Quote Originally Posted by Alcifer View Post
Snip.
It really isn't close at all. You can do your best, still fail at the boss and retry it for full rewards. Yeah, sure, but that doesn't change the fact that you get nothing until you actually win. Losing groups don't get jack. There is no A for effort in PvE. They don't simply hand out gordian manifestos in Alexander to groups who attempt and fail. The game doesn't pat you on the head saying, "hey, at least you tired," and then give you full rewards. They give you the frigin' boot and tell you to "git gud." You can trade out your members until you get a team good enough, and then, when you win and only when you win, the game hands you a reward.
The same goes for PvP. I don't expect every group to be a winning group. You trade out your members until you win. That's the nature of the game, as well as every single competitive game out there. Winners win, and losers lose. They don't give gold medals to every athlete at the Olympics just because they showed up. You get what you earned. Winning would be meaningless otherwise, as would competing. It doesn't have anything to do with being given a "penalty" for not meeting a standard. It has to do with being rewarded fairly for your efforts. As thing are now, there is no effort involved in getting Eso bonuses from PvP. You can just stick your hand out and SE gives you money.

RNG can be worked around. All dedicated PvP'ers know this. What you're describing isn't a loss because of RNG, it's a loss because of a "three man horse race." That's an issue all to itself. A lot of people think the three way fights should go because they create the circumstances for gank spanks within PvP. That may be true, but it's an argument for another thread. Point is, right now it's a mechanic that you have to work around if you want to win. Sometimes working around two other GC's is difficult, and sometimes it's blatantly impossible (usually because one GC or another has an irrational fixation on getting solely in your GC's way), but it can be worked around. I've seen game at 790 pts get completely re-adjusted for clutch wins because the losing GC's pushed just the right way. S ranks are a good example of that, because they attract a lot of attention. If the match is close and an S rank spawns it becomes less about the node RNG and more about which team is better at killing the other teams. RNG might encourage dumb decisions, but that doesn't mean your team has to blindly go for it. Responsibility for losing falls at the feet of the players, our personal prowess, and good judgment. That's a fact.

Another simple fact is that, sometimes, your team just isn't good enough or making the right calls. Again, this is the mechanics of the three way fights, and it's our responsibility to work around it. The same goes for PvE. For example, you never saw SE watching players fail time and time again at the final Divebomb mechanics of T9 and go, "well, they didn't win, but they tried their best; so, maybe we should give them full credit anyway." Yeah right. That's a dream that would never happen in PvE content, but, somehow, everyone feels entitled to get a consolation prize in PvP like it's somehow owed to them. I'm not saying that Eso's should be completely eliminated from PvP, but this strange idea that a lot of people seem to have that they are somehow entitled to equal spoils despite failing to win the match is ridiculous. Regardless of effort. A loss is a loss. That goes for any and every competitive game or sport out there.

As for your gear comment. You're not wrong, but you're also not right. Morale boosts ilvl of your PvP gear in wolves den, and the new rank 50 gear is scaled for the upcoming revitalized wolves den that SE is planning on releasing. If you want an edge in those kinds of more technical and smaller format fights, the PvP gear is the obvious choice. In seize, morale bonuses and materia bonuses are ignored. So the rank 50 PvP gear bonuses are not useful in seize. However, the rank 50 PvP gear secondary stats are tuned for a PvP environment, meaning that, compared to a lot (not all) of the PvE gear, the PvP gear is preferable for killing your fellow players. For example, the stats on the King Behe Great sword (drk) are strictly Det and Crit, as opposed to the Antiquated Deathbringer which has additional skillspeed instead. Using PvP gear can fine tune your stats (albeit by a marginal amount) to be more efficient for bust dmg in a PvP setting. The PvP BIS (for seize) likely requires a careful mix of both PvE and PvP gear. Also, as someone else mentioned above, you can desynth the PvP gear to make ridiculous sums of money. So, some people farm marks for that purpose.