3.2 PvP: Feast Game Mode Discussion Thread.

[Invalid_Name]

All this talk about matchmaking.

Let me just remind everyone what happened to WD when they implemented rank matching. It died.

In the perfect world we have enough of a population for match making to work and not kill queues, but be careful what you wish for. If doing this means increasing queue times from 1-3 minutes to 5-45 minutes, no thanks.

A lot more than that contributed to the "death" of Wolves den, quite a bit of it stemming from changes made due to player feedback. I agree, though, that this was a big one. Nobody wants to wait 15+ minutes to get into the den, another 2 for the match to start and then have the match end in under a minute because the healer died early.

The call for matchmaking comes from the frustration due to losing. So lets look at this from a different perspective, how can we make the current system work so that people are okay with losing? Obviously no one is going to be happy with a loss and people just love to blame others for it, but what if theres noticeable rewards for overcoming these differences in rank?

If you have a team of 4 bronze players and defeat a team that has 2 silver & 2 gold opponents, you should receive a good amount of bonus points for that victory. Enough points so that if in your next match when you go up against 4 diamond players, your loss of points due to your annihilation is padded thanks to your earlier achievement.

The current system is rather punishing for a variety of reasons(random matchmaking, unbalanced risk due to promotions, etc). This kind of harsh system works for 1v1 games, not random teammates of varying levels. Using another game as an example, my first online match of Street Fighter 5 was against a super silver player on a 30 game win streak. I also watched a mid-ranked player on stream go up against Daigo Umehara(one of the best players in the world) due to some matchmaking mishap. Since its all on you, you can laugh at the absurdity of it and maybe learn a few things. But in FF14 you aren't learning anything if you get your back blown out due it being your healer's first match. You aren't really laughing if you lost your promotion due to being helpless to change the outcome of an incredibly lopsided match.

Realistically, we don't have the kind of player base to support a strong matchmaking system. People are going to bow out once they get their minion or mount. Players will stop queuing once they get bored or frustrated with the feast(especially with the current reward system). The amount of players participating will be lower in a few months.

The ultimate goal is to have a system that is rewarding & fun for everyone. You want to encourage new players to participate. You want to reward players that have been putting in time & effort. You want a game that isn't going to die solely because of its own mechanics. The difficult part comes in balancing that. Having someone get to diamond tier with a 25% win rate is silly but its also necessary for players to feel like they're getting somewhere if they're doing decently.

We could come up with some system that would make this work, but its really up to S-E to consider our feedback and hopefully make this new game mode into something that will last.

[JzBen]

SCH performs a lot under it.

I was gonna bring up SCH being weak in a thread. Compared to the other 2 healers and the way Feast is currently played relying on a minute long resource just to survive burst phases is harsh especially with the ebb and flow of the fights and how respawns work. Then you have the possibility to vs a Monk, where unless im missing something there is 0 counterplay for the sch themselves apart from make sure they have 100% buff uptime which is unrealistic, instead you need to race to kill the enemy asap because if the sch loses stacks it really is rip. At 50 you could play around the arena having 0 stacks, but at 60 burst potential is just too high to not have them up. I also feel equanimity and aura blast are pretty meh skills for sch right now, im pretty sure under pressure you receive more damage than the adlo spam heals. Whilst aura blast is basically a worse fluid aura on 4 times the CD.

[Cynric]

respawn timers need to be longer, kinda sucks to kill the healer so you can get the tank down only for the tank to just turtle and sit in the base where no matter how many times you down the healer they can last long enough to run the time out.

The mode is fun but it has a lot of flaws. most of which have already been pointed out. I would like to stress that Black mages are pretty terrible right now, pretty much just an annoyance with sleep and not able to do anything else. Bard seems kind of eh too, Scholar is completely nullified by a monk and it feels a little cheap, where as Ast can literally survive for days.

The game promotes extremely defensive play imo. Kill one person for medals , tank grabs then keep everyone alive for the rest. you don't even have to try to kill anymore after that. Kinda lame imo

[Niroken]

Healing in the Feast is by far the most stress inducing, frustrating experience in the game. Your skills are canceled with basically anything, your always getting slept, stunned, silenced, pushed back, you have to run around everywhere constantly being chased only to take a break when you have the few skills that allow you to cast without getting auto attack canceled. So not only that but there are the constant LoS issues where it feels like your not only fighting the enemy but your own teammates as well. After all that you end up losing anyway because the enemy healer had more kills then your entire team put together.

