Something about the incoming PvP that really disturbs me. The names. Fresh meat.

[Noroi_Kisaragi]

In phase 4, as you can see here and here, when you enter the arena, all your enemies have the same exact name: Fresh Meat. There is no username, no playername, no name at all attached to who you are fighting. This I find is going to strike the PvP Community pretty hard, as you can't actually see who you fought until the game's already over.

If i'm a hardcore PvPer and I pick up 14, as i'm sure any pvp focused game does, other people seeing your name is pretty important for several reasons. Do you really want everyone to see you as "Fresh Meat"? Hell no. And even without that aspect, as far as strategizing goes, what if you're against 2 monks with similar gear, how will you tell your team which one to attack? "HEY GET THE MONK" "WHICH ONE?" "UHH". See the problem here? Names are IMPORTANT.

I see a couple of problems here with being known as "Fresh Meat", but i'd like to gather your opinions on this. Are you for or against?

[Scratchs]

Hopefully people can create an Alias for PVP. I can see why they might not have user names for the enemy due to harassment issues.

[Shiyo]

Wow, fresh meat? That is absolutely horrible, all the fun I had PVPing in vanilla WOW was due to the community aspect. I knew my enemies names, my allies names, I knew everyone, I knew who was good, I knew who was bad, I knew who acted like they were amazing and got stomped and we all took screenshots and posted on forums and talked trash and had a good time. We had a giant community of trash talking and competitiveness, It was so fun, not seeing anyone's name is complete garbage, I bet it's cross server too, right?

Pretty lame, the genre born on social interaction just gets more and more anti-social as time goes on.

[Nanga]

This is something that DAoC did, and I actually liked it. We learned to recognize our foes by what they wore, their playstyle, and their group composition.

[JustinianKaiser]

As long as they don't gut out the rest of the game in regards to the PvP then I really couldn't care less.
The idea of them catering to the mentality of "I want to log into this persistent online world and be a roaming raging badass without participating in anything besides this single narrow facet of the game" is what bothers me.

Here's to hoping that everything gained in PvP is cosmetic/starter-entery level armor so somebody without friends or any aspirations to master the holistic microcosm of FFXIV doesn't get smashed in two seconds/there is no reward but new actions and or the tears of my enemies.

[Nanga]

...Everything...

/clap

Agree. And I don't think (at least, from my observation) that Yoshi really wants to let players get to the point of literally melting faces based on high-speed twitch reactionaries. If that were the case, we wouldn't have the instant off GCD issues, etc. And ya, it does rub me the wrong way as well when people "invade" an MMO to run around melting other player's faces and do nothing else. Call me an old-fashioned gamer, but I like to feel like I take a bit of ownership in the games I play, and to see other people so narrowly enjoying it by doing nothing more than griefing other people, I get offended by it.

[Scratchs]

Here's to hoping that everything gained in PvP is cosmetic/starter-entery level armor so somebody without friends or any aspirations to master the holistic microcosm of FFXIV doesn't get smashed in two seconds/there is no reward but new actions and or the tears of my enemies.

I'm hoping PVP is an alternate way to obtain good gear other than primals & relic quest. I am a fan of both PVE and PVP, I think there should be multiple ways to progress in the game.

[tuseroni]

...so somebody without friends or any aspirations to master the holistic microcosm of FFXIV doesn't get smashed in two seconds/there is no reward but new actions and or the tears of my enemies.

nope, that's gonna happen. pvp becomes it own game with it's own culture and it's own set of norms and expectations and abuse of every bug or oversight, or anything which can give a 0.0001% increase in winability. pvp also tends towards homogeny as one set proves to be the absolute superior thing, some particular combination of equipment, skills, and class become end up having the best winability and becomes the most used thing.
this is every pvp in every game ever (dark souls, street fighter, fuck, even super smash brothers...)
then the nerfing begins. when one set becomes the clearly superior set things get nerffed, other things get buffed, PVE suffer for PVP because the PVP crowd pitch a fit once there is officially no reason to play anything other than that one archetype, and the other ones pitch a fit that their stuff gets nerffed and the PVE people pitch a fit because monster x is kicking their arse.

this does not end well....

[samst]

This is something that DAoC did, and I actually liked it. We learned to recognize our foes by what they wore, their playstyle, and their group composition.

I found this awesome in DAoC, instead of player names it instead displayed their Race name + pvp title. (still could see kill/death notifications in the chat to see who's owning who)

However.. fresh meat sounds pretty silly

[Nanga]

@tuseroni: I think with SE's stance against data mining, and no real-time parsing ability, the PvP community of 0.0001%'ers will really be turned off from this game, and that is a bonus for all of us.