I miss the old PvP.

[ThirdChild_ZKI]

You can't tell me giving the community a feature they begged for for 3 years, that allows people to play with their friends, and eases matchmaking doesn't hold more weight than a crossover event for new mounts and gear, which was explained ahead of time that the gear would also be available through gold saucer for those who didn't want to PvP? I'm speaking of 3.5, not 4.0; well before XP was offered for PvP, and yet queue times drastically improved.

I'll be the mean person to say it: A lot of the new PvP crowd aren't in it because they enjoy PvP. They want to farm the rewards or level alternate jobs, and generally don't have incentive otherwise to queue. That's fine, it's their time and money. But with an alienated "old" community that's lifelining, and a "new" fairweather community, SE's perhaps going to have to see PvP truly, finally fail in this game to perhaps take notice and either do it better, or realize they'd had it mostly right at first. . .

[RiyahArp]

..yeah, the gear was very well done. as were the mounts. You have incentives to get 100 people in the mode in the hopes 30 will like it enough to stay. The garo achievement made you do 60 matches to get all the mounts, and maybe longer for all jobs at 60 to get the titles. Thats a decent time to tour all the modes.

In most MMOs, PvP simply isn't a big draw. FFXIV pvp actually does well at giving incentives and keeping barriers to participation out. But you have to keep attracting people to make for a healthy scene.

[ThirdChild_ZKI]

And yet change after change they seem to keep alienating and pushing out the community that was/would be dedicated to PvP, in favor of a fairweather community that's only in it for whatever reward they can farm out, yet can't handle even the simplest of game rules and needs terrible adjustments made that STILL won't help them do any better.

I see why the others left, and why so many are so reticent to bother queueing for anything now. It's always been rough being a PvPer in this game, but Stormblood is quickly becoming one especially terrible time for PvP in FFXIV.

[Araxes]

And yet change after change they seem to keep alienating and pushing out the community that was/would be dedicated to PvP, in favor of a fairweather community that's only in it for whatever reward they can farm out, yet can't handle even the simplest of game rules and needs terrible adjustments made that STILL won't help them do any better.

I see why the others left, and why so many are so reticent to bother queueing for anything now. It's always been rough being a PvPer in this game, but Stormblood is quickly becoming one especially terrible time for PvP in FFXIV.

PvP was my endgame. I lvld Jobs to 60 just to be able to try them in PvP. Now i can bearly push myself to play a Rated Feast game once Week. I just doesnt feel rewarding to win anymore.

[ThirdChild_ZKI]

Same here. I enjoyed it enough to dedicate myself and my videos to XIV's PvP despite all the naysayers and bad talk about it. I truly do love it, but I hate to see what it has become, especially knowing what it was before anyone wanted to give it a chance.

I legit feel like I have nothing to do right now in game. I have the mount from Rival Wings, and those changes are just awful. I see no reason to force myself to queue for it knowing I won't enjoy it. And I'm as geared out as I want to be from Savage, so no burning desire to do that. Ultimate Coil might be nice, but it's got that O4S gateway that I haven't gotten through, and generally won't task myself with without my static. If I can't help revive Seal Rock, I pretty much am on "vacation" til 4.2, if not longer.

[RiyahArp]

I don't think idealizing the HW past is the answer.

I think the problem is SE needs to STOP FORCING US TO SLOWLY BETA TEST THINGS. They keep dumping half-worked content on us and expecting us to give them data to adjust things, but because they do it when the content is live it screws us all up. Something like healer stacking is so basic that just an afternoon of players doing the content would point it out. But because they dump it on us on the live server, we have to put up with it for weeks until they tenatively adjust it, and since they don't have us test THAT Content either, we get the updates that make things worse.

This just doesn't work. They should honesttly open up a pvp test server, have people test out the new modes a month before release, and go from there.

[Akimitsu]

PvP participation seems to be decreasing and I sort of hopes it will keep doing that.Everything has been simplified to mindnumbing levels and yet so many people are still unable to perform half decently. It would be so exciting to have access to the PvE skills we have now for PvP. When I compare how thrilled I used to be playing Seal Rock and the previous modes and how much any FL (and RW) completely turns me off now it really gets depressing. AOE brawls used to be amazing, now you pray your alliance can see the marker on enemies heads and manage to press their 9 buttons efficiently enough to take 1 person down. In the past if you were good and dedicated enough you had a much bigger impact in both Feast and FL, as a dps now it's "be a great healer or struggle for a while" to climb the rankings ladder.

[Wintersandman]

PvP participation is decreasing because A. Skills are backwards. They function different in PvE than they do in PvP. B. Everyone is getting capped on their jobs and Exp is irrelevant.

I pvp'ed endgame all 3.5. because I was gone for 3.4 and wasn't there when frontline freelancer was introduced. I know several people who picked up PvP once freelancer was introduced. All of those people miss 3.x. Riyah is one of the only people that vocalizes they don't miss it.

[RiyahArp]

I think it's because I remember the 3.0 toolkit. Trying to use enochian reliably was ridiculous, for example. 12 sec, something like 60 sec cooldown, and all it needed was one person moving out of range to spoil the refresh. You had all of the pve filler abilities like heavy thrust, and a lot of the kit simply didn't work; dots and aoe attacks were pointless due to aoe healing. Pretty much what people like I think was the fact that you could reliably chain crowd control moves to take out a single target, but that could be incredibly annoying to play against. And you also had all the skill issues you did in 3.0 pve, too.

People like 3.0 because its when pvp was fun for them, partly because of being new. But it had its own issues too.

[Wintersandman]

I think it's because I remember the 3.0 toolkit. Trying to use enochian reliably was ridiculous, for example. 12 sec, something like 60 sec cooldown, and all it needed was one person moving out of range to spoil the refresh. You had all of the pve filler abilities like heavy thrust, and a lot of the kit simply didn't work; dots and aoe attacks were pointless due to aoe healing. Pretty much what people like I think was the fact that you could reliably chain crowd control moves to take out a single target, but that could be incredibly annoying to play against. And you also had all the skill issues you did in 3.0 pve, too.

People like 3.0 because its when pvp was fun for them, partly because of being new. But it had its own issues too.

With 4.0 they already solved a lot of these problems by reducing the CD on BoD and Enochian. You simplified your toolkit for the mode. Just because you have a button doesn't mean you have to use it. One Ilm Punch was amazing in PvP but is almost useless in PvE. Hyoton is useless in PvE but usefull in PvP. Fluid Aura is a bane in PvE for melee but incredibly usefull in PvP. Why would you Heavy Thrust a target? You would only Blood of Dragon if you were attempting to burst a target for the extra jump damage. Enochian you would only use if you were able to setup and turret. DoT's were effective and especially when stacked and purify was down. Ninja you would primarily aeolian edge as it yielded more burst damage than applying your dots. So it really boiled down to knowing how to play the class than a problem with button bloat/usefulness. AoE abilities are pointless in PvP and that is not due to AoE healing it is due to PvP being about burst. CC abilties were there for a reason. They also had diminishing returns on them which if your team wasn't focused you would stun/sleep/etc to a point of resistance and then healers, etc would just laugh. A focused team however knew what to do and you were toast. You could say that coordinated versus uncoordinated which people still suffer from today and is the reason why "Healers are too powerful".

PvP in 3.0 wasn't new. PvP has been around since ARR. What changed in 3.0 was Freelancer which really enabled more people to get in.