RIP Minion Collectors :(

[Bourne_Endeavor]

From a devoleper perspective, you should also look that the skill of the playerbase dont hit rock bottom because you give all the big rewards to the lowest common determinator which will be always gonna lower and you reach a point where the whole game is a joke

Hence titles, achievements and leaderboards. The majority of hardcore raiders and PvPers play because they aim to be the best at their chosen form of entertainment. Look at the highly competitive FPS and MOBA markets. Most everything can be unlocked just by playing yet you'll see thousands of players striving to be top x in the game or unlock all of that content. There's some exclusive rewards in MOBAs but they're fleeting. An example of catering to the hardcore was Gordias and Midas Savage. What happened? Barely anyone touched it-- to the point we saw less than 1% clears. Developers cannot focus on the hardcore over others, especially in a case like FFXIV, where they need to build the PvP community first. As it stands, PvP is on life support. You won't get people into it by putting a reward most won't be able to obtain. You have to incentivize them first, then fuel that competitive urge.

King Stefan does have some great examples for rewards unique to PvP though: http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...ve-PVP-Rewards

While that's true, there's more to it than that. If the goal is simply to focus on the current state, then yeah... carrot on a stick is generally the best way. If the goal is to make a certain type of content be a prevalent and uniquely memorable thing (PvP in this case), it actually works against it. Why should anyone care about PvP when it just becomes another PvE-esque grind? Why should anyone care about any form of content when it quickly just becomes a dull addition to what already exists and often does the job better? Diadem was a pretty damn good example of that.

Honestly, that should be the primary goal at the moment. As I noted above, PvP desperately needs something to incentivize the playerbase at large. The devs have been going about it backwards, either by making new rewards for each new map-- effectively killing any previous map/mode or through rewarding a select few. The latter only works once you have an established community, though not always. Overwatch, for example, has very few exclusive rewards. Instead, you simply earn a currency and unlock stuff. This helps keep everyone satisfied because less skilled players still have plenty to strive for, even if it may take them longer to achieve. A bigger issue for FFXIV is the lack of a rank depreciation, which only encourages top ranked players to stop PvPing just to maintain their position.

Keep in mind, the vast majority of players in FFXIV are PvE centric. A PvE grind is what they anticipate, and why many actually play. Therefore, you do need to focus some of that same grind into PvP, otherwise they won't do it.

- the intentional outlook they have for player mentality. Carrot on a stick for pretty much everything in the game, with practically no possibility to ever expect otherwise. This is fine, to be honest, but an extremely shallow approach to game philosophy. It's along the lines of F2P mentality.

Yes and no. I used to play FPS competitively. Unless you're in the Twitch bracket (years after I quit the genre), you'll actually get very little. Games like Halo, Call of Duty and Battlefield mostly reward achievements and cosmetic things for bragging rights, like custom tags or painting your gun. Few of those are exclusive. The playerbase in FPS plays primarily for fun or to outrank other players. You don't have to incentivize them because the game itself is incentive enough. FFXIV doesn't have that luxury because its audience isn't PvP oriented. So you need to nudge them towards it in the hopes they'll find it fun. Basically, you start with a carrot, then gradually move away from it.

[Kaitoo]

snip

Thats true but i delibritly said "big rewards", i mean would there be as much as complaint if the title would be exclusiv only and not the minion? I would say rather not, so the minion is percieved as the "Better" reward. And the best vanity reward is that what is percived as the best, because ofc vanity doesnt give gameplay advantage. So i dont know how incentivising it is to reward only with "minor rewards".


Also, even when its a bit of off topic:
Yeah i also dont think that only focus on one player group in a mmo which is a as big as FFXIV is not a good thing, however this go for all player groups really. If you center your whole game and reward structure arround midcore, or even lowcore, players, games got boring as hell, then maybe you have clearrates of 99 % but you have also saturation and resignattion. I think there should be always a reward structure on the top end of an MMO where the player at least have the aspiration to pursue higher level content, and reading the last Yoshida interview he thinks on that line as well. I also dont agree that this being a PVE heavy game justfices as you say there is no challange in pve just grind. There is challenging pve content out there and actually i think alot of the problem with the relic weapons came from that people want the best rewards, doesnt want to the hardest content, but also dont want a tedious long grind which seems unreasonable for the most people if i look at the criticisim. So essentialy there is a group of people who want rewards for being not good in the game, and doesnt want even have secondary progression path which is the only reward path that exist beside the Skillcheck path in mmos, timesink. I dont see how this game, or any other game as we seen example of this in the other MMOs, suceed because of that. This only results in the already mentioned saturation and resignation and then top player base leaves and then there is also nothing to aspire for.


That said the post you linked has good ideas tho, and i also agreeing that this game has a problem with PVP playerbase, i would suggest the idea to derank people overall who dont play in a specific amount of time.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

-snip

It's the less the reward itself and more the exclusivity. No one touches LoV, yet no one's complained about the minions gated behind it. Why? You can still get them.

I think you may be misinterpreting me. There should absolutely be a challenge, hence achievements and whatnot. But the current PvP structure isn't really rewarding challenge, it's rewarding whoever gets there first. This why most competitive circuits avoid having many (or any) exclusive rewards-- instead making them difficult to obtain, but always obtainable. It assures even inexperienced players have plenty to strive towards even if they're late to the party. I wager the Fenrir Pup did far more to incentivize players than most other methods FFXIV's attempted, though their misstep was making it sellable. Like I mentioned, Overwatch keeps people playing because if you want everything, you have to. The only exclusive content they've offered is promotional stuff, and even then, player backlash after the Olympic packs prompted Blizzard to let people buy the unique Halloween skins, albeit at a higher cost. It's undoubtedly a grind, but it's effective in keeping their playerbase active.

