Crystalline Conflict's Ranking Rewards Suggestion

As time went on it became apparent that Crystalline Conflict's ranked rewards per tier turned out to be a bit lackluster for the most part, especially with no benefit for lower ranks.

I have played CC rank on and off since 2022, but never went any higher than plat due to the rewards being just the Hellhound Weapons becoming glowy. With a live letter announcement for the replica gear of older Feast rewards coming to the comm crystal rewards + delayed Savage tier, there are more people being active in the ranked. The recent reworks to Diamond+ ranking is wonderful to be a source of motivation of what to aim for. I am one of those people coming back into CC, currently Plat 3 with 74 ranked wins.

Over time, queue for CC suffers due to not wanting to endure more CC ranked, focus on the Savage tier or other priorities, effectively stranding the bronze-gold rank in a long/dead queue unless a PvP Discord organizes rank queue pops for bronze-gold / Diamond+.

Then there's Platinum. It exists as limbo between Gold and Diamond. You get placed to face people who are in low Dia, former Crystal rank, or you got high plat, high gold mixed in. The queue for it will vary depending on whomever is in Gold and whomever is in Diamond.

Some games reward minimally a badge and a charm for bragging rights, but other games reward players by participation and game time towards a cosmetic that can be attained after an unspecified amount of time.

What could be done? Give Platinum one comm crystal, Diamond to 2, Crystal to 4, while adding themed framer kits for every season (like the series mount/glam) instead of the current plain kits OR rework the means of getting comm crystals.

What I suggest for a rework would be adding a unique ranked XP that allows earning a commendation crystal akin to Overwatch's competitive points, except have XP gain towards the crystal be dependent heavily on what your rank is.

Example: comm crystal @ 30k XP (or any reasonable amount). If you were in bronze and you'd lose a match, you'd get maybe around 5 XP towards a commendation Crystal. If they kept losing, it'd be 6000 more matches of losses to get one, but if there's a victory, it would be around 15XP, reducing the matches needed for a comm crystal to around 2000 matches needed. This would encourage players to climb higher for a better XP gain on victory towards a comm crystal, while XP per loss, regardless of rank, would be locked at the same rate to deter people from throwing if they reached a higher rank. Now, what will happen with the XP at the end of a season you may wonder? Square, if they wanted to let alone care, could have the XP retained to have it transferred over to a new season, reducing it down (like Knowledge/Mettle in Field Operations) in a new season.

I appreciate the most recent changes that were introduced in 7.4 as a whole as it is moving towards a positive direction in the 3 years it has existed. Thank you for reading and see y'all in CC. o7

Updooted for suggesting an actually decent idea to encourage the low ranks to continue queueing.

I say this as someone who isn't motivated to do ranked because of rewards (currently sitting on 7 unused comm crystals and not interested in the feast replicas...): without failure, I see friends in the lower ranks lose any motivation to continue queueing because their brackets will unavoidably stop popping about 2-3 weeks in and there's no reward for ending the season under diamond. I legitimately think the 7.4 change to ALMOST DOUBLE the rewards per tier and drop in an extra 5 for making it on the board is just about the most tonedeaf reward adjustment they could've added. At least in NA, most high rankers are already swimming in more comm crystals than they have any use for, and low rankers will see their games thin out at exactly the same pace as they always do.

I've heard other ideas suggested to help low rankers earn their rewards such as getting "shards" of a comm crystal per low rank that they can then trade for a full one as soon as they have enough for it, slowing down the farming of rewards but still giving the player enough motivation to keep climbing. The climbing experience is already unpleasant enough as it is with players depending on chasing that winstreak to make it out of their rank and often being held hostage to the collective skill of their random team; I consider it would be a positive change to acknowledge the effort lower rankers are putting in and give them a reason to continue trying. As it is, CC is already so "top heavy" and so dominated by its veterans that it threatens to smother its own seedbed of newer players by offering them no reason to stay.

PS: I've played you in NA and you're legit really hard to bring down. I hope your climb goes well and you get your rewards sooner than later!

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Originally Posted by Talke

Updooted for suggesting an actually decent idea to encourage the low ranks to continue queueing.

