Rival Wings rewards (exp/tomes)

[Istaru]

-SNIP-

But Lace, I want to be able to join into PVP and be rewarded immediately and without effort!

Whether that effort be time, difficulty or any sort of dedication. Just give me what I want when I want it, right away.

Is that really so bad?

[ThirdChild_ZKI]

I know you were being sarcastic, but #feelssobadman

[NorthernLadMSP]

I'll be totally honest. If it weren't for Frontlines and Rival Wings, I'd never log in anymore. PVE content has become so stale and boring to me, and I'm no longer participating in the B.S. drama fest that this game calls raiding.

[RiyahArp]

TAs far as judgements are concerned, who would it make more sense to listen to, the active community that formed around and enjoyed that "terrible" 3.x PvP where everyone else hated and avoided it purely from word of mouth or personal bias, or those people who hated and avoided it, yet would turn around and say "the Nadaam is awesome! We want this for PvP!" but wouldn't touch Seal Rock? Should SE listen to casters on how to build a better Bard or Machinist? I mentioned that for a reason; the PvP community was just as unpleasantly surprised as BRDs were in Heavensward when they were suddenly made into half-casters. Bards didn't ask for that change, and they didn't like it. This is no different.

They listened to the raiding community at the end of coil, and got the consensus they wanted everything to be more difficult. So they designed Gordias and Midas, and they made the 3.0 system at launch really tough, requiring skillful play. Even with Bard's changes, it still wound up being the easiest out of the HW jobs to play and do average at, compared to BLM, which had such tight timers that it was ridiculous. All the DPS jobs were markedly more complex to play well and play in general.

And what happened next was SE discovering that people really struggled with that, despite the community asking for it. They tried to slowly adjust the game's balance through minor means, like cutting the timers down, or adding things like Thordan EX to bridge the gear gap for raiders. All the while people kept saying it was fine, or it was easy, etc. Eventually they just had to give up and reduce difficulty of the main raids overall just to rebuild the raiding community (which had massively splintered) and then literally toss out many of the HW mechanics that served to make the game so much more difficult, like applying multiple DOTs to a target for max DPS, or having large amount of moves in a rotation overall.

If you had asked the established communities then, they would have just said "git gud" and we'd still be seeing Ultimate levels of NA raid clears.

That's because over time, the communities ostracize their negative people, and just end up comprised of people who more or less like the system. If you were good at 3.0 rotations, you didn't see any need for them to be changed. But if you struggled with them, even if you joined the community, you just wind up not getting listened to, or leave because they aren't seeing how it is affecting things. Everything is fine, so it has to be the players.

And it's honestly just dumb. There's always a trend for expert players to try to make things harder over time, because the skill gap between an expert and average can be incredibly large. If you want 3.0 back, you essentially want to increase that gap. We've had a long history of people assuming that players will rise to the challenge when they do that. They don't, really.

[Wintersandman]

If you want 3.0 back, you essentially want to increase that gap.

Which is why the skill gap between an average player and expert player is about the same in today's 4.0 system. Healers honestly have a greater skill gap than what was required in 3.0. Also maybe the reason why feast is meh in attendance is it is a poorly implemented arena style pvp mode. The 3.0 system for PvP wasn't that complex, it really wasn't. But now we have a game that functions completely differently. In 3.0 you knew how the moves worked because not much changed between PvE and PvP, the biggest skill gap was people not knowing they had PvP abilities and be willing to compromise their hotbars (because hotbars were assigned to the job and not the gearset). I PvP'd on specific jobs and PvE'd on others for that exact reason. But now we have a mode where blizzard isn't blizzard and acts completely differently. So it is harder to go between modes and know how the abilities are going to work.

So if anything it was education that was lacking because players wouldn't look up the resources that were available to them. In 3.0 only experienced players knew how amazing/deadly push back was and it took education which the dueling arena allowed for.

