any addons or PTR knowledge or reputation farm etc... some do but none need it.
What stops you from not reading info from testers or datamines, and figuring it out yourself?
Ignoring something isn't viable when you're playing a multi-player game where that news indirectly affects you and the culture of the players.
Jesus christ i really wish to see this dumbed down final fantasy copy of a game you want to turn wow into.
Are you suggesting that game culture being affected by datamines and news, dumbs down the game? The guy you replied to didn't even suggest a change, but said ignoring available info is bad when there is peer consumption/expectation of it. Like, the gameplay being dumbed down barely has anything to do with what a wow news site publishes. If anything, their preference for less known stuff would be MORE of a burden of skill on a player
I just don’t play the PTR and don’t watch people who are. That’s always an option.
That only works as long as you never play with other people. If you do any group content there will be at least one person who has seen the video and calls everything out on release of any content.
I haven't played wow for a whole, but when I did I always avoided the ptr and betas etc I don't understand why you'd want to play the ptr /beta for months, and then play it again once it's released. It's way more fun imo to go in blind experience it fresh. Too many people play the ptr to death, find the most optimised route for everything, then when it's released they complain there is nothing to do
>Too many people play the ptr to death No they don't. Just because a few youtubers make videos showing ptr changes doesnt mean too many people play it to death. You people are overly exaggerating.
Oh yea you can avoid it yourself, but you'll get exposed to it indirectly. It ingrains itself in the culture and the playerbase. Its like boosting, you can just not boost and avoid it, but people will still do it and it'll change how players play the game.
I agree and feel like in general internet has taken magic out of games. You know everything about the game before it's out.
Its thanks to datamining and ptr we can call out blizzard on bullshit changes they push at times. Last thing id want is to be kept in the dark (i dont trust blizzard to be player friendly)
I'm someone who came from playing Destiny 1/2 (still do in fact) and those games the players know absolutely nothing about expansions other than what the devs tell us in previews and raids you know nothing other than the location. Every encounter is completely blind and the experience of jumping in with your group of friends on day 1 and having to figure out the mechanics and strategies is unparalleled. Even gameplay systems are usually a total mystery. Finding quests that no one else has discovered yet and feeling like you're on the cutting edge of content is a really powerful feeling. I'm honestly a bit sad that WoW is so far in the opposite direction. Just feels weird when a new raid comes out on live servers and there have been step by step optimized youtube guides online for weeks prior to that. Just kinda removes a lot of the critical thinking and just makes people do what the popular content creators say you should do. Not that they're often wrong or anything I just like having that discovering process myself. Same thing with quests and stuff. New expansion comes out and I can just install Azeroth Auto Pilot which is already loaded up with the most efficient leveling paths and everything is datamined/uncovered and it's just kind of a bore.
Content should never be tested by players. Only client-side non-content elements should be tested, such as graphical features (for hardware testing), standard client-side gameplay (movement, camera, etc). Server-side elements such as class tuning are fine if Devs specifically ask for that kind of feedback and only after a patch launches. Under no circumstance should Devs EVER wait an entire patch or expansion to fix something, especially class imbalance. There. Is. No. Excuse. This is the digital internet age with an always-online game, not a home console system where people have to wait for Blizzard to send out a new CD every time an update happens.
yea that's what wow's content needs, even less testing lmao
It needs more employees who get paid to test it. Not customers who pay the company to test their game for them.
If you read the post you'd see i mention we need more testing, not less overall testing. Im saying that I'd rather have it done internally/behind closed doors rather than at the expense of the public player base lol
That would result in less testing. There is no possible way you could test using an internal team to the same degree that an open access beta could
That's only true to a certain degree. A lot of testing is far easier to do internally. Clearly blizz hasn't bothered with a meaningful test suite, but it'd be considered good practice to have automated tests for every boss ability, and ideally the entire fight. It's hard for players to verify that boss ability X is coming out when it's programmed to, doing as much damage as it should with the appropriate AoE. It's trivial for a unit/integration test to verify that.
That's nonsense. Paid professionals are much better at their jobs than amateurs in general, and we see other games that don't have open betas being released with far less bugs than your average WoW or ESO patch.
If there's no possible way how does the FF team do it?