I say this as someone who isn't motivated to do ranked because of rewards (currently sitting on 7 unused comm crystals and not interested in the feast replicas...): without failure, I see friends in the lower ranks lose any motivation to continue queueing because their brackets will unavoidably stop popping about 2-3 weeks in and there's no reward for ending the season under diamond. I legitimately think the 7.4 change to ALMOST DOUBLE the rewards per tier and drop in an extra 5 for making it on the board is just about the most tonedeaf reward adjustment they could've added. At least in NA, most high rankers are already swimming in more comm crystals than they have any use for, and low rankers will see their games thin out at exactly the same pace as they always do.

I've heard other ideas suggested to help low rankers earn their rewards such as getting "shards" of a comm crystal per low rank that they can then trade for a full one as soon as they have enough for it, slowing down the farming of rewards but still giving the player enough motivation to keep climbing. The climbing experience is already unpleasant enough as it is with players depending on chasing that winstreak to make it out of their rank and often being held hostage to the collective skill of their random team; I consider it would be a positive change to acknowledge the effort lower rankers are putting in and give them a reason to continue trying. As it is, CC is already so "top heavy" and so dominated by its veterans that it threatens to smother its own seedbed of newer players by offering them no reason to stay.

PS: I've played you in NA and you're legit really hard to bring down. I hope your climb goes well and you get your rewards sooner than later!

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Thank you! It's so funny that I was just watching your video about the State of FFXIV PvP in the time that I was writing this. The "shards" of a comm crystal makes me think of what some gacha games do for getting an SSR as a means of a "pity" system which is a good idea. If the upcoming CRCC participants bring about something like this into the public space vocally, it would go a long way as well honestly. I just hope for a day that CC is welcoming to maintain many more people engaged so that you will know when you queue for Ranked that it will pop outside of the first two weeks of a season. And also thank you haha it feels rough to play Warrior given SCH/PLD/DRK/PCT around bursting me to kingdom come though, but I've found a sweet spot in handling the classes that I constantly face amongst each fight.

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Originally Posted by Talke

Updooted for suggesting an actually decent idea to encourage the low ranks to continue queueing.

I say this as someone who isn't motivated to do ranked because of rewards (currently sitting on 7 unused comm crystals and not interested in the feast replicas...): without failure, I see friends in the lower ranks lose any motivation to continue queueing because their brackets will unavoidably stop popping about 2-3 weeks in and there's no reward for ending the season under diamond. I legitimately think the 7.4 change to ALMOST DOUBLE the rewards per tier and drop in an extra 5 for making it on the board is just about the most tonedeaf reward adjustment they could've added. At least in NA, most high rankers are already swimming in more comm crystals than they have any use for, and low rankers will see their games thin out at exactly the same pace as they always do.

I've heard other ideas suggested to help low rankers earn their rewards such as getting "shards" of a comm crystal per low rank that they can then trade for a full one as soon as they have enough for it, slowing down the farming of rewards but still giving the player enough motivation to keep climbing. The climbing experience is already unpleasant enough as it is with players depending on chasing that winstreak to make it out of their rank and often being held hostage to the collective skill of their random team; I consider it would be a positive change to acknowledge the effort lower rankers are putting in and give them a reason to continue trying. As it is, CC is already so "top heavy" and so dominated by its veterans that it threatens to smother its own seedbed of newer players by offering them no reason to stay.

PS: I've played you in NA and you're legit really hard to bring down. I hope your climb goes well and you get your rewards sooner than later!

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I like this suggestion. Like how lower ranks in the feast would still earn you a couple of wolf collars but it could take several seasons to get enough for a weapon if you relied on it. You still got rewarded if you were forever stuck in gold. The suggestion from mrteacat is good too. I think the fundamental issue is quite widely agreed on: Offering literally nothing of value for any rank below diamond has not and will not sustain a healthy population for the mode.

I just wanted to add that I think this is a good idea. I have been complaining about no queues in low rank for quite a while and I would generally be open for a change like that.

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Originally Posted by Draxian

I like this suggestion. Like how lower ranks in the feast would still earn you a couple of wolf collars but it could take several seasons to get enough for a weapon if you relied on it. You still got rewarded if you were forever stuck in gold. The suggestion from mrteacat is good too. I think the fundamental issue is quite widely agreed on: Offering literally nothing of value for any rank below diamond has not and will not sustain a healthy population for the mode.

