PvP Needs An Endgame Once Again

[Zojha]

I mean I've come from/and still play WoW [...]

Which, in fairness, is much bigger than FFXIV is. Their servers can hold up to 50k active characters, Balmung is on perma-lockdown with 22k. Going by the lodestone censi, active characters at their peak are around 800k for FFXIV with around 500k-400k sticking around, WoW had over 11 mill and even the most conservative guesses of current active population are well over one million, i.e. twice to thrice as big.

We can only guess how well WoW's PvP ideas would have worked out with FFXIV's population. We might even be able to see it at some point if WoW shrinks down to that size.

It should also be noted that once upon a time, FFXIV did have real PvP gear and progression. Back then you'd be getting Wolf Marks for PvPing, which could be used to buy gear with Morale, which boosted your item level when in PvP. In Short: You got better PvP gear for PvPing. More than that, you got PvP experience, which allowed you to buy better gear as you ranked up.
The result was constant wintrading in an otherwise fairly dead queue to grind up rank and marks and them putting a item sync into frontlines when it was introduced to essentially neuter the PvP progression system. Fun read with interview link. And you'll find threads about bots to boot. And queue times. And healers. Do you spot any familiar topics here?

PvP in this game has come a long way. And arguably a lot of this way has been off the track.

[uvuvwevwevweonyetenyevweugwemu]

Progression is a tricky thing. If you look at the census, there's more level 30-69 than 70s. I'm not saying it's bad, it's just people aren't that invested in endgames.

There will always be cheaters as there are always carries, I think of win trading as cheaters who prefer to be carried. You will meet them in endgame regardless of how the system works.

The thing that prevent carries from jumping to o3s isn't progression, it's the lock out and lack of rewards. The level of difficulty is separated by roles, not ilevels or stats. The more specific things each person have to do for successful run, the less cheaters there would be. What tier matching in Feast does is only delay 2 cheaters from meeting in same match.

[BloodRubyXII]

Snip.

Yea I know I do remember (note join date). I miss those times I'm not saying ability bloat was the way, but it felt more rewarding than the combo-spam we have now. It's not a bad PvP system, but it's not right for this type of game.

Not sure how I feel about the old gating, on one hand you could gear up and go into ranked, on another - you were disadvantaged on a time level. Like by the time I thought about giving ranked feast ago, my gear wasn't really there, and then when it was there it wasn't itemized very well, plus I didn't have as many PvP abilities/trait points due to rank so I would just get smoked for a while.

[ThirdChild_ZKI]

The playerbase is partially to blame as to why PvP isn't so active; the raiding community is far more inviting to newcomers than the PvP one is (where you'll simply just get abused for being bad).

I'm gonna stop you right there. First, I've said many times, and I'm sure many can agree, there's nothing wrong with being new. We were all new at some point. If anyone's trying to bag on a newbie for being bad, not only is that unrealistic, that's pretty low. With that said, there's everything wrong with being new and refusing to learn. Raiding doesn't have that issue honestly. There's a minimum requirement for it, not unlike what PvP used to have. While that goes beyond gearing, I'll use that as it's an easy note: the ilvl for PvP was ridiculously easy to meet. Best in slot or not, you could buy entry level endgame gear (i180 as of Heavensward if my memory serves) and you'd be just fine, and yet people were showing up in Poetics gear. Allagan gear (Allagan, not High Allagan, i90 Allagan). Glamour gear. And when you say something about it, you're at best ignored. Or perhaps you explain why a particular thing is bad to do and are met with a myriad of lame excuses like "oh whatever, it's just a game"/"I'm just here for X". . . When was the last time you encountered that in a raid? When was the last time someone severely undergeared showed up in
a Savage raid? When was the last time someone was "just here for" in a raid and not only didn't know mechanics, but didn't care so long as they got some kind of participation reward out of it?