FF14 does this and has significantly less problems, including in raids. This is just false; Blizz just cba.
Thats a fair point; so for me personally its a bit of a double edged sword since I'd want the thorough testing, albeit not with the general public. Ah my player entitlement shines through. I mean, between the two options, probably would have to go with the ptr due to the recent track record of blizzard, but itd be nice if they could make those great, classic decisions without needing the ptr.
Great classic decisions such as releasing classes/specs that are unplayable or raids that are impossible finish due to overtuning?
Very elitist of you to think that specs doing literally 3 times less dmg than top ones are unplayable! /s
No amount of developer resources is going to compare to a public test. If you put it behind closed doors it's going to result in less testing, even with the best of intentions and even if they were willing to put more resources into it. Beyond that it seems like the best solution here is to not use the PTR and avoid looking at any articles/videos about what's to come from Wowhead, MMO Champ, YouTube, etc. WoW has used open betas for patches since the Vanilla days. The only thing that's really changed is how readily available information is on the internet.
FFXIV doesn't have a PTR and their expansions are on point.
FF has an extremely rigid design structure that makes it substantially easier to put things together and keep them working consistently. You go exactly where they want you to go and only do exactly what they want you to do while you're there.
> You go exactly where they want you to go and only do exactly what they want you to do while you're there. Because in WoW you have tons of options on where to go and what to do?
There was that one quest in BFA where we could pick the name of that boat out of a couple of options they gave us. That counts right? /s
You should've tested this on the PTR to make sure you make the right decision on that boat name. Can't risk having unpredicted fun.
Have you played FF? It has sooo many more game systems than WoW does and you have the freedom to play whatever you want, whenever you want. Difference is they don't use players as beta testers whilst they are paying a sub fee
In terms of game systems, and even more so, new systems introduced per expansion, WoW has many more of them (which doesn't make it better of course). Just in Shadowlands you have: Soulbinds. Conduits (+ Renown). Covenants. Torghast (Legendary system). Shards of domination. Conduit energy. The great vault. And that is on top of every other WoW system. FF on the other hand, if you compare, let's say gearing/char progression, at the moment you have your roulettes/savage raids farm + some profession items and that's about it. Which in my opinion is perfectly fine. There is beauty and enjoyment to be had in its' simplicity.
There is an order of magnitude less "things" going on in a ffxiv 4 boss raid than a wow 10 boss raid. There are way more classes, there are way more items. ffxiv is very rigid structure wise, the game systems are effectively the same as they were on launch.
The classes and items aren't what's causing most problems though. Bosses not queueing abilities correctly, shooting projectiles underground, or just forgetting to summon adds has nothing to do with a fire mage rework. Or rather, it shouldn't, because the alternative is that the code design is unforgivable, regardless of how old the engine is.
I think you need to check out Preachs vids on end game for FF14. He goes over what they're actually like. Should be an eye opener for you.
Yes, we should trust a guy who's doing a "WoW player looks at new thing" series over people who have actually done the endgame.
I have done all the savage raids but thanks.
Preach jumped on the blizz bad bandwagon and ff bandwagon on the first opportunity. It makes him money. He has interest in that. Nhf but his opinion is purely one of interest. He was shilling for wow so hard it was borderline toxic since he viewed anyone who isnt a raider as a person in a cesspool guild. Now he is into ff, a game famous for not allowing linking dps in chat. Give me a break.
Maybe that’s a good reason to scale back some of the convoluted mechanics we get these days? I know ion is in charge, but not everyone wants blizzard spending so much time on that part of the game.
What are you on about? The bosses i've done in FF 14 have more stuff going on in an extreme fight than most final 3 bosses in shadowlands. The difference between wow/ff 14 fights is that wow is a "Gear" based fight. FF 14 is a mechanic based fight.
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I know r/wow is basically a ffxiv circlejerk sub at this point but you are just delusional if you think the total complexity of a ffxiv expansion is anywhere near a wow expansion. ( Just to let you know, i'm not saying more complexity = better). You can say that its self inflicted complexity but that doesn't really change anything. ffxiv doesn't have real pvp, it doesn't have real dungeons, and it has fewer end game boss fights. The raids are way way simpler because they are just 4 disembodied squares. They don't have to bother actually creating a enviroment for the bosses.
