PvP from a casual new player (very long)

[Stormfur]

I have always thought that we needed a Hall of the Novice-style place for PVP matches.

[Sunako]

It would be nice if wolf marks would have any use. Even 6 materia or infusion potions would be enough for me.

[Nedkel]

Tomestones are already a big reward for pvping, i found it easier to pvp to get them than doing dungeons or trials.

[Geryth]

Sorry for being late to the party here. This is a nice, well thought out post. Thanks for the time you spent putting your thoughts together. Here's my take on these points:

The game does not attract the "PvP Crowd"
I'll be blunt - the starting experience of the game actively turns away most PvPers, with almost all of them quitting before level 10. The most cited reason is, to put it gently, "slow combat", with "boring art design" coming in second. The former stems mostly from a very long Global Cooldown (GCD), long cast times and being unable to move while casting; the latter comes from the general art direction of the game as being on the extreme side of "family friendly" and "safe", with little sex appeal or "coolness" in character, armor, weapon and animations design.

I agree and disagree with points here. The PvP in this game is not well polished and is very lacking from a pure PvP view-point. So yes, players who have a pure focus on PvP are probably going to be very disappointed in FFXIV. 95% of the content - especially good and fulfilling content - is in PvE. SE just isn't putting enough resources into PvP. Though I disagree about the art direction. I think there's plenty of sex appeal if that's what you're after, and I think there's a lot of well designed armor for "cool" factor of various classes. I'm well pleased with the aesthetics of this game, and I actually find the art style to be more mature then WoW.

Starting PvP is overwhelming
Any new player (especially the type that stays with FFXIV as noted above) that manages to reach the Wolve's Den is confronted with an entirely new set of abilities, all given out at once. The interface simply lines the abilities on the main bar with no concern for where they should be and overwhelming the player with "having to set up the entire UI all over again". This is a very archaic way of doing it, it might've been acceptable during Ultima or Everquest times perhaps. Feast Quartermasters don't show off the gear without getting a rating, so less motivation for players.

I absolutely agree with this. SE, in attempt to make getting into PvP easier, made it much more annoying to get into with having a completely different set of abilities and requiring that players have to redo an entirely new UI just for PvP. If SE wanted to be serious about PvP they would put in the time and resources to add abilities in the game with design balanced for both PvE and PvP. Right now they just design for PvE and delegate a very small team to balance for PvP - a feat that they could only accomplish by removing most of the abilities in the game so they only have to balance around a handful of abilities. They just don't want to put in the work required to make PvP challenging and balanced, and the incentives to make it easier for new players (much fewer buttons to press) also works to send them away (having to redo setup for those special PvP buttons). It's a mess.

And also - yes, the feast quartermasters should show what they have to offer. Seeing what kind of shiny's you can get is a good incentive for players.

Nothing matters in PvP
The biggest reason why players don't stick with it is because the entire experience is completely disconnected from the rest of the game. While there is a case to be made for glamours (but then the glamour system is badly designed to begin with) there is nothing to take in or out of the PvP sphere. Nothing a player does in PvP affects anything else in the game and this insularity offers no incentive to participate.

We have a few good threads here recently where players here like the idea of PvP world zone where what happens in PvP can matter for more than an instanced 12 minute game. Otherwise I don't see this as a big issue. I loved PvP in WoW and outside of world PvP, I found plenty of enjoyment in battlegrounds and a little bit of arena of which the outcome also had no effect outside of those instances.

Skillgap is too wide
The difference in skill between a regular PvPer and a newcomer is too wide, leading to new players feeling frustrated from "losing all the time". New players are unable to tell what is happening, leading to regular surprise deaths or feeling like the enemy is undefeatable. Matches drag on with little variance followed by sudden defeats. This comes from and leads to new players being unable to understand and analyze each encounter, unable to learn from it, leading to frustration and demotivates them from trying again. This demotivation leads to an easy quit because there's no motivation (reward) to balance it.

It's not the skill gap that's too wide. It's map knowledge and the complexity of what's going on. SE really dumbed down the "skill" of PvP to very few buttons so the skill ceiling and the skill floor are actually quite close, almost to its detriment (there are a few players who hate this and are very vocal about it but I think its almost necessary given that they split PvP abilities completely off from PvE abilities). Even Shatter, the most commonly played PvP map, is at first not intuitive and the knowledge of what wins you games doesn't come strong until you've had quite a lot of hours put into the mode. If I wanted to write a guide on Shatter, it would very long, having to explain ice spawn patterns, points earned from controlling a base vs. points earned from killing players vs. points lost from dying vs. battle high/fever changing those things vs. proper positioning and when to press forward vs. getting sandwiched and demolished...it's a lot. Hell and I still don't know all that goes on in Rival Wings. And in Feast - there's nothing that teaches you in game about the medal system or how hard it is to out damage a good healer. A new player in the feast is just hacking and slashing at a brick wall for 8 minutes and then doesn't understand how their team lost when they managed to get more kills because they picked up all the medals and increased damage taken by a lot. And now there's that dumb light medal damage reduction status...

