Square - Need to add more incentive PvP. - Make PvP great again!
Everyone knows that since the release of patch 3.3 with the introduction of Shatter that PvP participation for both Front lines and the Feast has pretty much gone down the drain.
Queue times are now horrid across many data centers for both, and there is a general lack of interest for the modes outside of the PvP community.
To rectify this, Square has tried to liven PvP up with their Culling Time events, which for the most part, have been unsuccessful. They've live streamed themselves trying to play PvP on both the Feast and Shatter, only to sit in queue for 45 minutes and embarrass themselves as they fail to even play the game. How can it not be obvious that something is very clearly wrong when the community reps are boredly sitting in a queue during their own live stream and unable to play the game?
You need to change the direction of several things for both large and small scale PvP if you hope to revive it. This is a PvE game, and for some reason you think by introducing tiny rewards to PvP people will play it. It doesn't make any sense.
Frontlines:
Add more rewards. What do people currently get from Shatter? A re-dyed version of the ADS mount that plenty people already have? Oh, and maybe a title. With Seize, you introduced new PvP-rank exclusive gear, new titles and achievements, and a sick new gear outfit that wasn't impossible to obtain. In a game that is sharply PvE focused, a single mount that takes roughly ~300 games to obtain is not enough incentive for people to PvP, especially if they hate the mode. Which brings me to...
Liven up the old modes. Let's be honest. People fucking hate Shatter, and for good reason. It's a Frontline "PvP" mode that almost seems to punish you more for PvPing and less for PvEing. You didn't learn from your mistakes with Slaughter. People don't want to chase drones/crystals down for points, they want to fight each other. You have three (I'd argue two) perfectly good modes that people arguably liked far more than Shatter, and for some reason, you keep them in the dust rather than adding anything new to them. Create a roulette, shove all the modes in there, and have people play them at random. This way people can enjoy the old modes as well as the new ones. Yay.
Remove GC restrictions. I don't need to explain this one. Even if you're just sticking people on a GC that they don't belong to, people don't care at this point.
For the Feast:
Same as above: slightly more rewards. Keep the top-tier rewards for the top-tier players, but offer something for people mid-core and up, so this way new PvPers actually feel like they're getting something if they PvP. Otherwise they just get a miserable waiting experience and no rewards at the end of a season. It's silly.
Give more stuff to healers to incentivize them to queue. Only a masochist would queue as a healer for Feast (I'm one of them!) You get absolutely fuck all for doing it, and it's (arguably) the worst experience out of all them. Feast is often lacking healers which massacres the queues.
Other possible ideas.
Merge Aether and Primal. This one is hilariously far-fetched, but it would certainly do much to liven the queues, although this comes with numerous downsides.
Make PvP rank and Wolf Marks more useful. PvP rank serves little purpose besides more AP (which IS helpful), and Wolf Marks is by far one of the most useless currencies in the game. After you get your PvP gear, your only options left are...music scrolls? Other worthless items? What normal person would want to PvP if the reward after a certain amount of time is just a pat on the back?
These are just some ideas, though, and they've been said numerous times before. I just wanted to reiterate them in one proper thread. Something, overall, needs to change with PvP, and making occasional "Culling Time" events isn't it.
Posting for: https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...n8&sh=6952f54f