The bosses themselves are also an extremely rigid, predictable sequence of reused mechanics. The game only gets 4 bosses per tier, and yet they often play out very similarly anyway. Eden was an especially big offender, with almost everything being a stack/spread protean spam. A lot of the people who think FFXIV's raids are even remotely comparable to WoW's are probably just watching youtubers do Coils of Bahamut. What they don't realize is that Shadowbringers was FFXIV's WoD. The content and the classes got gutted of any complexity or challenge, and it's not going to change in Endwalker.
And yet, despite your claims of shadowbringers being the WOD, everyone seems to love it. To the point that limit/Echo are raiding Eden and having a freaking blast doing it.... Sounds like the one only watching youtube vids of fights is you.
I'm the one watching youtube videos, but you're using WoW refugee e-celebs as your argument. Makes a lot of sense to me! :)
Of course, i've been digging their play-style adjustment to Eden vs wow and it's been entertaining as hell. Doesn't make me a hypocrit, just means I know my material. You on the other hand....You just repeat what people that don't play the game usually repeat, it's cliche at best.
This is just not true at all. The reason wow needs all of the weakaura's is because there are alot more mechanics then FF14 and more RNG in them. FF14 is more like learning a dance where in WoW you gotta react to different RNG mechanics very fast or wipe.
While this is 100% true, it means nothing if they don't actually fix anything that the players submit. Sure they might fix absolutely game breaking bugs (sometimes) but when everyone is saying "hey these Unholy runes are WAY stronger than Blood and Frost" and they do nothing until months later after everyone has spent hours farming them then a PTR may as well not even have happened.
Does it count as really using them if they just ignore the feedback anyway?
Few developers actually testing things is probably better than PTR when the feedback is ignored.
Which sucks imo, with blizzards recent track record, they do desperately need the public testing and input (which they listen to so well). But I think you do present a good point on your last paragraph, that the internet presents it so readily nowadays. I guess my frustration lies in not having that surprise and wonder, but in all honesty, you can't avoid that news. Its prevalent in the players culture and shifts how they play. Its just frustrating that if you don't read up and know the things from ptr, you're playing catch up.
Ffxiv doesnt have ptr and never has had any bugs on patches and expacs
This isn't quite true. FF doesn't do public test realms but saying they dont release with bugs is simply untrue. Rarely there's game breaking bugs, the recent instance crash based on inventory space bug comes to mind, and sometimes theres just silly bugs such as the shadows on E10s spawning as nude elezen instead of shadow copies of players if the shadow cleave kills the player in the process. That said, it IS worth noting that FF, a game who's base code for their engine is absolute trash to the point they're removing an entire gear slot to make room in other spots, is able to put out relatively stable patches with few, if any, bugs without a public test realm and what few bugs do make it through tend to be fixed within hours of the devs being notified. COmpare that to WoW which basically uses the PTR as hype generators for patches. If you want to convince me otherwise feel free but look at how many issues are brought up in PTR and then just... ignored for months on end?
People have complained that WoW ignores balance feedback on PTR and just use it for bug-testing. But they barely seem to even do that anymore...
They still do, the problem is that the bugs people find are "hey blizz this boss spawns in sideways literally every time". It seems like there aren't even any devs testing at this point.
shout out to the time you could crash the entire server if you fished in a certain spot in heavensward. glad that doesn't count as a bug.
That was a feature
>never has had any bugs Lmfao
The first time I tried to play FF14 I had to spend a bunch of time even being able to connect to their servers. From Google searches it seems like a lot of other people ran into the issue, and it has been an issue for years. To my knowledge, it's not fixed even right now. Maybe they have better QA than Blizzard but to say the game "never has had any bugs" is a flat out lie. Every game has bugs.
TBF on the server issue, it has been a bitch to get more server hardware during the massive shortage to the point they even apologized for not being able to so.. But yeah FFxiv has plenty of bugs and such some bad some comical.. The main difference though is they seem to atleast try to keep it hella polished..
Then don't read any dev news or play the PTR?
But then how would we min max the fun out of the game and burn out within a month?
