Series 2/Season 3 Rewards are kinda lackluster!

Hi everyone,

I haven't seen anyone make a post about this. But I have to say that the Series 2/Season 3 rewards are kinda lackluster.

Ranked portrait frames are the same just attached with a "III" to it. There is nothing new to buy for crystalline credit as far as I know. And the mount that we get as BP 25 reward just seems to be a recolor of a random mob from Sohm Al.

I think we should all advocate for better overall Pvp rewards in CC. I thought that CC will be one of the new big things for this expansion.

But I feel that people might abandon this mode in the future if there are no better rewards for playing.

Even the new portrait frames for PVE are better quality than most of the PVP stuff.

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Originally Posted by TimotheusReed

Hi everyone,

I haven't seen anyone make a post about this. But I have to say that the Series 2/Season 3 rewards are kinda lackluster.

Ranked portrait frames are the same just attached with a "III" to it. There is nothing new to buy for crystalline credit as far as I know. And the mount that we get as BP 25 reward just seems to be a recolor of a random mob from Sohm Al.

I think we should all advocate for better overall Pvp rewards in CC. I thought that CC will be one of the new big things for this expansion.

But I feel that people might abandon this mode in the future if there are no better rewards for playing.

Even the new portrait frames for PVE are better quality than most of the PVP stuff.

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Regarding Season 3 (and also 1 and 2) we even lost Wolf Collars as a unique reward and apparently Rank 1 doesn't even get a housing trophy anymore for their achievements.

Gotta keep the aggressive fomo-labelling hyper casuals happy by making sure good players get no more reward than them. /s

...we truly live in an alternate timeline.

I am personally againt FOMO rewards. i am glad that they are gone. So i am not advocating for FOMO rewards to return.

But I still think there should be more rewards for everyone to obtain. There seem to be no rewards for crystalline credit at all.
The Archfiend set was also cool. But I don't think current rewards really hold up.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by TimotheusReed

I am personally againt FOMO rewards. i am glad that they are gone. So i am not advocating for FOMO rewards to return.

But I still think there should be more rewards for everyone to obtain. There seem to be no rewards for crystalline credit at all.
The Archfiend set was also cool. But I don't think current rewards really hold up.

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Answer me this then - what is the point of Ranked then if there is no reward apart from carbon copies of mediocre portrait borders and a currency you can farm in Casual just fine?

As much as I understand the anti-FOMO crowd, I feel like the understanding is never mutual and our plea for casuals to get good stuff has been met, but we had to lose our own rewards for it - I hardly consider this fair.

I don't want this topic to derail into another ranked vs. casual thread.
I wanted to focus more on the overall rewards for EVERYONE and not create another topic where casuals and ranked players are put against each other.

I just feel like the overall reward structure for Pvp is not really rewarding for everyone right now.
I want casuals and ranked players to both get better rewards, but I am not advocating for only ranked players to get new stuff.

This is not the intention of this thread.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by TimotheusReed

I don't want this topic to derail into another ranked vs. casual thread.
I wanted to focus more on the overall rewards for EVERYONE and not create another topic where casuals and ranked players are put against each other.

I just feel like the overall reward structure for Pvp is not really rewarding for everyone right now.
I want casuals and ranked players to both get better rewards, but I am not advocating for only ranked players to get new stuff.

This is not the intention of this thread.

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And neither was it my intention to ONLY discuss ranked rewards. I will leave it at that.

They need to add previous mount/glam from Seasons back in and spend via Trophy Crystals.
Trophy Crystals currently just sitting there getting wasted. Add x100 Wolf Collar for previous top 100 mount/glam if needed, or even just the recolor version.

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Originally Posted by Dionysius

They need to add previous mount/glam from Seasons back in and spend via Trophy Crystals.
Trophy Crystals currently just sitting there getting wasted. Add x100 Wolf Collar for previous top 100 mount/glam if need, or even just the recolor version.

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Just to be on a tangent here - do you know what happened when they re-released the White Ravens earrings players earned back in 1.X from Nael, one of the hardest fights at the time? People were livid that their proof of achievement essentially went down the drain. To add insult to injury, they were farmable by doing the Rising Event for like 15 minutes.

So while 100 Wolf collars (iirc, 100,000 Trophy Crystals?) are certainly within the realm of "understandable" for the reward you are asking for, you are still going to meet a lot of sour faces that their proof of victory, their "trophy" is reobtainable, similar to how White Ravens became reobtainable.

I'm uncertain how I'd feel about someone being possibly able to obtain my Shadowcrawler Armour while losing every single Casual match.

