Insufficient game moderation and competitive PvP in The Feast

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Originally Posted by Marxam

A lot of this can easily be solved by putting past feast rewards in the vendor and making them purchasable via wolf marks. Sure these win traders are going to get it first but in a year or two so is the rest of the playerbase. Personally I stopped caring about PvP in general after I got the entire field commander set back in 3.0 but if those feast rewards are in the vendor I will try for them. Just a shame to see that most people who pvp legitimately are usually bumped in with these win-traders. Lets see if they will fix in EW but like I said, A LOT of this can be fixed by just putting the rewards in the vendors. It's literally why 99% of the people even pvp in the first place.

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I'm fine with wolf marks IF it's used to buy another intermediary currency AND IF it's ridiculous.

For example, there are already some things you buy with Hunt Mark Logs which are purchased with Hunt Seals. These aren't actually that expensive... iirc it's 500 seals for one log, and the most expensive items cost 6 logs... so 3000 seals. Which isn't an issue persay anymore since the cap on Hunt Seals was increased, but when the logs were introduced the cap was still 2000, so the intermediary currency was a way to make things cost an amount of seals over the cap that players could hold.

Thus, if players were able to purchase mounts from previous feast seasons with wolf marks... I think the starting cost should be 1 million wolf marks, with perhaps "cooler" more desirable mounts costing more. And the intermediary currency should be purchasable withe the cap of 20,000k wolf marks (which indeed means players are often going to be going over cap to reach cap). So 50 of the intermediary currency as a starting point for mounts, "cooler" mounts cost even more.

I've long since run out of things to buy with wolf marks. Whenever I hit the cap I just buy and sell glamour prisms but they're not exactly selling for a premium. I think at least one new reward should be added to the wolf mark vendor per patch in an effort to help keep PvP relevant.

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Originally Posted by Larirawiel

PvP wintrading is common in MMORPGs when the loser does not really lose something. FF14 is no exception here. It is a conceptional problem of the game and i doubt that SQEX will fix it.
Cheers

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Yes this is true, Cheating in FFXIV Feast was never much of an issue when our ranking system was more punishing on losses, However it was changed to record highest ranking instead of Current ranking at some point through it's life cycle and now all legit players are suffering for it.
https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...Ranking-System

The change was intended for new players to be able to rank up without worry of losing points but the opposite effect started to happen around Season 16. People found out you could just abuse the Match Making System(MM) and Ranking System by throwing all your points at another target with zero penalty. I've seen many new players try feast for the first time on my Data Center only to find out it's riddled with cheating and either not feast again or move to Aether.

It's only a handful of people doing it as well and localized mainly on the Primal Data Center(Although I have heard of rumors of cheating on other Data Centers as well). For example the current rank 1 is a booster that cheats abusing a horrible MM glitch that ensures they are always matched with alts or friends helping them cheat.

Players have made multiple Tweets, reported many times, and cried out for help but they always come back, it even got to the point in old seasons were legit pvpers started to get stalked in game by cheaters if they tried to get help.

Below are a few tweets and even a video on the issue.

https://twitter.com/brianricardos/st...76180145344513
A Tweet made in Season 18 regarding the issue. Similar to our current season, cheaters in Season 18 controlled the board with multiple alts and even deployed bots that allowed them to teleport across the screen to kill the enemy teams before the games even started. You would que up into a match only to find out the whole enemy team and everyone on your team were wintrading and this would happen multiple games in a row.

https://twitter.com/brianricardos/st...71130347573248
Current Season. Most legit players who played at the start of the Season have either moved to Aether or stopped pvping completely due to the cheating going on this season. If you try to que up you are greeted again with most of your teammates alts.

https://youtu.be/nNdH-Ajdfyo?t=323

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Originally Posted by Theodric

I've long since run out of things to buy with wolf marks. Whenever I hit the cap I just buy and sell glamour prisms but they're not exactly selling for a premium. I think at least one new reward should be added to the wolf mark vendor per patch in an effort to help keep PvP relevant.

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Company seals would be nice.

