A no new players feast queue?

[LisannaTargaryen]

Wow the numbers have dropped. I stopped at S3.

What u say makes sense. Still i believe having only ranked teams its much better system and actually promotes the e-sport element.

[aeoncs]

Wow the numbers have dropped. I stopped at S3.

What u say makes sense. Still i believe having only ranked teams its much better system and actually promotes the e-sport element.

That's how it should be. But PvP in FFXIV is way too niche and a lot would have too change before light party ranked could ever be taken seriously; I mean, just look at the ladders. As a PvPer you either have to make due with what you have, which is the occasional frontlines and soloq Feast for ranked and "competition", or you have to transfer to the one server of your datacenter where most of the PvP community resides and play 4v4 in an unranked environment to get your fix.



B2T: That just wouldn't work in the field. First they have to fix their horrible matchmaking and rating system, then we can talk other changes. Rating decay if you don't play at least 10~ games a week, only matching players of similar rating (unranked with bronze, bronze with unranked & silver, silver with bronze & gold etc.) because under no circumstance should a top 10, or even a top 100 for that matter, player ever be matched with/against someone who is playing their first game; the thing is that the latter can only work if they punish players for not playing as otherwise games wouldn't pop at all. But seeing as pretty much any other solo queue mode uses such a system, I have no idea what needs to happen for them to pull their heads out of their a** and get it done.

[Zojha]

But seeing as pretty much any other solo queue mode uses such a system[...]

To be fair here: League of Legends only has decay for platinum and up - gold, silver and bronze, so 90% of the ranked playerbase is unaffected - oh, and gold happens to be the rank where you get the Seasonal Skin, so the main reward for ranked. And I didn't pick the monthly active players as reference earlier at random - Rating decay starts at 28 days of ranked inactivity there. For Master and Challenger players (the top 0,05%), you need to play a game a day (though you can bank up to 10 games as reserve).

In fairness, their seasons last about one year. Our seasons last...three, four months? Divide the whole thing by 4 and you get to around 1 game per week - for platinum and above.

DotA2 IIRC has no rating decay and uses MMR as rating for ranked games. Overwatch I think implemented a rating decay recently - it's 50 on a scale of 5000 per week until you play one game. In their system however, decay won't get you below 3000 rating however, which is diamond for them. Starcraft 2 MMR decay used to start at 2 weeks of no game and was capped at 4 weeks or about 310 MMR - It also got removed entirely as of August 2015. CS:GO has no rating decay - it just gets hidden if you are inactive for a month (Admittedly, that information is shaky).

So with ~10 games a week, you're pretty much asking for the harshest rating decay in probably one of the the least competitive games out there. Just to put that into perspective.

[aeoncs]

So with ~10 games a week, you're pretty much asking for the harshest rating decay in probably one of the the least competitive games out there. Just to put that into perspective.

While this is true, the average game of LoL or Dota lasts anywhere from 3 to 10 times as long as the average Feast match. Also, rating decay doesn't have to effect bronze and silver Feast players either as that would be kinda pointless anyway; but gold should definitely be part of it, especially considering that there wasn't a single diamond player this season, in any of the datacenters.
I really don't think that having to spend 40-80 minutes playing a mode that's supposed to be fun to you, plus maybe half an our of waiting, each weak is too much to ask for. It could be brought down to 5 games a week but anything less and it won't change the way things are now.

[Zojha]

While this is true, the average game of LoL or Dota lasts anywhere from 3 to 10 times as long as the average Feast match.

Remarkably exact :P The average is around 32 minutes (The higher the skill level, the shorter the game). A Feast match lasts at the very least 3 minutes (preparation time is included) - That's if the enemy gets steamrolled on the first round. It goes up to 10 minutes if the timer runs out. So 3-10 times.

If you consider queue times as well however...the two get a lot closer (League waiting time last I played were 1 minute max). Especially if you make matchmaking stricter - I do remember reports of hour long queues for gold players in season 1, which most likely were the reason it got changed in the first place. At that point, you could play one or two games of league before even getting into one game of Feast.

Another, unrelated issue is...you are assuming the mode is supposed to be fun for people. If that was the case, we could scratch the rewards, because rewards are always compensation for doing something you don't enjoy. This would, at the same time, make the rating decay obsolete, because people no longer had a reason to sit on their rating - nothing depends on it after all - so everyone who did enjoy the mode would just play and people who didn't enjoy would just drop out entirely and not even get into the ratings. But that's not what the people want, is it? No, I know this forum better.
Moreover, even if people DID enjoy it, if you turn something fun into an obligation, it can quickly become a chore, because you're no longer doing it whenever you feel like it, but when Simon says you do.

And yes, I totally agree the rating decay wouldn't change the way things are now unless it was unusually strict. I think I actually said that myself earlier. I just don't think trying to fix the system by making it more punishing is going to make PvP any bit more fun, enjoyable or popular. I think the entire idea of a ranking system in this game was a brainfart of someone with a great passion for Ranked PvP and little commercial sense. But I'm not going to insist, I've realized by now that's futile - just refer to my post in a couple of years when you still ping pong between horrendous queues and sucky matchmaking because you keep fighting symptoms without touching the cause.

[Februs]

you are assuming the mode is supposed to be fun for people. If that was the case, we could scratch the rewards, because rewards are always compensation for doing something you don't enjoy.

That's not necessarily true, though.

Rewards certainly can be a compensation for doing something you don't enjoy (such as a Christmas bonus at work), but it's not always the case. They hand out rewards in sporting events all the time, but the participants wouldn't be there in the first place if they didn't enjoy the sport. Rewards are intended to be a pat on the back for a good performance, not a compensation for doing something they hated every minute of. The same can be said here.

In Feast, we get a ugly fancy looking PvP glamour set. The only reward is literally just a status symbol within the PvP community. It serves no purpose anywhere else in the game. That kind of a reward isn't really all that much of a compensation for anyone who hates PvP, so why bother? If it's a monetary reward, or a reward they could use anywhere else in the game, then it would be different, but it's just a glamour. If a glamour is all someone is after, then there are far easier, and better looking, ones that they could get their hands on without playing a game mode they hate. With that said, it follows that some people are there just for the fun of PvP and a competition -- no matter how warped of a competition it might be.

That said, I do agree that the ranking system in this game is a giant brainfart, but I don't believe it's the brainfart of someone who has a great passion for ranked PvP. I think it's the other way around. If SE had any passion for ranked PvP at all, then they would of ensured we had a matchmaking system that worked, rather than one that punishes players who make the mistake of actually playing.