New matchmaking system is a failure

[MixZ]

Trying to learn your class is a ranked environment is selfish and only hurting your team's rating as you are using their time to learn your class. You don't send rookie players in a tournament if you want to win. This is getting to be part of how society is now, where everyone needs to win and needs a participation ribbon. I really enjoy the PvP in FFXIV but I feel SE is spreading itself out so thin in different systems that it won't improve what they have. Or they may have too many systems and nothing will reach it's peak.

[Februs]

Trying to learn your class is a ranked environment is selfish and only hurting your team's rating as you are using their time to learn your class.

I get what you're saying here, but that's not exactly fair to new players. Telling a new player that they're not allowed to queue into Feast because they're still learning their class is basically the same thing as telling them they're simply not allowed to play that game mode, ever, because they'll never have enough PvP experience to play it without actually playing it. That's a pretty selfish attitude in itself, because it prioritizes the enjoyment and entitlement of experienced players over new ones who have just as much a right to be there as anyone else.

Now, I do agree that throwing them in fresh is obviously a bad idea, but at the moment we don't really have another option. I mean, where are the new players supposed to go to learn? Front Lines? They'll be lucky to get into one match a day, and they'll be playing a game mode that is completely different from the intensity of Feast. I can almost guarantee that if you take a player who's PvP experience is exclusive to Front Lines and dropped them in Feast, they'd be no better off than someone who is completely fresh at PvP. The same goes for 8v8 Feast, which is just as dead.

In the end, this is a problem for SE to fix. They seriously need to buckle down and figure out a way to ease the damn learning curve on new players. A pre-season would have been a hell of a good start. A pre-season which had Preliminary/Season qualifier requirements would have been even better. Then there's the practice mode that everyone was asking for in season one ... SE has options, for sure. They just need to explore which of those options would be best, instead of letting the PvP community spit venom at each other because of unfortunate match ups.

[MixZ]

The one thing I always found tough to sallow with SE is how they put just enough systems in (like the Feast scoreboard being very general) for community to turn on each other and do the blame game when they lose, but then this long period of not responding to any improvements. Even at the start of season two I was surprised they barely tried to improve it as I am sure they had enough feedback how to make it better.

[Enlial]

I can almost guarantee that if you take a player who's PvP experience is exclusive to Front Lines and dropped them in Feast, they'd be no better off than someone who is completely fresh at PvP.

Thats a bit of a hyperbole... Yeah the game modes are very different, but at the very least its certainly better if, to give a few examples, players know that they can sprint without expending tp, understand how ilvl sync works and how to gear, bards and machinists are aware of the range penalty and so on. Not to mention have a few PvP attribute points (and hopefully by extension are aware of their pvp abilities). Going in with 0 puts people at an even further disadvantage.

A preseason would have been really nice though...

And yeah matchmaking is crap. Another thing about it Ive noticed is that at times it tends to match you with the same people, against the same people, repeatedly. Had some nasty losing streaks due to that -_- Its a bit unfair that players from the more populated servers can often check to see if someone is still queuing. Also, hey call me paranoid, but given how much easier its been made I'm almost positive some people are using alts to boost each other. No way to prove it, of course. /shrug.

[Februs]

Thats a bit of a hyperbole... Yeah the game modes are very different, but at the very least its certainly better if, to give a few examples, players know that they can sprint without expending tp, understand how ilvl sync works and how to gear, bards and machinists are aware of the range penalty and so on. Not to mention have a few PvP attribute points (and hopefully by extension are aware of their pvp abilities).

It's an exaggeration, sure, but it's not as big of an exaggeration as you might think. You'd be amazed at how many casual PvP'ers (typically Front Line players) don't actually know about any of those things. They just get away with it in game modes like Front Lines, because there's just too much going on in large format matches for people to notice if one of their teammates is doing something wrong. There's a lot of dedicated FL players out there who know how PvP works backwards and forwards, but the more casual crowd is a different story. You can get away with only the basics in Front Lines, so details like range restrictions (something you'd need to have read the patch notes or the forums to have learned) are utterly lost on them.

That said, it's still a problem caused by SE's lackluster PvP management. Part of the reason that casual PvP'ers are so lost is because there are absolutely NO quests, dialogue, or tutorials for PvP. Every time SE makes a change or adjustment, the simply post it in the fine print of the patch notes and assume everyone got the memo. This is not the best way to keep the community up to speed, especially when our various weekly PvE responsibilities dominate the majority of our time.