To say the dueling arena is dead is a fallacy. I constantly saw duels going on in the Wolves Den when I was on Ultros and also now that I am on Hyperion.

[Zeonsilt]

Xp have always been bad in pvp. I have played over 500 feast with my mch and it is still not lvl 70.

Took me around 135 games in Rival Wings to level my DRK from 56 to 70. Not bad, i guess.
Definitely better than farming one Stormblood dungeon over and over.

[Airget]

Even though the xp rate isn't the most efficient I've taken 3 jobs to 69, saving some space to do their job quest and it's definitely been more fun that just doing dailies.

XP doesn't have to be huge to make it worthwhile, if the content is engaging then in your mind the leveling experience is faster because you're enjoying yourself as you do it. It's not like PVE content where you know what to expect, in PVP you have to look and react to the situation.

[ThirdChild_ZKI]

And it's honestly just dumb. There's always a trend for expert players to try to make things harder over time, because the skill gap between an expert and average can be incredibly large. If you want 3.0 back, you essentially want to increase that gap. We've had a long history of people assuming that players will rise to the challenge when they do that. They don't, really.

Well that's a large part of the problem honestly. People didn't want to try or learn PvP then. It was never hard. Never. But SE made no effort to teach, and the playerbase didn't, and generally still doesn't know of the resources the community made for themselves all this time. I personally wrote 2 Frontlines guides, and made a few video tutorials showing why I say some of the things I say, like MCHs not fully loading before entering battle. And STILL I see and hear MCHs fully load up before the gate comes down.

During the early days of the Garo event, I remember plenty of times seeing advice defiantly refused; the now-famous "you don't pay my sub" meme. Even now too; had someone tell me "Nobody wants to hear your suggestions, Lace", as I was telling them not to drop off cliffs to reach a large ice teeming with enemies while we only had one healer. Can you guess what happened?

You perhaps have the mistaken impression that the vets want things to be tougher. We don't. Learning how to PvP was never tough. I taught a guy 3.x PvP MCH in the course of a week, and through duels. In no time at all, with practice and effort on his part, he plays well enough that I have to caution my team if he's on the other side. He also learned to be a good healer in 3.x too. Maybe he's a prodigy, but I saw the work he put into it, and I see how it paid off. Even I wasn't so amazing at first, but I simply pushed myself and faced all challenges head on. Either I won or I learned the hard way. A lot of the veterans did. But rather than want the bar raised, we just wanted people who were willing to learn what we could teach with far less struggle. The PvP system did not need to change so drastically to facilitate this.

It's worth noting, before I forget, that even if BRD was easy to play, the bigger picture was that many BRD players didn't like the change. They didn't ask for it, and BRD wasn't so difficult before that either.

[Wintersandman]

Either I won or I learned the hard way. A lot of the veterans did. But rather than want the bar raised, we just wanted people who were willing to learn what we could teach with far less struggle. The PvP system did not need to change so drastically to facilitate this.

This right here. I had a friend who main'd ninja. He was an extremely good PvE Ninja and knew how to burst but wasn't good at PvP. But I was a PLD main at the time and he quickly learned how deadly pushback was. He eventually learned how to beat me. Shoot I didn't know the potential until I look up Rara Mira videos.

[RiyahArp]

Something that is easy for you may not be easy for everyone. PvP is not something you could go down, read a wiki or watch a video, and then execute relatively simple steps to suddenly become competent. A lot of the feast back then was trying to use a really unwieldy skill set under some pretty harsh settings while managing being cced as well as dealing with FFXIV's notoriously wonky netcode. Actually executing what people taught was a tremendous issue, in the same way anyone can read a guide on Savage yet struggle in mastering it.

Gamers somehow tend to assign all the fault to the players as if it was something simple to do and people just didn't do it. it's a lot more complicated than that, and simplifying was an attempt to reduce some of the mechanical complexity so players could focus better on the tactical stuff. You're asking for what you think is tactical complexity, but will also end up adding mechanical complexity back in too.