Map knowledge is gained by experience and lot of players might not have the patience to gain that experience, and duck out of PvP when they don't know what the hell is going on and how games are being won and lost. I think Frontlines is a failure because they are way too big of maps with too many rules and an element of RNG that makes too big of a difference. Tone down the size and scope of these maps and simplify the rule sets and give us standard CTF / King of the Hill etc. and then PvP can be a lot easier understood by new players.

Your analysis here is spot on, but slightly misdiagnosed skill gap with map knowledge.

Can we address all of these? Not without fundamental changes to the spirit and gameplay. PvP will stay irrelevant until a major rework of the combat and reward systems is done. While i'm sadly not a game dev i can still provide possible solutions from personal experience of what works and doesn't.

I think for PvP to be successful, they do need to address these issues. A major rework does need to be done, in my opinion. I think this is what FFXIV PvP needs:

1. A full, dedicated team delegated to focus on PvP
2. Actual direct communication between development and the community, with a reasonable frequency
3. Remove PvP abilities and reintegrate PvE abilities into PvP and rebalance them for both. I can't tell you how many times I've used an ability in PvP thinking it did some of the same things in PvE (like healing on Storm's Path) or vice versa (like a +damage debuff applied by butcher's block). This should also fix the healing problem.
4. Tone down the size and rule sets in our PvP maps and make in depth map knowledge available in game somewhere.
5. More rewards other than titles and glams to give wolf marks more meaning.
6. More swift action against bots.

Remove the barrier of having to reset your UI just for PvP. Make maps easier to learn. Increase rewards. Remove bots. Talk with us so we can have discourse about these ideas and why you think I might be wrong about my proposals. I think these things will increase PvP participation.

[Stormfur]

I think the "talk with us" is perhaps the most important thing here. Kaposhipi kindly informs us from time to time that they're collecting feedback to pass on to the dev team -- which is great, don't get me wrong.

But we'd kind of like to know what's getting shared and what the dev team has to say in return. I know it can be hard to nail down and everything is in a state of flux as to whether it will or won't be implemented, but a little back-and-forth discussion would be absolutely refreshing.

[Geryth]

I think the "talk with us" is perhaps the most important thing here. Kaposhipi kindly informs us from time to time that they're collecting feedback to pass on to the dev team -- which is great, don't get me wrong.

But we'd kind of like to know what's getting shared and what the dev team has to say in return. I know it can be hard to nail down and everything is in a state of flux as to whether it will or won't be implemented, but a little back-and-forth discussion would be absolutely refreshing.

Other games have taken an strong dev to community communication approach, and it's really working for those games. The first I noticed of this was Riot Games with League of Legends having great back and forth between the community and the developers. That's obviously turned out really well for them. Blizzard took note and has done the same with both Hearthstone and Overwatch. Those games also have benefited very positively with that approach as well. I think SE follow suit, especially for PvP which is really not in a healthy state.

[Vinnush]

Quasi-"skilled players" in pvp just play bard.

[Theodric]

Other games have taken an strong dev to community communication approach, and it's really working for those games. The first I noticed of this was Riot Games with League of Legends having great back and forth between the community and the developers. That's obviously turned out really well for them. Blizzard took note and has done the same with both Hearthstone and Overwatch. Those games also have benefited very positively with that approach as well. I think SE follow suit, especially for PvP which is really not in a healthy state.

Ideally, the Live Letters should be used as an opportunity to engage the player-base more, especially the NA and EU communities. It actually seemed like they were a lot more open in the past, yet nowadays a chunk of time is devoted purely to advertising FFXIV related merchandise whilst major concerns within the community go without mention.

[Notcs]

I think pvp needs a unique skill design like wow in the classes, something like dk's death grip, the freezing of the wizard, the ability to copy a dk's enemy ability, and the druid's transformations (all this from the world of warcraft as an example), and so on, class fancy is not only visual, it is also physical, and not to mention the skills that should be very fast, the cast system does not work and stun too, I will always take 100% damage from a mage for example.

[Wintersandman]

I think pvp needs a unique skill design like wow in the classes.

We had this. Each job had unique abilities while maintaining some of their core PvE abilities.