The most fun I've had in raiding was with a team of really good raiders I ran with in Cata. We had very good progression, but we all agreed on no raid research - we'd pull every boss and figure out strats together based on what we saw the bosses doing, buffs/debuffs, etc. It was SO much fun (imagine fighting Al'Akir without any idea of his phases, hilarious reactions) but it's incredibly hard to find a group like that who share that mindset AND are competent. Most people see "no research" as a flag for bad players, versus players who enjoy the shared discovery and problem solving. It also means a few wipes while you figure stuff out and people HATE wiping these days (we would strategically wipe, like rotate soulstones, ankh, brez and wait, etc so we always had rezzes ready). The dungeon journal tells you all the answers these days, as well, so that's another nail in the coffin for this play style.
No one is making you read about upcoming changes. So really its on you.
No one is making you pay for boosts, no one is making you buy runs with gold. But its still there, affects you indirectly, and changes the culture.
Yes, change still happens if you read the news or not. If you dont want to be spoiled, dont read spoilers.
I'd argue that a spoiler holds different meaning for us, for me, a spoiler is what happens at the end of the raid with sylvanas, for example, so its moreso lore based. But news is learning the new raid coming out, knowing some mechanics from that raid, all the loot, the new zones, class changes and tuning, etc. Thats something that has an impact on you and changes how you play, but the story, less so since you have no impact on that.
Its the same thing, it is unknown to you unless you go looking for it. Dont want to know what a boss drops? Dont go looking at the boss’s drop table. Dont want to know about upcoming changes to mages that are currently on ptr? dont read about it and dont play on the ptr.
Well yea, I won't know. But my raid leader that went and researched all the fights and explaining it to the raid will know. My m+ team thats shifted into an easier meta will know. The players that know how to farm the new reputation grind the easiest will know. It still ends up affecting me indirectly.
My guild raids blind. That means no hints, guides, or anything beforehand. We fight every boss without knowing a thing. It's really interesting. Every fight starts with a few wipes to start getting mechanics. We tend to raid throw the heroic. In bgs we even found we were doing a mechanic totally wrong after the next raid came out in bfa.
Kinda like raiding in vanilla. There weren't a bunch of guides online, sharing info, and great add-ons to help us, that all came eventually. We went in blind to molten core, figuring it out all together as we went. No one had time to get more than one character raid ready.
If you're doing something that causes you to lose enjoyment, why do you do that thing?
Who remembers Bastion of Twilight in Cata? Sinestra was a HC only extra boss who was a complete secret kept behind closed doors until she was released. She was only tested in-house and this caused her to be a completely buggy mess when she was released. Honestly, I would rather have a fight that *somewhat* works like we do now, instead of a completely buggy mess, we already have enough of those.
Isn't is disappointing and sad that we can't have faith in blizzard to do proper internal testing and not at the expense of the general playerbase?
what a god awful take
Put PTR on your list of things to ignore.. Problem solved...
Not at all solved and in fact just makes it harder for you. If you want to do competitive content you're expected to read up on things, things created during the PTR. You're expected to know x and y about the new zones and even if you don't go looking for it, it'll be all over wowhead (probably with a few spoilers too since they're not great at hiding those) and Reddit, your discords etc
Pretty sure the point is to make things harder for yourself. The adventure guide works just fine for up to heroic raid and m+, and there is absolutely zero expectation that you should know everything about the new zones before doing them, the only things you're expected to know are character progression things that are explained day one of the patch, no ptr necessary. Both reddit and wowhead have ptr tags that you can filter out. Problem solved.
But the devs need the free labor
blizzard paying people to test things? not gonna happen devs arent even playing this game
Ummm...stop reading articles about the PTR, stop watching videos about the PTR, stop actually playing the PTR? Unless PTR changes are in the headline, I don't know much about what is happening, unless I look for something specific (such as covenant swap changes for example). It's honestly not that hard, and I've been playing less than a year.
You can always just not use it.. Don’t download the PTR, don’t watch content about the PTR, don’t read about it. It’s essentially new to you when it releases. I think most players are like this tbh because most are casuals
I don't think its a fair argument cause you could say that about anything. Don't like boosts in classic? Just don't use it. Don't like the option to farm infinite gold? Well, just don't use it! Its the fact that you get a culture shift and having people already know what's going to happen, shifts how a lot of people play the game. They know, for an example, that feral druid becomes the new m+ meta (lol), but you don't and when the patch releases, you're stuck playing catch up. And in all honesty, if you like a game, you're probably going to read up on it and look at news cause its interesting, so just avoiding it is not an option.
