The Feast - Impossible Queues, Opaque Design

I wrote this in the "Leave a Suggestion" area of the in-game Support Desk. This is my first forum post, since I want to know what other people's opinion on all this is. The post is apparently too long for one post, so I'll divide the rest into comments.

I really want to get into The Feast since I love the PvP, but it's a constant uphill battle to play PvP. The problems are that pvp is not designed in a beginner-friendly manner, the queues are impossible to deal with, and there are almost no rewards or content for doing PvP. I'll explain each of those now.

Beginner-Friendly
The problem here is that if you queue up for PvP, the first thing you realize is that none of your skills work. You need to open up a new menu you have never seen before and assign your skills to a bar, and figure out what you are doing before other players kill you. It would be a huge improvement if players that enter pvp for the first time already have a pvp hotbar set up for them. I've known several people that told me when they tried PvP for the first time, none of their abilities worked, they were confused, and quit, never to return, until I tried to convince them to give PvP another shot. The next issue is that classes in PvP play totally differently from their normal classes. This means almost nothing people have learned or practiced about the base game carries over to PvP. Dying is very easy in PvP, especially when most beginners start with 72-man battles where getting too close to the enemy means you get targetted by 20 attacks and die instantly. There's no feedback for what killed you or how to do better, and getting beat up by a large army makes it feel unfair instead of something you can improve upon. Objectives are fun, once you understand them, but beginners have no idea what all the triangles on the map mean. PvP is very fast-paced and a lot of the challenge early on can come from successfully targetting the right enemy player. Tab to target will often choose a player way out of range, and clicking to target is inconsistent (an issue in the entire game, but highlighted in PvP). Designing classes around their PvE counterparts so that skill can carry over is very difficult, but people tent to prefer the unbalanced WoW PvP that has that system over the completely divorced, yet balanced, system FF14 has. The tradeoff for balance isn't worth turning off so many new players. I think the option should be given to enter PvP with normal abilities (damage reduced overall so you don't die instantly) and let gear be effective, too. I suspect even though this mode will be less balanced, it would be much more popular among beginners.

Queues are Impossible
Writing this, I am 124 minutes into a queue for The Feast (Ranked Match). [Now 141 minutes as of writing this forum post] From what I've heard from other people who play the Feast, low ranks do not get queued with high ranked people. People who are high ranked are people who play Feast a lot, so that means people who never play Feast get queued against people who never play Feast. This means low-ranked queues never pop, and the only way to play against everyone else who is enjoying the feast is to reach a high rank early on in the season. I unfortunately missed the beginning of this season, so I probably wont be able to play Feast for another half-year. This feels like I'm soft-banned from PvP, and banning people from playing PvP will only make the queue issue worse. Beginners percieve PvP as being completely dead or "no one plays that" because it's impossible for them to enter pvp unless a new season just started.

No Content
There are no quests, storylines, or content designed for PvP outside of some glamour items or end-of-season mounts. If you play a single game of each PvP map, you have enjoyed all the content PvP has to offer. It would add a lot if you had abilities you could unlock through PvP, such as the Lost Actions of the Bozjan Southern Front. Ways to modify your stats (without increasing the overall strength level) would be good too, since it motivates people to analyze their own performance and decide what would benefit them more, and set a goal to unlock those modifications. A Feast roulette would make a world of difference, but roulettes alone aren't enough. The only reason people do PvP roulettes is for exp and glam, which aren't used for PvP, it's so people can level a job for PvE and look good in cities. I don't know what sort of quests or storylines should be designed for PvP, but more content to play through would help keep people invested in improving and winning.

The last thing I want to mention is that I wish duels could be done anywhere, so I don't need to drag people to the Wolves Den to kick their ass. Seeing other people PvP might convince new people that PvP isn't dead / looks fun as well. Quickest fix is still creating a feast roulette that rewards exp / tomestones.

I hope that PvP can flourish one day.

Do not worry! Feast is getting removed and replaced soon according to Yoshi :)

Wait what?

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Originally Posted by Nanne

Do not worry! Feast is getting removed and replaced soon according to Yoshi :)

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Do you have a link / source for this?

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Originally Posted by EleinaStrongarm

Do you have a link / source for this?

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Check out the PvP forums. Someone just made a post about the interview :p

Yeah, possibility Feast will be removed.

Also, PvP has been gutted since 4.x and although I like some of the change, I disliked the fact that it lacked depth. However, things can be changed to add more depth to the game.

Currently, Feast is an arena style game. You have a few walls to los players, Wolf's Heart, and Adrenaline Boxes... couple this is baiting mitigating abilities and coordinating bursts... meh...

I'm hoping whatever the devs have in mind would be a better overall game. If we can't have the same actions and abilities that we do in PvE, can we at least have more depth with the few buttons at our disposal? I guess we'll wait and see. Anyway, back to baiting out crap and then bursting people to death. I mean... same ol' - same ol' arena PvP. O.o *Good thing I don't play ranked solo queue. XD That's just suffering and torture.

Feast went from being somewhat good in Stormblood to pure trash in Shadowbringer sadly, i still enjoy the mode but the player base i just to small for it on EU at least.

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Originally Posted by EleinaStrongarm

The post is apparently too long for one post, so I'll divide the rest into comments.

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Just FYI, you can make a post, fill it to the text character post limit, post it, and then go back and edit it to be able to add more text past the character limit.