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Absolutely! I have heard from some casual ranked players who don't mind staying in the Bronze-Gold range as long as they get rewarded at least a crumb of what the higher ranks in NA have (example: the golden weapons with competitive points in Overwatch being earned slowly in bronze vs someone in Grandmaster back in the day) and work towards something rather than aimlessly existing, which is why other games with ranked seems to work just fine in general with a fair balance of casual and ranked harmonizing with little to no issues of queue population long term.

I call it being stuck in Silvurgatory.

I was inspired to get into CC ranked this season because of the inclusion of the top 100 reward replicas, but today I decided to stop my climb in part because of Square Enixs' design philosophy and me not having done any research on how rewards worked until just the other day. This sudden research stemmed from the fact that my queue times at Gold 1 have all but dried up. Yesterday I sat around in queue for 30+ minutes at 6:00 PM EST and called it quits after playing 2 matches, needing to go cook dinner before raid time at 8:00pm.
I thought if I could just endure it until I got into diamond to get a few pieces of the rewards I was aiming for I'd be happy. After doing some Googling I found out that upon reaching diamond rank you receive 1 (ONE) commendation crystal for your efforts, which is not enough to buy anything at all. I'll need to wait another 5 months for a new season to begin in order to do the grind all over again, and that's just to get one singular piece from a full set if I even make it to diamond again. On top of that, I'd most likely sit in 30 minute long queues again because I dared put my focus on raiding at the start of the patch for the first few weeks, because for whatever reason both are tied to the same patch. I'd have to do this for years in order to assemble just ONE of the various sets I imagine will be implemented in the future, which is just insane to think about, and even more insane that they sat in an office and nodded their heads in agreement while discussing that before rolling out the rewards.

Why are the rewards so expensive? And why are the rewarded commendation crystals ONLY available for achieving a high rank exclusively? How on earth would anyone feel driven to enter into ranked PvP if the vast majority of the population going in wont see a single reward for the time they've put in? It has been 16 seasons and they've never once thought of this?

I agree with the OP's change suggestion, but I believe the rewards should be opened up even more.
My suggestion is to make 1 commendation crystal the baseline reward for getting bronze, and having the numbers increase as your rank does. This is how you get butts into seats, and people into queues. A player only looking to get into bronze and check out will be happy to receive the reward after a few seasons, and you'll potentially get others to keep playing if they can get to silver and immediately buy that piece of gear they were wanting, and so on. "Oh, I can get the entire set I was wanting by getting to diamond? Sweet I'll keep climbing."

Games like League, DOTA, Overwatch, and Street Fighter 6 all grant players of all ranks various rewards for just playing the game, and have been doing so for a very long time, and it has kept those games competitive and active because of it. I don't see the PvP experience improving in any way at all unless you give players a reason to want to do it. I'm sorry if I come off as a bit frustrated, I've wasted hours of my time in hopes of getting a reward I've waited years to get just to have my dream of finally having them again absolutely crushed by Square Enix's inexplicable aversion to giving players a reason to engage with their content, making it all but near impossible for me to get it unless I decide quit my job and raid team in order to sit in these ridiculous queues or buckle up and be prepared to PvP on its release week.

I realize that Feast no longer exists, and it's hard to compare CC to that, but given what we have, I'll never understand why back then, people could reach Diamond and get an entire set of armor whereas now, if you want, let's say, the whole Alpha Wolf set, that's 10 commendation crystals, which is either:

10 seasons of Diamond
5 seasons of Crystal

To put that in perspective, there are 3-4 seasons a year.

How did we go from 1 season = one set to 1 set = ~3.5 years? I'm all for having something to work toward but at least like... Astrope from 2k mentor roulettes you're not locked into dead queues for hours. Maybe there are some legendary big fish that take this amount of time too, I don't know because I don't fish.

With insane restraints like that, I understand why some people win-traded.

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Originally Posted by Stormfur

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Not like I'm agreeing with the way things are right now but, getting Diamond was much more difficult back then of course than getting Crystal is now.

For quite a few of the rewards as well it wasn't a matter of getting a highest rating number and stopping, you had to maintain your rank as well or sit and hope for the best as it did not save the highest rating earned like the later seasons did.