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Originally Posted by Vejjiegirl

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Godsdamn, this is disgusting what these cheaters are doing. And I thought the speedhacks in season 1 was bad.

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Originally Posted by Rowde

I'm fine with wolf marks IF it's used to buy another intermediary currency AND IF it's ridiculous.

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Just do like what they did with Rowena Tokens. ex. 20k wolf marks for one token/certificate. Helm/arms/feet costs 3 tokens and body/legs costs 5. My idea is just to reduce the incentive to cheat in the first place, which is to get that armor/weapons. That would just leave people who are epeen stokers, mount collectors, or both who will try for the ranking.

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Originally Posted by Marxam

Just do like what they did with Rowena Tokens. ex. 20k wolf marks for one token/certificate. Helm/arms/feet costs 3 tokens and body/legs costs 5. My idea is just to reduce the incentive to cheat in the first place, which is to get that armor/weapons. That would just leave people who are epeen stokers, mount collectors, or both who will try for the ranking.

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I concur, I just don't think the alternative should be easier than placing top 100. Simply removing the exclusivity takes away some of the prestige, which removes one of the reasons why ppl cheat since SE can't seem to be bothered with proper moderation for these activities.

I just used a million wolf marks as an arbitrary baseline, seems like a lot to me. Like if you saw someone with the mount and thought "That person either placed top 100 or grinded a ton of Frontlines" you'd think they're both equally nutters.

I'd assume SE has some data points they gather, so they'd probably be able to balance it better in terms of average time players spend to reach top 100 vs average time players spend to reach x amount of wolf marks.

Having nothing to add. Just supporting the cause. I hope ya'll find a resolution to your problem.

We've given the dev team a dozen ways to solve the issues over the years that would create a fair and equitable PVP environment without the need for cheats/hacks/boosts but for the longest time they just buried their heads in the sand and kept trying to push FFXIV PVP as a MOBA/e-sport.

The ones whining the loudest about "muh rewurds" are probably the very ones selling the boosts and releasing them to more players means their cash cow got sent to pasture. Oh noes.

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Originally Posted by Theodric

I've long since run out of things to buy with wolf marks. Whenever I hit the cap I just buy and sell glamour prisms but they're not exactly selling for a premium. I think at least one new reward should be added to the wolf mark vendor per patch in an effort to help keep PvP relevant.

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If the team is over worked a solution could be PvP could share golden saucer reward or nut rewards or one tier down tomestone rewards. It isn't a great solution and makes PvP kind of a second tier vendor. But if they don't have the man hours they could come up with other solutions. Has this been the worse expansion yet for pvp rewards?

I've tried a dozen times to get into the fest pvp just to have this very thing discourage me away. It would ok if you could actually block people and never see them again, but the blacklist only prevents them from communicating with you... you can still match again with them. Sadly i feel like SE just ignores pvp or tosses it the scraps left over from unused pve resources/hours. They honestly should just bring in a pvp dev team and if there is one, they should all go. I wish there were ranked teams seasons. What is with the solo only crap anyway? Bandaid for anything they want to ignore. I dont have much fun queueing with randoms. Let's be honest the game is pve focused, but do people just queue for savage? party finder normally, no? So they can't use that as an excuse. Easier to find 4 than 8.

Yeah... weird things happen in PvP.

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Originally Posted by Magus4

It would ok if you could actually block people and never see them again, but the blacklist only prevents them from communicating with you... you can still match again with them. I wish there were ranked teams seasons. What is with the solo only crap anyway? .

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The Feast community is way too small and even if there were more players if blacklisting would make them never matched with you people would only abuse that to gain much much easier time with matchmaking. Late into the season you could probably blacklist 99% of the high rated players to ensure that you are always matched with same few people. Also every team season even the Fanfest tournament team season had cheating/win trading so those seasons have been pretty much completely removed.

Yeah for some unknown reason matchmaking just completely throws your blacklist out the window in PVP. Like Nanne says, you could rig the system to only match you with who you wanted by blacklisting everyone so I can understand why they did it. But at the same time, when you're matched with someone on your blacklist, you can consider that a loss right from the start.

