The biggest issue with 4.0 PVP

I've seen many players single 4.0 PVP's skill balances and oversimplification as a concern, though there have been many who have praised the very same things. While I agree that there's not much flavour left after the simplification of abilities, the real problem that it boils down to is that there is NO ENDGAME FOR PVP

In my opinion, the changes that outright slaughters the future for this niche are:

The removal of all chat features in The Feast (4v4 and 8v8)
The inability to queue with more than 1 person in The Feast (8v8)
The inability to queue with anyone in The Feast (4v4)

Aside from the blandness of skill and ability design I will not point out, this could still be remedied by interesting player-team coordination and strategies. Unfortunately, the changes above mean that:

• You cannot create interesting strategies with your team.
• You cannot PVP with friends.
• You cannot 'get better' at PVP (because the skill cap due to ability simplification is so low, the only way to get better would be to have better team coordination which is no longer possible)
• There is no reason for any DPS to queue for (4v4) because of the queue time.

Basically the only thing you can DO in the feast now is to throw bodies mindlessly at the enemy because you simply cannot communicate to your team if you want to do anything differently.

Even if you had a team you and were willing to cooperate (eg. discord) you can't even queue for them. Frontlines is the reason for playing this game mode, and any PVP veteran can tell you that the only strategy that actually works for that game mode is:

• Don't AFK
• Stick with the team
• COMMON SENSE

Somebody, bonus if it's the FFXIV team, needs to tell me what the appeal is of committing to a game mode with

• no skill progression, as the difference between a good and bad player at this mode are near negligable.
• no real reason to try and win
• no notable rewards that assist with PVP nor new glamors that are worth farming
• no strategy save to throw bodies at the other team
• no friends or teams
• no uniqueness between classes
• no high-level plays

and a 45m queue time only to queue up with a bunch of mute body bags that may or might not know what they're doing without the hope of improvement.

If you use edit, you can circumvent the initial post limitations.

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You cannot 'get better' at PVP (because the skill cap due to ability simplification is so low, the only way to get better would be to have better team coordination which is no longer possible)

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Debatable. The curve isn't what it used to be, but you'd be surprised how many people still have no situational awareness, know when to commit and when to just harass and fall back. All the little niche tricks with many pve abilities are no longer a thing, but other than the mechanics of PvP have remained predominantly the same.

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There is no reason for any DPS to queue for (4v4) because of the queue time.

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Nothing is stopping them from multiclassing and learning the healer or tank jobs. Healing is somewhat difficult in ffxiv because of the way the server ticks work, a fair amount of situational awareness and foresight is required. With that said, more healers will probably be queueing in S5 because there's less to learn, which is the goal of SE. Only the range DPS queue was truly awful on S4 on Chaos anyway.

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no skill progression, as the difference between a good and bad player at this mode are near negligable.

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Some of the 0/6/0 melees I've had in my games this week might leave me to disagree. The gap isn't as big as it was, but it's still pretty obvious.

Everything else is more or less correct.

a lack of game modes also kind of kills it.

i want to see diversity, all of the frontlines are basically the same in essence, get to location, defend/kill NPC object. fight players who approach. /done. Its bland and boring and the game modes are way too similiar. even the feast is just a common deathmatch. they need to bring in variety. frontlines has had enough, add capture the flag or base defense (not the half assed zone defense in glory where you read the tomeliths) but genuine bases on either side and you must assault and do some kind of objective.


also, adding only 2 teams allowed in a frontlines, instead of 3. 36vs 36 please.


my main issue with pvp isnt what you describe, tho they are valid. its just that its way too generic and gets boring fast

You can bypass the characters limit by editing your original post.

Anyway, what SE never understood is that (at least for NA/EU servers) the ratio of good and bad players will most likely never change no matter how much you dumb down pvp. What makes a difference is a player's motivation to perform well (and how badly the netcode affects you...). It's relatively easy now to figure out how to deal good damage, or how to press 2 healing spells, and still you see people underperforming. At least before this new PVP people sorta learned their jobs through PVE first and added PVP skills and mechanics to it. And PVP focused players would just learn how to be efficient in PVP even without touching PVE, because they were motivated and found it fun/interesting.
Now macthes in 4 vs 4 feel just too long because it's so boring and the fact that the better team ending up with too many medals will most likely get decimated at some points because of it.

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Originally Posted by Tsuole

The removal of all chat features in The Feast

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People keep complaining about that, I never felt like it was a big issue...Just mark what you want your teamates to attack and add a "Attacking that target" order to it. But for the love of god just allow one Hello! and Good job! per match.

I would agree with most of what you said though, and trust that (speaking for the Primal data center), a lot of the past seasons top players share the feeling that this new PVP is dumb.
Sadly the final say mostly goes to the Japanese players, and I don't know if the Japanese community is as disappointed with the new PVP as many of us are.

It's an issue Akimitsu (not being able to talk) because maybe I want us to hit the BRD until the SCH burns his lustrates, then hard swap onto him, or call cc for tank whilst bursting. Instead all I can do is "Attacking ranged!" "Attacking healer!".

I recall several instances last season of people misinterpreting my "attacking x" macros for "use absolutely everything". Having a ranked mode with virtually no communication to me is nonsense, but people somehow make it work.