Then of course most every rank had qualifier matches to get to the next rating range, whereas now you just lose a star, no big deal, just try again. Maybe you get lucky and streak up there.

Though like I said that's not to say I agree with how it is now. It's probably always going to be considered not really worth the effort until they decide to make it easier to obtain.

If I had to make a comparison of time investment, I don't know..

What was it like?

0 - 250 = Unranked
250 - 500 = Bronze
500 - 1000 = Silver
1000-1500 = Gold
1500 - 2000 = Platinum
2000 + = Diamond

With 3/5 matches needing to be won at the end of each range to promote?

And you got what? + 15 - 25 on a win? -10 - 25+ on a loss dependent on rank? (could be wrong its been a long time)

Like assuming you were amazing and won 100% of your matches to Diamond, you'd have taken 80 games in order to get there with a 100% win rate.(generally unrealistic but we will assume)


then with Crystal Conflict,

No qualifiers and you need 3 stars to climb a riser?

and you get a bonus star every win after streaking?


Bronze 1 -3
Silver 1-3
Gold 1-4
Platinum 1-4
Diamond 1-5
and we will stop at that comparison since Crystal did not exist and we are checking Diamond to Diamond, I assume we could check Diamond V specifically since that is the start of Diamond

We will assume you have again a 100% win rate, that means after 3 wins, you gain an extra star every time.
Okay so...
my math for this one could be off but, it seems like from Bronze 3 -> Diamond V with a perfect 100% win rate is 23 wins. After the first bit of bronze you're gaining stars very quickly here.( again this is unrealistic)


So if my math is right and I mean I will even for the sake of saying include the amount without streaks at all as well
3 ( 3 + 3+ 4+4) = 3(14) = 42 wins


Okay so even assuming there is no streak at all. Getting Diamond from the feast on average would be longer.

Is that a good evidence as to why it should be this way? Not really but it's certainly interesting to think about. In fact, getting Gold in the Feast(60 wins) took longer than getting Diamond does on average in Crystal Conflict. It would likely be that getting Silver / Gold in the feast is about comparable to Diamond / Crystal in Crystal Conflict. Going from this data, it would seem that the most comparable to Diamond from the feast is one of the newer ranks Omega or Ultima.

Just in this little bit of meaningless data anyway. But it could explain why they are like this.(Or they just wanted old people to get stuff first)

If we were to actually account for losses and other factors, the feast would be even more difficult to achieve rating in compared to CC.

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Originally Posted by Trucknbolts

I agree with the OP's change suggestion, but I believe the rewards should be opened up even more.
My suggestion is to make 1 commendation crystal the baseline reward for getting bronze, and having the numbers increase as your rank does. This is how you get butts into seats, and people into queues. A player only looking to get into bronze and check out will be happy to receive the reward after a few seasons, and you'll potentially get others to keep playing if they can get to silver and immediately buy that piece of gear they were wanting, and so on. "Oh, I can get the entire set I was wanting by getting to diamond? Sweet I'll keep climbing."

Games like League, DOTA, Overwatch, and Street Fighter 6 all grant players of all ranks various rewards for just playing the game, and have been doing so for a very long time, and it has kept those games competitive and active because of it. I don't see the PvP experience improving in any way at all unless you give players a reason to want to do it. I'm sorry if I come off as a bit frustrated, I've wasted hours of my time in hopes of getting a reward I've waited years to get just to have my dream of finally having them again absolutely crushed by Square Enix's inexplicable aversion to giving players a reason to engage with their content, making it all but near impossible for me to get it unless I decide quit my job and raid team in order to sit in these ridiculous queues or buckle up and be prepared to PvP on its release week.

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this is genius can we do this please

Oh I had forgotten about qualifiers until you mentioned them, and it suddenly gave me PTFD, post-traumatic feast disorder.

I'll add that top Feast players were repeatedly playing the same elite pool of players again and again whereas CC matchmaking as we all know, is a heck of a lot more volatile.