That said, better Trophy Crystal rewards? Yes absolutely needed.

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Originally Posted by Reinhardt_Azureheim

Regarding Season 3 (and also 1 and 2) we even lost Wolf Collars as a unique reward and apparently Rank 1 doesn't even get a housing trophy anymore for their achievements.

Gotta keep the aggressive fomo-labelling hyper casuals happy by making sure good players get no more reward than them. /s

...we truly live in an alternate timeline.

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Look at LoL for example. Going beyond gold rank doesn't net you any tangible "rewards" other than rank borders. Since you wanna delve into a casual-vs-hardcore thing here, getting a high rank should be motivation enough. To prove you're better at pressing the buttons and having better ping than others lmao

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Originally Posted by TimotheusReed

I don't want this topic to derail into another ranked vs. casual thread.
I wanted to focus more on the overall rewards for EVERYONE and not create another topic where casuals and ranked players are put against each other.

I just feel like the overall reward structure for Pvp is not really rewarding for everyone right now.
I want casuals and ranked players to both get better rewards, but I am not advocating for only ranked players to get new stuff.

This is not the intention of this thread.

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Why? What is wrong with ranked players getting a unique reward for playing well? Older MMO's used to to it all the time making specific mounts and armor very rare. It was something cool to show off. SWTOR had a cool looking rancor in their season 1 ranked pvp for being a high rating, but now everyone can get it by simply farming ranked making my season 1 rancor mount no longer rare or unique.

I can't stand this "everyone gets a trophy" mentality.

I just don't want this topic to derail in one of those threads again.

I also can't stand elitist mindsets. I mean why shouldn't casuals and ranked players both get their rewards?

I don't understand why you guys have to derail everything into a discussion about ranked vs. casual all the time.
I am solely talking about the lack of CC rewards. And I am talking about ranked AND casual rewards.

I also can't stand this "I put a lot time into the game, so I except the devs to design rewards for solely 0,1% of the playerbase" - mindset.

I think we can design rewards for both types of players. But less then 0,1% of players get top 100 rewards for example.
In my personal opinion it is a waste of dev ressources to design stuff solely for ranked players and do nothing for casuals.

Even Ultimates get cleared by more people and the rewards can always be obtained and are not gated behind FOMO (Before anyone starts the Ultimate comparison again).

But I don't want this to derail into a thread about casual vs. ranked again, as I already said.

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Originally Posted by Karasio

Look at LoL for example. Going beyond gold rank doesn't net you any tangible "rewards" other than rank borders. Since you wanna delve into a casual-vs-hardcore thing here, getting a high rank should be motivation enough. To prove you're better at pressing the buttons and having better ping than others lmao

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Riot did used to mail out stuff to people who acquired challenger rank a long time ago lol. That's for a different time to discuss though :)

Let's be honest here. I have yet to look at the new stuff that came out for this season. I'm not going to be surprised if there is still a lack of stuff to grab in general as far as pvp is concerned. At least I can use the wolf Mark's to waste on glam prisms and ventures, but still....

I was expecting the vendors to get something new? What do I spend my excess crystals on now?

They could always introduce new currency for high end rewards that you only get from end of season placement, lower placement is less but will allow you to gain the stuff over multiple seasons and then put in some really juicy stuff to lure players.

Alternatively they could go the Ultimate route and offer players shiny weapons for top 100 and make the retroactively gainable by placing top 100 in later seasons.

If nothing else at least they should offer a base recolor of stuff like the Archfiend set.

Currently active players have very little to go for and are already drowning in trophy crystals, either give something that seems like a hard grind for tons of trophies or make the top 100 and more a worthwhile to fight for.

This will never be right. Of course there should be an incentive for such an grind.
But on the other hand: people will start threads to complain about it.

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Originally Posted by ThaCa

They could always introduce new currency for high end rewards that you only get from end of season placement, lower placement is less but will allow you to gain the stuff over multiple seasons and then put in some really juicy stuff to lure players.

Alternatively they could go the Ultimate route and offer players shiny weapons for top 100 and make the retroactively gainable by placing top 100 in later seasons.

If nothing else at least they should offer a base recolor of stuff like the Archfiend set.

Currently active players have very little to go for and are already drowning in trophy crystals, either give something that seems like a hard grind for tons of trophies or make the top 100 and more a worthwhile to fight for.

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I like your idea to not lock stuff behind FOMO and make it also obtainable in the future.
I originally didn't want to focus on ranked rewards vs. normal rewards. But people can't stop bringing it up. So here is my take on it, if people really want this thread to derail into this discussion.