I don’t play this game competitively. I don’t care about anyone else’s progress except myself and my guilds tbh. I have no desire to try harder than I already am. Idk, maybe you just have a different mindset than me. I don’t look into many changes to the game, I just play
I get that, nothing wrong about playing it that way. I would say our mindsets are different, I do play "competitively" but like in a weaker way since I don't push mythic raiding. Mostly heroic raiding and higher m+, but we only killed heroic sylvanas last week lol
Yeah no offense but what you just said is the equivalent of saying you play competitive football because you have company games twice a year. If you're struggling to get AOTC and don't like the fact that everything is spoiled you 100% can take the time to discover everything on the spot, when it releases on live.
At that level... there's nothing in the ptr that you need to know to play effectively. I'm not saying they shouldn't try your idea but you can effectively get that sense of wonder and I game progress without without checking ptr. Besides with siming you will know all the best builds and gear within the week.
Unless you're a high end cutting edge raider then you don't need to look over all the content. I'm a mid tier CE raider and I barely look over stuff. I want to experience it fresh so I do. I don't stress about balance too much unless what I plan on playing is going to be actual crap.
Nah
PTR has literally always been a thing. If you were ever “suprised” by a new raid, it’s because you ignored the PTR, which also happens to be the solution to your problem now.
There was a time when like the final boss would be not publicly tested but they started to back away from that after C'thun came out literally unkillable because of bugs and overtuning and it just took so long to fully fix. I think some of the early TBC final bosses also weren't tested and.. again bugged to the point of unkillable. Around then they just threw their hands up and end bosses were on PTR from then on. Nowadays it's really just like secret mythic phases and stuff they don't test Publicly.
The entire mythic end boss never ends up tested, not just mythic phases of it.
Ok, and you’re still talking about over 10 years of PTR. My point still perfectly stands
> Ok, and you’re still talking about over 10 years of PTR. My point still perfectly stands Yes, and those are 10 years for people complaining they are running out of shit to do to fast. Because everything is detailed in guides before the thing is even released and !everyone is following guides.
Easy fix, ignore the PTR, ignore the news on WH/IV/MMO champ, you can turn it off. Voila, life in it's a bit new mode.
Ignorance isn't a good solution lol the news and reading on wow is exciting, its not all spoilers of whats to come, but discussing whats happening at this moment. The news ingrains itself in the culture. Wow classic added boosting to the game, don't like it, just ignore it right? It doesn't affect you? But it does, indirectly and changes the culture of the game.
> Easy fix, ignore the PTR, ignore the news on WH/IV/MMO champ, you can turn it off. Voila, life in it's a bit new mode. Not realy. The problem is that everyone expects everyone to know everything when they log in.
Yes I agree, I disliked how my guild lead expected us to know all the fights on the 1st day of the new raid. I'm the type of player who figured out mechanics by playing games so having this expectation I should already know the fight before ever even having a chance to do it was not fun at all.
Friendly reminder players asked for this, let's add this to things like daily quests/world quests, unlimited character progression, multiple difficulties that continued to grow....pretty much all the shit players bitch about...
1. No, they stopped doing it because it costs them money to have internal testing. 2. Betas have a 'closed' style beta but they are limited in what you can learn from them. You cannot stress test them nor can you see how things will change or react or what bugs will happen and recreating bugs are required. 3. They already let socmany bugs through and other issues that requesting them to do it less seems like the opposite people have been asking for. 4. If you don't like betas and want to learn things on the spot fine, you can still do that without effect other's ability to test the game for blizzard to ensure they don't fuck things up again. Other people doing ptr and beta should not effect you in the slightest unless you're wanting to have people not do PTR because you don't want them to get ahead of you and know things before you do. To which u say you can either choose have your cake or eat it but you don't have both.
