CRAZY QUEUE TIMES!

[Eorzean_username]

Tried to queue, estimate was "25 minutes", queue time spent was 90 minutes.

This is another frustration, the 'Average wait time' indicator is usually completely wrong, which only adds to the demoralization of trying to get queue pops. You can't plan your playtime around it at all, because '20 minutes' can easily become '120 minutes' and then you give up with not much to show for it.

I've read speculation that 'Average wait time' isn't tracked separately per Grand Company. So if Adders or Mael is getting in 15-20 minutes and Flames is waiting 45-60, it all gets averaged together into a meaningless blob that doesn't indicate an accurate time for any of the GCs.

Many western players always tell me they're afraid of pvp and pvpers.

That's an interesting point. For me at least, it's absolutely correct — once I realized PvP even exists in FFXIV (a separate issue that also doesn't help the population size), the number one issue that caused me to avoid FFXIV PvP for as long as possible, until absolutely forced to do it (because I needed a Wolf Mark weapon) was just fear of the PvP community.

Which is weird in retrospect, because once I resigned myself to the need to farm Wolf Marks and started asking questions and joining matches, I was mostly met with patience, encouragement, support, helpful answers, etc — and I've had a lot of genuine fun. (When the queue actually pops.)

For me personally, the PvP community's reputation was a lot worse than its reality. But that reputation definitely did discourage me from trying out PvP until forced to.

A factor that might contribute to this is that FFXIV doesn't offer any consequence-free PvP where you can casually try out PvP without the pressure of messing up someone's match. That's intimidating and discouraging, and it also impedes the ability of veteran PvPers to mentor and train curious new players.