Here are some basic thoughts that I can't voice using the normal commands avaliable used in 4v4 and 8v8.

Please somebody switch to a healer.
Healers take the defence boost item.
Healer take the Wolf's Heart boost item.
Tank, pull the healer down from the ledge.
Enemy Healer down. Charge!
Our Healer is down. Retreat!

The last two are covered by Everyone Attack & Fall back.

E: Further to how the skill gap is still blatant. Dealing damage in this game has never been easier, but apparently the same goes for feeding medals. Died twice over 2 games as SAM with 13 KBs overall, never played it before. Knowing what healers in 8s are like, especially when they have to solo = focused on hitting melee line/overextenders only and moving in and out of los - dumping tp - kill - run. Pulled back anytime i was on 6-7k hp whilst being focused, didn't push up without Safeguard and w.e that jump is.

I do things like this and wonder how people die so much and so easily, the gap is still there lol (and I'm not even good)

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Originally Posted by Akimitsu

People keep complaining about that, I never felt like it was a big issue...Just mark what you want your teamates to attack and add a "Attacking that target" order to it. But for the love of god just allow one Hello! and Good job! per match.

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Imo, it started being a major issue the moment you cannot tell all new players that came with the garo event that medals aren't candies and must not be stacked, and other basic rules of pvp like LoS. That way we ended up with tanks that kept taking 10 stacks while being gold (aka get matched with plat/dia). But how would they know if nobody was able to explain those basic rules to them.

I think the biggest issue of 4.0 PVP can be easily summarized by a single statement: Square Enix is determined to make it appealing to a majority of players who are not interested in the mode for anything beyond superficial rewards. That's it. There's no greater agenda or hidden depth of meaning. The simplification, the no-chat, the increasing focus on PVE elements/objectives - these are all designed to cater to a group of people who will only continue to do PVP as long as it's their fastest avenue to glamours, mounts, and PVE exp.

I've kind of given up caring about bads, or casuals, or whatever you want to call them. I never flame, I don't care if people are new and struggling and seemingly dumber than a box of rocks. But I DO start to care when that starts creeping over into game design, and that's what's been happening to PVP in this game for about the past year and a half now.

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Originally Posted by loreleidiangelo

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I agree with you, but you can't change the appeal without it affecting the game design. You might not care for casuals (a demographic I more or less fall under) - but they do. We're the majority.

You may be the majority, and the majority of the game has largely til now had more attention and support, but why must that bleed over into something a small community of the game has enjoyed however imperfect it was til now? Especially when it was shunned and scorned and ignored otherwise?

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Originally Posted by BloodRubyXII

I agree with you, but you can't change the appeal without it affecting the game design. You might not care for casuals (a demographic I more or less fall under) - but they do. We're the majority.

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Perhaps my point got a little lost in my second paragraph. What I was trying to say wasn't that casuals are necessarily influencing PVP design, but that people who aren't interested in PVP beyond collecting their superficial PVE rewards are. It's the latter I take issue with, not the former. A PVP casual SHOULD be able to jump in with their full kit at level 30 and not worry about farming ranks or collecting Morale gear. But a casual PVPer would also look at their CC, their abilities, and their displacement moves and work on using them, because abilities like that are fundamental to solid PVP design. To be honest, XIV's combo system and certain job mechanics DIDN'T work well in PVP; I agree. But I can't help but feel like they're throwing the baby out with the bathwater by trying to condense gameplay down into the most monotonous of thought processes possible, just to try to win over a subset of people who aren't going to keep playing once they get all jobs to 70 and finishing collecting the glamour gear anyway.

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Originally Posted by ThirdChild_ZKI

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Because they don't want your community to be restricted to the hardcore/those who can be bothered to put the time into learning it. It's not sustainable. They want everyone to see all the content they put into this game.

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Originally Posted by loreleidiangelo

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And I understand and agree with you. I PvP at 70 because it's fun, I queued it at 60 for the titles and jewellery, but also it was fun. 8v8 brings zero joy to me long-term, there's no sense of progression to me playing anything other than a ranked mode and frankly, progress is fun. Whether you like it or not, PvP has had a really good reception to the changes, it's obvious whatever SE are aiming for is doing the job. Especially with "casuals" like me playing it, I probably care a bit more than most people you might be trying to stereotype under that demographic, but generally, they aren't going to have all their jobs at 70 anytime soon, and there's a lot of glamours lol (and almost all of them can't be worn without levelling). We'll see how things are a few months down the line, but as it stands, queues for unranked are popping, and therefore I feel that the changes (which by the way, I literally threw all my toys out the pram about; got 10-dayed, came back extremely salty - flamed Koltik and got 10-dayed again for it) whilst detrimental to the competitive nature of the game in my personal opinion (didn't they say they wanted it to be more competitive? Lol.) have delivered exactly what they were put in place to do, and that's make more people queue for PvP. Idk, maybe this entire paragraph is nonsense and trying to argue that complex PvP should never die for such a long time has worn me out.

There's also the fact of course, those who love this kind of PvP generally aren't the type to be involved with discussions like this or post in this section. The last time they did they got upvoted to the heavens for lauding the changes.


Sorry if there's a point you've made that I've missed again, I've been awake too long ok? :(