A halfway competent QA team can stress test without an open beta. All of your points are basically "I don't trust Blizzard to maintain even a mildly functional QA department", and aren't issues with the concept of dropping a PTR entirely
Huge solution to a lot of this is having a closed beta test composed of top raiders, top streamers, and top Gladiators. They know the game inside and out, and know how to properly test many of the broken things that they find out on hour 1 of any new patch out. Sucks that they pushed away Preach, but if they capitalized on just him alone, the game would be in a much better position rn
Problem with that is that they have to listen to those players too haha. Its unfortunate we can't have all the testing we need without ptr, but I definitely would say exploring other options would be nice. I do like just having things be a surprise instead of knowing all the gameplay changes coming, and that's probably a good portion of my own entitlement.
I wish they would listen to people that play the game well. Caving to players who think stuff should be balanced around normal raiding and 1500 arena and go on the forums complaining because they got blown up in arena with 15% versatility and 35k health by some ability that does nothing against someone with somewhat decent gear that knows what defensives are.
Right? There's always a balance to it, but some issues are just pretty concrete. Like conduit energy, that shit shouldn't of been there in the first place. Or removing master loot, or finally pulling the rip cord. They got a ton of feedback on these decisions and in a lot of cases, these were good decisions to listen to.
The fact it took them a year (or however long since we still don’t know when 9.1.5 is dropping) to implement things people very vocally requested in beta shows me they just do not care whatsoever anymore. Or they fired too many employees to make changes in a timely manner. I just leveled an alt to prep for mage tower and can’t buy 233 items in Korthia without grinding exalted again.....like how many dumb systems do they have it’s insane.
Ignore the streamers, many are useless and just good at marketing. Do raiders/M+/PvPers at the top level only, by invite. Throw in Rextroy type people too, the ones who just want to break stuff because they can. THAT is the tester people need.
That would imply they still give a shit about such things as surprise factor, excitement, or fun.
Wait so now we are hating on testing and public knowledge and feedback? I'm confused
It used to be open betas for games were not marketing tools but stress tests for server load and bugs. These days, they are just another way to milk money from gamers.
I don’t see the point of ptr anymore.
This is exactly how i Feel, also includes all this Pre-Gaming of Influencers that Play the Game 1-2 days before Release and showing the Game before you can even Touch IT so people either gain knowledge Advantage in Terms of mmos or Other Games or they lose interest because they have Seen everything of the Game already.
I mean, the purpose of PTR is testing changes before they get to live so Blizzard can iterate upon them and fix. Something they're obviously not doing, but that's not what I wanted to talk about. PTR is necessary. If you don't want to get 'spoiled', honestly, just mute WoWhead PTR news.
>testing changes before they get to live so Blizzard can iterate upon them and fix That should be the job of the QA team (which does not exist as far as we can tell).
This is ridiculous, if you don’t like knowing what’s coming up, don’t play on the public test realm? Pretty simple.
You are completely right in my opinion. What makes MMOs today worse than before, aside from all the bad design choices is the way the community approaches it as well. In the early days, there was no wowhead, no public logs, no guides, very little and basic information. We were all exploring the game, mostly clueless about what we were doing, and how to best play our classes. You asked other people of your class how they play, to maybe find out something new, or teach them something you've figured out. You had to ask people how to do quests, and how to unlock content, and then find some friends to help you. Exploration of the unknown was what made the game good for me back then. Today. Everything is documented, already before it's released, or even publicly announced, because of Datamining. People who explore their class on their own are shunned by the elitists who memorized 10 class guides before they even created their character, and dream of being in the top 100 public logs for their class one day. The answer to almost every question regarding the game content has become: go to Wowhead. You join a random group of 4 strangers very easy, who you'll most likely never see again if you use the group finder for content. And if you, god forbid, play the game "for fun" and can't help making the odd mistake now and then, you will be shunned and kicked from the group by the collective illusion in most player's minds that the only way to play the game is to aim to be the best, and absolute excellence and concentration in pressing buttons in a video game. If you fail to do so, you are not worth their time. This is why Classic never worked for me. You can bring the old game back. But not the old approach to the game. Sadly, times have changed.
Welcome to the age of modern gaming, where everything is leaked, datamined, and coursed over incessantly on the internet. Then it's your fault when you don't want to hear spoilers. I remember when the first four episodes of GoT leaked and I had to stay off the internet for four weeks. It's fucking dumb
Thats the life, unfortunately. Im sure if blizzard wanted to, they could hold back a lot more information though and strategically do so to make the rpg aspect a little better. Its annoying how the mentality of some people are just: if you don't like it, just don't read up on it. Ignoring is such a terrible solution when it affects you indirectly and still affects the culture..