I think with just 4 players, it's too easy to pick out one or two and be hostile until they quit. I hope the new Feast or whatever replaces it is at least 8 v 8 like old Feast was.

They just need to either moderate it more heavily (seriously it's a joke), or just outright remove it, but most people that are in the top 100s all do this stuff but it's been a thing since HW with people doing the same type of behavior and hacking, this is all behind closed doors with false promises that the team that handles this has permanent solutions for these problems.

At least these videos and this forum post will shed some light and continue to promote PvP because it's sad that it's, for 1, not popular, and 2 easily exploitable so hopefully this gets some traction.

I doubt they'll do anything that requires more moderation on their part. When something needs too much "people power" to monitor it, it becomes more and more of a drag on resources as new servers are added and the population grows. Ideally what they'd do is make the mode as failsafe as possible, making moderation unnecessary. Personally I think they're walking back some of this "one-time only" exclusivity nonsense (because that's what it is) by bringing back old events and items, like that Dragon Quest X event. It wouldn't surprise me if they eventually bring back the Shantoto one (I forget the name) and whatever else we had in the early days.

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Originally Posted by Stormfur

I doubt they'll do anything that requires more moderation on their part. When something needs too much "people power" to monitor it, it becomes more and more of a drag on resources as new servers are added and the population grows. Ideally what they'd do is make the mode as failsafe as possible, making moderation unnecessary. Personally I think they're walking back some of this "one-time only" exclusivity nonsense (because that's what it is) by bringing back old events and items, like that Dragon Quest X event. It wouldn't surprise me if they eventually bring back the Shantoto one (I forget the name) and whatever else we had in the early days.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXky...index=1&t=491s

just started dipping in to media tour content, but this question about PF and stood out to me.
while the question was about a different topic, the answer could also be related to PvP issues... and maybe later i'll find a video where a PvPcentric players gets a similar answer.

Basically, they haven't done anything about PF yet because the feel the language in the EULA is too broad. Thus they're going to be updating the EULA soon with more defined language that they hope will close some loopholes and allow them to take action against abuses.

Again... haven't seen anything directly mentioning PvP yet, but if they're updating the EULA with more specific language already... that would be a good time to highlight actionable abuses for PvP as well.

transcript of the interview

I saw that too! Hopefully they can get their EULA beefed up so they have a legal platform to stand on and then actually go after the rotten apples that keep plaguing PVP/the party finder/novice network.

Update since the live letter:

Seems that PVP is getting an overhaul in terms of rewards, so that's good.

I think it's a shame that the Feast will be going away, but if the reason being is to try and get more engagement with PvP I can see that being a good reason. Rival Wings is already a great mode that doesn't see enough play because of the large player requirement and because it's not tied to any other things in game, contrasted with Frontlines which pop all the time because of at least the roulette.

My hope is that if there is some kind of exclusive rewards or ratings or rankings or what have you that they will have the moderation in place to prevent this kind of abuse in the future, because again, it was insufficient in the feast.

Take a look at the current primal rankings https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...dcgroup=Primal and you'll see at least 6 of the top 10 are blatant win traders and abusers that actively lose matches to keep certain players down and out and increase their own rankings. You can recognize some of their names from the link in my first post, and my understanding is that a few of these are alts of the top player.

While I don't have concrete evidence of this, I just go on the word of many others in the community because it's all we're able to do without more stringent moderation and game master support.

Hopefully the new 'battle pass' system will disincentivize these players from these obstructive tactics and increase participation in pvp overall, but I'm still not satisfied that they get to walk away with the top rewards. Anyone that takes a glance at that page or their titles/rewards might wrongly get the idea that they're good at the game and deserved them.

Should just axe ranked instead splitting players into 2 separate queues :p No matter if the leaderboard is for PvP or crafting there always is too much cheating and too little moderation from SE.

I think leaderboard rankings are just for show now (like they are with GC standings, POTD, and EVERY OTHER THING as it should be) but being there doesn't give exclusive rewards (maybe it gives a title, which would be good enough, kinda like The Necromancer is for POTD).