[Welsper59]

Honestly, that should be the primary goal at the moment. As I noted above, PvP desperately needs something to incentivize the playerbase at large. The devs have been going about it backwards, either by making new rewards for each new map-- effectively killing any previous map/mode or through rewarding a select few. The latter only works once you have an established community, though not always. Overwatch, for example, has very few exclusive rewards. Instead, you simply earn a currency and unlock stuff. This helps keep everyone satisfied because less skilled players still have plenty to strive for, even if it may take them longer to achieve. A bigger issue for FFXIV is the lack of a rank depreciation, which only encourages top ranked players to stop PvPing just to maintain their position.

Keep in mind, the vast majority of players in FFXIV are PvE centric. A PvE grind is what they anticipate, and why many actually play. Therefore, you do need to focus some of that same grind into PvP, otherwise they won't do it.

There are PvP-only rewards that we can get and they have been there since its introduction (the ADS mounts). All they're doing is repeating the same cycle with almost no change besides said carrot. There is little reason to expect anything different of an outcome. PvP is, and always will be, seen as nothing more than a grind to fulfill PvE needs in this game for the majority. The cause is because there's no reason to think about PvP positively in its own light. There's no reason to distinguish it from doing something else to get what you want (since you can just AFK through PvP to get tomes, for example). Even in the case of the mounts, it's not much different of an outcome than just getting a bad group, except you still benefit from a loss with tome rewards (not a bad thing).

In other words, it's poor marketing and practice for PvP content, which was what I was getting at. Why should people look at or treat PvP differently from PvE, when the goal rewards are possible to be acquired in the same mindless venture? You can currently categorize both forms of content as the same objective. Get a match/dungeon/raid done ASAP (without needing to think about it at all).

Yes and no. I used to play FPS competitively. Unless you're in the Twitch bracket (years after I quit the genre), you'll actually get very little. Games like Halo, Call of Duty and Battlefield mostly reward achievements and cosmetic things for bragging rights, like custom tags or painting your gun. Few of those are exclusive. The playerbase in FPS plays primarily for fun or to outrank other players. You don't have to incentivize them because the game itself is incentive enough. FFXIV doesn't have that luxury because its audience isn't PvP oriented. So you need to nudge them towards it in the hopes they'll find it fun. Basically, you start with a carrot, then gradually move away from it.

That's true but as I said above, we've already done that. We're well beyond this being any form of trial and error, since we have the data on the matter, and it's just repeating itself over and over. Incentives have always been a thing with PvP in this game. The minion/mount from ranking was a proper attempt at the gradual removal. Now that that's not a thing, we're right back to where we started. Thinking the only way to fix the participation is to use the same method with that carrot, which was done multiple times already. I highly doubt a large number of people care about unique earrings in this game outside of collections sake, nor do I think anyone would hail earrings as the same sort of enjoyment or prestige as minions (and inevitably mounts).

Well a better way would to like every 30 days the top 10 players get the special reward not 10 people total ever and no one else. This not some groundbreaking world competition or anything.

It doesn't have to be that way. What they could do is allow a list of rewards as more seasons start. Top ranking players pick one or so rewards from the entire list (which will include prior season rewards). That way, as seasons continue, they can introduce more ranking tiers for rewards. I.e. top 11-50 ranks will get access to last seasons rewards list

[Bourne_Endeavor]

There are PvP-only rewards that we can get and they have been there since its introduction (the ADS mounts). All they're doing is repeating the same cycle with almost no change besides said carrot. There is little reason to expect anything different of an outcome. PvP is, and always will be, seen as nothing more than a grind to fulfill PvE needs in this game for the majority. The cause is because there's no reason to think about PvP positively in its own light. There's no reason to distinguish it from doing something else to get what you want (since you can just AFK through PvP to get tomes, for example). Even in the case of the mounts, it's not much different of an outcome than just getting a bad group, except you still benefit from a loss with tome rewards (not a bad thing).

In other words, it's poor marketing and practice for PvP content, which was what I was getting at. Why should people look at or treat PvP differently from PvE, when the goal rewards are possible to be acquired in the same mindless venture? You can currently categorize both forms of content as the same objective. Get a match/dungeon/raid done ASAP (without needing to think about it at all).

And the issue with those has always been the dev's insistence to release a new mount/minion exclusive to whatever new mode or map comes out; effectively killing any of the previous PvP content before it. People abandoned Seal Rock en masse because, oh look, Fenrir Pup can only be obtained by playing The Feast. This continued with Shatter, hence why Fenrir Pups went from 50k to 500k (on Balmung). Had they continuously kept rewards in actual participation, be it through winning or consistent play, this wouldn't be an issue. In fact, they could even keep the Hellhound reward exactly as is, except introduce rank depreciation and keep it available for every Feast season. Not necessarily the best way, but a better alternative. You simply aren't going to incentivize people who aren't keen to PvP with exclusive content. They'll just feel excluded, especially with the horrible rank system currently in place.

That's the thing. They won't. FFXIV caters to a PvE centric audience. Thus, you have to attract those people with similar incentives, lest they ignore it. You aren't going to get the vast majority of FFXIV's playerbase to PvP on the basis of being competitive. At least, not until you have already built a stable PvP community. This is why games like Overwatch make the barrier for entry so easy. Someone like myself, who has never played, could pick it up today and work towards the same rewards long time players already have. Essentially, we're all on the same level. I only need practice, which is also made much easier.

Admittedly, that isn't the only issue with PvP in FFXIV. Frankly, I feel adding even more abilities was a mistake. But that's another topic entirely. Put simply, FFXIV needs to keep PvP familiar to its PvE counterpart due to the playerbase it attracts. They haven't, which is why no one does it.