This is not including AST, they can go die in a fire.

[Synestra]

I know everyone seems to think Astros are op right now but every plat team I played in team ranked yesterday all ran a whm yet I still see a lot of hate towards whm for no reason. It really seems to me that smn and ast are pretty in-line and that only the lowest skilled players still think they are op. I think the most op class right now is pld though. They just bring way too much to the table compared to war or drk.

Well played WHM is a beast! also they offer extra CC in from of Sleep and Bind, and in proper team setting i can completly agree that PLD might be a OP due huge utility/party support it has while setting up targets for burst due stun-locking. All those PLD skills that gets whinging in PvE really shines in PvP, afterall our base class is Gladiator so it kinda makes sense

[Cynric]

I'd also like to say that the seasonal rewards don't look worth it. As well as mirror the complaint that Premade should have rewards as well. Top 1 /10/100 per data center is terrible, should be server based or something. It's going to get to a point that to keep yourself ranked you won't be able to do PvE content or you'll fall behind, it'll be PvP and win with RNG based teams all day everyday or don't get the rewards. That's honestly not worth the stress.

[IHeartTwinBadders]

As a BLM, the feast is hard to have fun in, especially in solo ques... i get we have great CC but our cast times are so long and it's so easy to get interrupted, if i get lucky maybe i can manage to CC the melee and the tank at once but usually bliz II and sleep are what they save they stun for so even if i surecast it doesn't matter....

on that note, i use surecast and the pvp surecast skill literally every time its up but the still seem to be able to interrupt me very easily, im constantly moving to avoid damage but its just relentless because black mages are so easy to kill. it feel like i hardly get to cast anything and spend all match avoiding the melee dps who only attack me until i'm dead.

to add to this, even when i have like 15 medals, im still the main target because im so squishy. with only 2 120 second defensive cooldowns (make that one if the other team's ranged is a brd or mch since one only nullifies magic damage)

[fm_fenrir]

Thoughts on the Feast reward structure, which hasn't gone online yet:

4v4 group ranked matches should be used as screening for tournaments, which would give the super-exclusive rewards SE has been talking about. Groups would have to register with some minimum 4v4 group rank and participate in the tournament at pre-set times to advance to the next bracket, like other PVP games with Real Rewards for Competitive PVP. If SE is intending the Feast to be a competitive PVP event that people tune in to streams to see, it would be better if the games had real stakes and teams weren't randomly matched against rofflestomp pubbies who wandered into the wrong queue.
Setting up a tournament this way also ensures that if you try to sneak in by win-trading, you'll get ruined by competent premades who actually know what they're doing, and only actual good PVP players can take home the elite prize without being stuck in "grind the feast all day, every day" solo queue hell.
(Historical note: SE has done this style of PVP tournament before, back in the FFXI era. There was a cross-server Ballista competitive event that rewarded exclusive prizes for top placed players.)

[EdgyLatinName]

Realistically, we don't have the kind of player base to support a strong matchmaking system. People are going to bow out once they get their minion or mount. Players will stop queuing once they get bored or frustrated with the feast(especially with the current reward system). The amount of players participating will be lower in a few months.
The ultimate goal is to have a system that is rewarding & fun for everyone. You want to encourage new players to participate. You want to reward players that have been putting in time & effort. You want a game that isn't going to die solely because of its own mechanics. The difficult part comes in balancing that. Having someone get to diamond tier with a 25% win rate is silly but its also necessary for players to feel like they're getting somewhere if they're doing decently.

I think the biggest problem is people have disillusions about how big the PvP community is and seemingly forgetting how Frontlines (to a extent) drew in a casual play base whereas Feast will probably not (or outside a month or two).

The system is almost set up to fail from the beginning.

[GrumbleBeard]

I gotta say, for once it feels pretty satisfying to play monk in pvp (to me). I only played very limited Den, but I wasn't a big fan of monks lack of burst at 50 but their kits at 60 feels very well rounded and unlike FL where I will get nuked by a group of ranged classes the second I stray a foot from the group, I feel like I can actually put the moves to use.

For the mode itself, I don't really have any complaints that stray far from what has already been said. The ranking system may grow to annoy me, I've had a couple matches where our healer would die and "quit" out of frustration, and I have seen a few teams I've faced have someone rage quit and idle after the beginning goes badly for them. It's irritating to know that you insta lost and rank down a bit but I can't really think of any viable solutions. I guess you just have to accept what DF throws your way.

Overall, I like the mode itself, I have had fun with it so far.