Thanks for this pvp mode, besides its flaws.

So, being a heavy pvper, I really dreaded this games pvp from the day it got introduced up until prior to this patch. It was BAD. And its activity reflected it.
Hell even ranked was only done by wintraders at the start of the season & then quit it.
Leaving ranked queue completly empty. Think i sat in hours once just to see if i could get in, nothing.

I expected SQE to drop pvp from the game. But instead they do a 180 & fixes it. Don't think i've spent this many hours in the game, let alone in pvp in ffxiv. Friends asking me wtf im doing still in ffxiv, as i used to only login for raid days. This has renewed my playtime & im having a BLAST. Loving every moment. Trying my Warrior, Rdm, sam, monk. It's so much fun.
Ye you rely on teammates & they can be absolute monkeys some times. But the pure gameplay is awesome. It's casual games anyway. And in ranked i've gotten to gold so far.

You've completly fixed the pvp & as a day one release of a revamped pvp system, you did great. Now we just need to iron out some balancing & make a few changes & voila.
Think it's been mentioned alot like buffing a few classes, toning some down, giving CC a diminishing return (personally i'd put something like 2 CCs then you're immune for 10sec).
I do really hope you bann the cheaters & heavily lock what addons are allowed to gather in info from the game. Me & my friend played ESO & there were some broken addons like telling you when a class hit from stealth. But they managed to block those by restricting the info it could get from the game. It would be a shame if Wolfs den went from more active than your pve, to dead. Not even joking bout that one, all pve queues are so slow right now. You're all addicted to this shiet :D .

Edit: I wanna add, please make casual have a duo + trio queue. It can be separate from solo. I REALLY want to play with my friends. ESO did the same thing. And it killed the pvp for me & my friends. As we could just solo queue without eachother & link how we performed to brag to eachother. We'd love to dunk heads together & pvp.

I hope to see more people rewarding FF14 PVP think tank team for this mode. Simply by being thankful!

Not everything has been thought out and they evidently do not have the QA Team they claim to have and that's fine. We can work one step at a time. Now FF14 Team knows diminishing returns for CC are a big deal in PvP :^)

This mode and the pacing of the new PvP has a lot of potential.

It'd be nice if I could choose what ability I use, and when. Having to cycle through multiple different skills, with different ranges and effects, on a single button (mch) feels awful. So does tying my only CC to air anchor.

CC as a concept is great (even if I dislike the 5 min format), but having my kit "simplified" and gutted didnt feel good at all. One thing I will say, is they did good in terms of MCH identity (sniper is cool), but lack of control over the kit kind of overshadows it for me. The balancing is a bit all over the place as well. Pvp felt more balanced before to me.

Theres for sure stuff that needs to be fixed & changed. But this is absolutely a step in the right direction.
Also pvp felt worse before, melee could oneshot anyone with their LBs in the feast. Atleast now it's not always guaranteed a kill.

And the general flow of the pvp was shit. I wouldn't touch pvp prior to this patch with a 10 foot pole & considering it's activity before, neither would anyone else. People did roulette for good xp while lvling, that was it, half the players afk'd.
Now it's putting a hold on pve queues because it's so active. They're absolutely doing something right.

I do hope they add diminishing returns on CC & check what makes certain classes to strong, pull them back a bit & push up the underperforming classes.
And people on this forum can cry & complain all they want, but they have no idea how good they have it. If you'd listen to this forum, you'd have to uninstall the game, because it's unplayable.
It's nowhere near as bad as people make it out to be. The pvp now is better than it ever has been in the history of ffxiv. And if they can revamp it & make it good, they can for sure improve on it. I think this amount of activity must awaken something in them to make it worthwhile to put effort into balancing.

Yeah, watch it die again after everyone got their rewards and Garo stuff.
(Purely luck based below Gold-)Ranked is still not worth it, the same bunch of wintraders and their alts is all there is.
When I've played Feast years ago it was the same as it is today.

My background: I come from the other side of the fence, where I've historically touched PVP just enough to get my rear end kicked up and down the street and decide I wasn't interested. For the most part, I consider myself the mid-upper end of casual. I'm capable of clearing savages given enough time, but I've more or less settled on beating current EX content as my content skill goal, playing 10-15 hours a week, generally speaking.

The new skill rework has been a godsend for me and really helped me appreciate PVP. I reluctantly filled in an empty slot in a community PVP event last Friday, as a machinist, expecting to have a pretty "meh" time and to be a liability to my team, but quite to the contrary, I had an absolute blast and was able to improve from match to match. I love the "easy to learn, hard to master" style they've gone with. I'm still regularly getting stomped for various reasons, be it poor decision making on my part, or just getting outplayed 1v1, but I also have enough good matches that it keeps me coming back again and again and again, and I see PVP as something that will remain in my rotation for the foreseeable future I think.