Difficulty from Feast came from the risk of each match + pressure + punishment for losses + you had to perform consistently against top players. CC has a bit more "padding" with rank floors, streak wins, complete team RNG and shorter matches

Remember too, Feast was practically hemorrhaging players. Queue times were nonexistent. New players did a match and noped right out of there. At least CC, for all its downsides, still lets average players progress. I'm glad I got to reach platinum in Feast but I'm also glad it's gone.

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Originally Posted by Trucknbolts

I was inspired to get into CC ranked this season because of the inclusion of the top 100 reward replicas, but today I decided to stop my climb in part because of Square Enixs' design philosophy and me not having done any research on how rewards worked until just the other day. This sudden research stemmed from the fact that my queue times at Gold 1 have all but dried up.

[...]

I thought if I could just endure it until I got into diamond to get a few pieces of the rewards I was aiming for I'd be happy. After doing some Googling I found out that upon reaching diamond rank you receive 1 (ONE) commendation crystal for your efforts, which is not enough to buy anything at all. I'll need to wait another 5 months for a new season to begin in order to do the grind all over again, and that's just to get one singular piece from a full set if I even make it to diamond again. On top of that, I'd most likely sit in 30 minute long queues again because I dared put my focus on raiding at the start of the patch for the first few weeks, because for whatever reason both are tied to the same patch.

[...]

My suggestion is to make 1 commendation crystal the baseline reward for getting bronze, and having the numbers increase as your rank does. This is how you get butts into seats, and people into queues.

[...]

Games like League, DOTA, Overwatch, and Street Fighter 6 all grant players of all ranks various rewards for just playing the game, and have been doing so for a very long time, and it has kept those games competitive and active because of it.

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Hey, your post really spoke to me. I am on EU and I got up to Plat 1 with 2 stars before falling down to Plat 4 again. I was really close to getting at least to Diamond but it was still pretty hard for someone like me who does not have the time to play Pvp all the time.
Also a lot of times the matches for PVP in EU are starting to pop at 11pm till 3 am, which is not a good time for me to play. I don't even know if they are even popping at all right now in EU.
Every time I try to queue in EU at the times that I am able to play I have to wait 30-40 minutes in queue before just giving up to queue.

At least on EU you are essentially locked out of the rewards if you are not able to play at specific times or if you dont have enough time to play pvp hardcore at the beginning of the season.
If you look at the CC Leaderboard Top 300 (https://de.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...llineconflict/), you can basically see that a big part of the Top 300 is still in Dia. So that means to get to Dia in EU you have to compete with players who are currently in Top 300.
But if you look closely you can even see that almost no Diamond player had a match yesterday.

A system which rewards ranking up in every rank would incentivize a lot more players in the lower ranks to at least try to rank up.
I agree completely with your suggestion.

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Originally Posted by Trucknbolts

On top of that, I'd most likely sit in 30 minute long queues again because I dared put my focus on raiding at the start of the patch for the first few weeks, because for whatever reason both are tied to the same patch.

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This is honestly what I don't understand. Imo there's no reason why they can't desync PvP seasons from the release of raids/PvE content.

It's as if in their mind raiders and PvPers are such distinct populations with zero overlap that nobody will be troubled by conflicting schedules. In reality there might be quite a few raiders/PvErs who are potentially interested in ranked but will pick raiding when forced to choose because PvE content is more popular (and then there's that whole guild/static community aspect that might make raiding more important to them as well).

If ranked (on EU, and also on NA from what I gather?) stayed active longer then it wouldn't be as much of a problem but unfortunately the start of each new season is a big fomo event. If you haven't reached at least diamond within a couple of weeks (because crystal+ regulars are much better at keeping the queues of their ranks active than lower ranks) you're locked out until the reset. So ranked CC forces you to commit to it fully for that short time frame. It's understandable that players who are also very involved with PvE don't want to or can't do that.

At the same time SE does release other PvE content like cosmic exploration after the original patch launch. So it's not an outrageous concept for them. No idea why they can't just apply it to CC ranked.

I'm sure others have also chimed in on the subject, and I made a post on how savage directly competes with ranked pvp for player time last expansion but I guess they don't care. Nothing will shake their holy schedule.

Yep... New stuff dropped and PVP queue went *POOF*. At the moment, it's quite literally "stay up for hours and grind your soul out for 2-3 weeks, good luck!"

Frankly why would they even care, it's not a problem on JP anyway.