I still don't think Top 100 rewards are the way to go. And I also don't think you can compare Ultimates to Top 100 rewards. Why? Because even though Ultimates are the hardest PVE content, they are still easier to obtain than Top 100 in Pvp.

There are fundamental differences between Top100 rewards and Ultimates:

1. You can ALWAYS do Ultimates. There are no Seasons, where you only have a certain timeframe to get stuff like in Pvp. Ultimates have no FOMO.

2. The content isn't locked for everyone but the first 100 players to clear it! Even if 100 people clear an Ultimate, all the other people who do it after them can still obtain all the rewards.
People cannot lock each other out of getting rewards. Even if 100 got people got it, people will always be able to obtain the weapons.
If this system existed for Ultimates, the rewards would only be locked to the first 100 players to clear it. People would rage pretty hard if Ultimate rewards could only be obtained by 100 players (and their alts).

3. The top PVE players cannot lock new players out of clearing Ultimates. Once you get your Ultimate clear you will always have it as top player and there is mostly no need to do it again. Maybe only for fun.
In Pvp the same top 100 players can always occupy the same spots for multiple seasons. Top players can even block out people from getting Top 100 by placing their alts in Top 100. This is not the case for Ultimates.

4. The content is locked to 100 players across multiple servers (Most of the time 8 servers per data centre). No other content in FF14 is locked to 100 people across multiple data centres.

These are some of the reasons why you can't compare Ultimate progression to Pvp. Because in the end Ultimates are easier to clear to most of the playerbase than Top 100 Pvp.
There is a reason why less than 0.1% of the playerbase has obtained top 100 Pvp titles on fxivcollect.
And it is not because it is extremely hard, but because the system to lock rewards to only 100 players instead of maybe more percentage based systems is bad system design.

I am not against ranked rewards. But locking them to only 100 people across multiple data-centres and also attaching FOMO to it is a waste of dev ressources for a very marginal group to me.

Exclusive rewards can go away and never return, but I do agree that if we're going to give ranked placements some kind of reward allow them to get rewards faster than those who place lower or play casual.
I hate that there are glams that were introduced in feast and I can never ever get them, they were gone long before I even started playing. Even seasonal glams they return to the mog station if you miss the events.

screw portrait's, i want glams and we got NONE this season :D

And what am I supposed to spend all of these trophy crystals on? lol

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Originally Posted by Mandudez

And what am I supposed to spend all of these trophy crystals on? lol

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nothing obviously lol

The issue with the new system (and the old system, to be fair), is that it does a terrible job of incentivising ranked play if you don't have the time or skill to push for top 100.

The new Series system is pretty good, overall. Series rewards should move straight to the trophy crystal shop when each series ends, though. No need to punish casual players too much with FOMO. Shops in general need more repeatable rewards. Stuff like the minion
coffers would be a good shout.

For ranked, keep the portrait rewards as they are, but these aren't enough to encourage players to stick with ranked and we need more stuff on top of these. Each Season needs a mount or armour reward, added to a shop requiring a CC-exclusive currency. They never retire, so if there's one in particular you want you're always able to grind for it. Bring back a currency like wolf collars which you earn based on your highest tier; 3 for Bronze, 4 for
Silver, 5 for Gold, 6 for Platinum, 8 for Diamond, 10 for Crystal.

Rewards cost 7 tokens. This encourages casual players to hop in each season and play at least enough games to get on the Bronze ranking. If you get into ranked PvP some time down the line, it's possible to catch up with the historic rewards by placing in Diamond/Crystal consistently over multiple seasons.

Top 100 needs unique rewards to encourage competition. These should be a variation of the season's token reward which stands out in some way as a prestige item; a unique colour variation, or glow/particle effect, or whatever. These are also added to a vendor, so when you place in the top 100 you can buy one reward, whether it's the current season's or one of the historic ones.

The point is that nobody is locked out of owning a particular style of mount or armour, since the standard ones are always grindable, but the top 100 variations should always stand out as a mark of high-ranked play. That keeps the top end of your PvP ladder active and competitive (complaining that there's competition involved in earning player vs player rewards seems kind of silly, to me). You could bring back trophies too, if you wanted.

A structure like this would hopefully give more casual players a reason to dip their toes into ranked. In turn, some of those players will enjoy ranked enough to stick around, and it gives them a reason to play for the season even if they know they probably won’t be challenging the top 100 rankings. At the top end, it provides sufficient rewards to maintain healthy competition among your best players, without relying heavily on FOMO rewards.

None of this will happen, but a potato can dream.