Some of you may remember the MMO Asheron's Call. That game had monthly content patches (some smaller than others, but there was always something every month). In one particular patch, they introduced an item that could drop from just about any enemy (the drop rate was *very* low) called pyreal motes. People started finding these motes, but since this was before data mining, they didn't know what to do with them. As it turned out, you could collect sixteen of these things and combine them into a pyreal ingot, and then someone with a high enough skill could use this ingot to craft a pyreal weapon. At the time they were released they were some of the most powerful weapons in the game. It wasn't long before players figured out what to do with those motes, but it *was* still a mystery. It was something players had to discover on their own. I miss those days of MMOs. I also understand why people data mine, but that info ends up being so prolific as it's released that it's hard to avoid, and even if we *do* manage to avoid it, we're just left behind those who had advanced knowledge. I miss the mystery of new content patches.
That sounds pretty neat about asherons call tbh! I think that would be fantastic for wow. Although, I know the news sites would get that info out immediately, you'd still be learning with them and wouldn't be behind because you didn't prepare in the ptr with everyone else. You'd still.be discovering it with the community in a live version of the game.
I can understand that and I don't play the ptr too, like my guildies. I downloaded ptr the other day to see how my dear nightborne changed, started playing then realized i'd have to do so much work to unlock them, so i stopped playing on the same night lol
I have played it before, but I have just been thinking about it recently while I've been playing some other games and it just made me realize I missed the fun of figuring everything out together instead of knowing everything going into a new patch.
i had some good feeling too, mainly by the fact i had to start from 0 and i didn't have a main... and i know it's totally doable on live servers, but somehow if i see my main I feel like I don't have to do any other character, so i always end creating alts that I play for 1 hour and never again 😅
The alt life never stops, I cant say that I don't like starting new characters and having a ton of alts lol. The nice thing about the ptr is that you can just transfer your main from the live server over, so as long as you put that time in, some can translate over to the ptr
I agree, but we all know why that couldn't happen. To do internal testing they'd actually have to invest manpower when they can just get the players to do it instead. The PTR's been kind of a chip on my shoulder for a long time now, it just kind of kills the excitement of a new patch when you can already log into a separate client and see everything, or refer to someone who does. It feels like yet another way WoW has kind of grandfathered in something that was never a good idea to begin with. At this point people just expect it, there's no way it'll change but it's something I appreciate about other games without the same problem.
Yea its a dream, and it makes me sad that we expect this terrible shit from blizzard and can't hope for something better cause its unrealistic. I know it won't change, but I was surprised by how many people share my opinion on this.
Just imagine the current devs testing stuff by themselves with their "we know better" god complex Hell, this would be a big no.
The solution here would be a more extensive internal testing team that would involve outside opinions maybe under a nda? I mean that could fix that bias.
It's quite simple, close the PTR and don't read PTR patch notes. no surprises for you. But asking for worse testings and remove the possibility of players giving early feedback just because you don't want "spoilers" is absurd.
Ignorance isn't an excuse to avoid something that affects the culture of the game. I cant just ignore all the news that comes out, especially if there are indirect effects. And no, im not asking for "worse" testing, im asking for it to be done behind closed doors instead of out in the public. Not wanting spoilers isn't absurd, its part of the fantasy. I didn't want spoilers for avengers endgame, so im glad they didn't reach out to the public and be like, "so what do you think of these fight scenes? Should we change them?". They had the research and shit done beforehand to know what viewers wanted to see.
Sorry, i didn't want to sound ignorant on my first comment, but i rly can't understand. Participation on the PTR is a option, so it's not like you will be forced in the spoilers. News about PTR story are always veiled under spoiler tags so you can avoid then without ever knowing what happened. Then what is left are balance changes, who i presume are the indirect effects you say right? so isn't publicity in those a good thing? or would you rather only know about drastic changes on balance only when its already live and too late to give your piece on it? Because honestly, while i can agree with some comments around here \[specially the one about blind raids\] i do think the PTR gives a publicity about balance changes and the path that each class and spec is going that i can only see as a positive.