Season 1 had lackluster rewards. I made to platinum and got some wolf collars. Like that's not even worth it. I'm just gonna get the dragon mount this season and quit it. It's just so bad and unbalanced.

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Originally Posted by HermitUK

Top 100 needs unique rewards to encourage competition. These should be a variation of the season's token reward which stands out in some way as a prestige item; a unique colour variation, or glow/particle effect, or whatever. These are also added to a vendor, so when you place in the top 100 you can buy one reward, whether it's the current season's or one of the historic ones.

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I have to disagree a bit here. Because at least on my data centre it is very often the same people each Season who are in Top 100 spots. It might not even be 100 people, because a lot of the people have alts.
So this will mean that in the end that every Season the same 100 people will always get the rewards and there will be almost no new blood coming into ranked.

In the end this will only lead to the same 100 people battling it out against each other and everyone who is not part of those 100 people will loose interest after time.

For a reward system to be better it needs to be accessible for more people out of Top 100. Otherwise you will have only maybe 100 people who actively participate in Pvp across the whole data centre.

I also think that the Top 100 players will ALWAYS play. Even if the rewards are low, they will still play and compete with each other. They don't need exclusive stuff to play, because they will always play. Most of them propably want exclusive stuff. But in the end they are not the ones who will quit because of the lack of incentive.

But the casual players on the other hand are the ones who will quit as soon as there no rewards for them. So I don't necessarily think there needs to be exclusive armor sets and mounts for Top 100 again. Or maybe at least widen the player pool and make it Top 100 per server. Or make it Top 400 per data centre.

100 people is just a very small player pool.

have not played sence the problems started still waiting for fixes to the system.

Personally, I want the return of Top 100 exclusive rewards that are nice like armor sets or mounts. Portraits that are very similar from one season to the next are not good enough incentives to queue up ranked.

Like for instance, the late seasons Feast armor sets for Top 100 were a great incentive to queue up PVP ranked. It was like a badge of honor and proof that you were skilled (unless you were wintrading which is an issue all by itself). It was sort of like the people showing off their Ultimate weapons.

Now you have the Archfiend armor set, which is nice, but there is no pride to be had with that set because 1) It was extremely easy to get 2) Your skill didn't really matter in obtaining it.

It's an MMO, people love to show off rare sh*t and grindy stuff. Bring that back.

Now, I can understand why some people don't want that because pretty much every other content in the game does not restrict you from getting it if you didn't play at a specific time. Also, most content (except Ultimates to some extent) becomes easier to grind if you wait long enough and you don't have to be super skilled to get the stuff. For PVP, if you are not any good, you could play 5000 games, it doesn't mean you'll get into the Top 100.

Sadly, season 2's top spot on one of my DCs went to an obvious wintrader, and a peek into pvp community discords shows this is anything but uncommon. Match fixing is incredibly trivial to accomplish and it seems every dc has known trolls, throwers, and win traders.

Seeing it for myself, it's honestly kind of a farce. Just like how the status of ultimate weapons is degraded by paid carries, the same is true for top 100 rewards when you cannot be certain the person you're looking at didn't cheat. As long as this is the case, being conservative with exclusive rewards is the most equitable state of affairs.

for this serie we got 2 IDENTICAL minion, only color changed, a mount of a dragon that is way too similar to other mounts we got, bah, they must bring back old rewards, old feast rewards, they were a waste of resources and developers time, since only 0.1% of players got them (counting cheaters and wintraders too), they should add old rewards permantely and leave it like that, what if someone joins the game now? they could never get those rewards, and thats unfair

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Originally Posted by Reinhardt_Azureheim

Just to be on a tangent here - do you know what happened when they re-released the White Ravens earrings players earned back in 1.X from Nael, one of the hardest fights at the time? People were livid that their proof of achievement essentially went down the drain. To add insult to injury, they were farmable by doing the Rising Event for like 15 minutes.

So while 100 Wolf collars (iirc, 100,000 Trophy Crystals?) are certainly within the realm of "understandable" for the reward you are asking for, you are still going to meet a lot of sour faces that their proof of victory, their "trophy" is reobtainable, similar to how White Ravens became reobtainable.

I'm uncertain how I'd feel about someone being possibly able to obtain my Shadowcrawler Armour while losing every single Casual match.

That said, better Trophy Crystal rewards? Yes absolutely needed.

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old feast armor needs to be made reobtainable with maybe a reskin

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Originally Posted by GordonGeeko

Personally, I want the return of Top 100 exclusive rewards that are nice like armor sets or mounts. Portraits that are very similar from one season to the next are not good enough incentives to queue up ranked.

Like for instance, the late seasons Feast armor sets for Top 100 were a great incentive to queue up PVP ranked. It was like a badge of honor and proof that you were skilled (unless you were wintrading which is an issue all by itself). It was sort of like the people showing off their Ultimate weapons.

Now you have the Archfiend armor set, which is nice, but there is no pride to be had with that set because 1) It was extremely easy to get 2) Your skill didn't really matter in obtaining it.

It's an MMO, people love to show off rare sh*t and grindy stuff. Bring that back.

Now, I can understand why some people don't want that because pretty much every other content in the game does not restrict you from getting it if you didn't play at a specific time. Also, most content (except Ultimates to some extent) becomes easier to grind if you wait long enough and you don't have to be super skilled to get the stuff. For PVP, if you are not any good, you could play 5000 games, it doesn't mean you'll get into the Top 100.

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nah, don't give those dirty win traders anything to brag about when they did not earn it.

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Originally Posted by HermitUK

The issue with the new system (and the old system, to be fair), is that it does a terrible job of incentivising ranked play if you don't have the time or skill to push for top 100.

The new Series system is pretty good, overall. Series rewards should move straight to the trophy crystal shop when each series ends, though. No need to punish casual players too much with FOMO. Shops in general need more repeatable rewards. Stuff like the minion
coffers would be a good shout.

For ranked, keep the portrait rewards as they are, but these aren't enough to encourage players to stick with ranked and we need more stuff on top of these. Each Season needs a mount or armour reward, added to a shop requiring a CC-exclusive currency. They never retire, so if there's one in particular you want you're always able to grind for it. Bring back a currency like wolf collars which you earn based on your highest tier; 3 for Bronze, 4 for
Silver, 5 for Gold, 6 for Platinum, 8 for Diamond, 10 for Crystal.

Rewards cost 7 tokens. This encourages casual players to hop in each season and play at least enough games to get on the Bronze ranking. If you get into ranked PvP some time down the line, it's possible to catch up with the historic rewards by placing in Diamond/Crystal consistently over multiple seasons.

Top 100 needs unique rewards to encourage competition. These should be a variation of the season's token reward which stands out in some way as a prestige item; a unique colour variation, or glow/particle effect, or whatever. These are also added to a vendor, so when you place in the top 100 you can buy one reward, whether it's the current season's or one of the historic ones.

The point is that nobody is locked out of owning a particular style of mount or armour, since the standard ones are always grindable, but the top 100 variations should always stand out as a mark of high-ranked play. That keeps the top end of your PvP ladder active and competitive (complaining that there's competition involved in earning player vs player rewards seems kind of silly, to me). You could bring back trophies too, if you wanted.

A structure like this would hopefully give more casual players a reason to dip their toes into ranked. In turn, some of those players will enjoy ranked enough to stick around, and it gives them a reason to play for the season even if they know they probably won’t be challenging the top 100 rankings. At the top end, it provides sufficient rewards to maintain healthy competition among your best players, without relying heavily on FOMO rewards.

None of this will happen, but a potato can dream.

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see i would agree with you but i don't wanna give win traders or cheaters any reason to come back to pvp, they're one of the reasons its not worth playing CC in the first place

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Originally Posted by Towa-Musa

see i would agree with you but i don't wanna give win traders or cheaters any reason to come back to pvp, they're one of the reasons its not worth playing CC in the first place

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Really what needs to happen is A. literally everything HermitUK said, all of it is great, I love it
AND B. SE needs to figure out a way to crack down on the win traders and cheaters. Because really, getting rid of them by making the rewards too meh for cheaters to bother is not a solution. Besides the fact that it defeats the point of rewards, it also doesn't really work well because people will cheat for no reason other than to brag that they are the "best" or even just to mess with people. The rewards are just extra to some people.

I don't see why PVP rewards can't follow the same philosophy as rewards just about everywhere else - things start out difficult to obtain and slowly ratchet down into availability. Top 100 rewards would be much less obnoxious if there was a known and expected lead time for them to hit the 'mass market', and frankly I don't think there's many particularly good arguments for why anyone should care about the exclusivity of a top 100 reward from 4 years ago. If you want to keep holding the perceived exclusivity, then keep defending your title.

None's fine and all, but I do think there is a better middle ground that could be walked here.

I would like more things to spend wolf marks / crystals on. I have already purchased all the collectibles with wolf marks and purchased the glamour gear I liked with the crystals (along with all the plate frames). I wish there were more collectibles (mounts, minions, dyes---something, anything really) or if I could convert these currencies into another currency (e.g. wolf marks to gil or MGP).