Again, it's really not about trying to split up queues, though I would question why there's a need for a separate Normal/Savage raid then? Why is there a line in the sand for "leveling" and "endgame" instances? I don't see opening up PvP to newer/lower-leveled players as a bad thing, and let me be clear on that. But I highly disagree with the directions the whole system overall was taken to facilitate that. Why "simplify" something that wasn't complex to begin with? Why make something "more accessible" when accessibility wasn't the issue, failure to attempt to understand or try to learn was? PvP didn't need simplifying; players needed to make more effort to learn and improve. To be fair, I and many others saw nothing wrong with how Coil worked. The story AND the challenge motivated me to clear it. People understood what needed to be done and (mostly) came prepared and focused. Not only does that not happen with PvP now, it doesn't HAVE to. People that are clearly not prepared for it, nor have to be, nor do they care to be, are lumped right in with the rest, and you're expected to perform as a cohesive unit. That's always been a bad mix where and when it happens in PvE, so I can't fathom why it would be considered okay in PvP.

And on a completely separate-but-necessary note, no, there is no sense of community anymore. When your community is frequently shunned, dismissed, wrongfully scapegoated, and the devs themselves have often, frequently shown a complete disregard for you, to the point of completely changing your preferred endgame activity to something less than what it was, and based on none of your input AS the dedicated community. . . then yeah, there's no community. They were thrown away. Alienated. Upset and moved on.

But hey, at least no one is mean or abusive now, right?

[Nezerius]

Again, it's really not about trying to split up queues, though I would question why there's a need for a separate Normal/Savage raid then?

Because raids have a side story to tell, while in PvP it's more of an excuse to fight each other. People do normal for the story/easy loot, and others do savage for the difficulty/better loot. Your "savage" mode in PvP is ranked feast, while frontlines/rival wings are more like the alliance raid, which also only have a normal mode. Having said that, I do agree that ranked feast should have a max level requirement.

Why "simplify" something that wasn't complex to begin with?

Because enough people deemed it to be too complex and complained about it, so SE changed it.

To be fair, I and many others saw nothing wrong with how Coil worked. The story AND the challenge motivated me to clear it.

I was definitely in the camp of only having one difficulty, like Coil, because the story was my biggest motivation to raid. However, it's also easy to see why SE decided to add a normal mode to see the raid's story, given the amount of people that complained.

Not only does that not happen with PvP now, it doesn't HAVE to. People that are clearly not prepared for it, nor have to be, nor do they care to be, are lumped right in with the rest, and you're expected to perform as a cohesive unit. That's always been a bad mix where and when it happens in PvE, so I can't fathom why it would be considered okay in PvP.

If you honestly think having a 72-man frontline with all 70 randoms is suddenly going to make them perform as a cohesive unit, then I'm not sure what to tell you. Just look at alliance raids, that are all lvl 70, and don't always work as a cohesive unit either.

[Zojha]

Your "savage" mode in PvP is ranked feast, while frontlines/rival wings are more like the alliance raid, which also only have a normal mode.

Not quite correct - By nature, PvP has no set difficulty, it is entirely dependent on the opponent. Every mode can be "Savage" in one pop and "Story" in the next, because in the first you encountered sth like a coordinated premade or a former top 10 player on the enemy team and in the latter you fight a bunch of bots. And no matter how terrible you are, you can still be a winner if you can find someone even worse to fight against.

The whole thing just brings us back to skill ratings - You gotta match people close to their own skill to give them a quality match, else you'll constantly have people fighting opponents that are "too hard" or "too easy" for them. And that brings us back to a lack of participation and the questionable quality of Feast matching.

[BloodRubyXII]

I'm gonna stop you right there.

Nah you're not, I rerolled Scholar midseason in S4 to fill queues and I was stuck in the situation of transferring to reset my rating, but then basically never getting queues or trying to learn fast and play it at the current level I was at which was Plat. I'd played Scholar before obviously, but PvE doesn't exactly transfer well to feast (this goes for most games actually). I somehow got more abuse than the 60 healers who for several seasons had been carried to plat/diamond whilst never ever getting better. How does that in any way make sense. So I just went back to SMN, queued all the rating back I'd lost and sat rating like everyone else does. I highly doubt I was a unique subject to this scenario, maybe the scenario itself is unique to Chaos, but you can see why I might have very little understanding as to how you think the PvP community has nothing to do with why people won't queue even just for fun.

The amount of abuse I got on Discord and in PMs for doing so was unreal though, ended up just going back to WoW before S5 and snatching another title over there instead. Also, no-one ever gave me advice lol. They just simply told me to stop queueing, or they would deliberately stop queueing in case they drew the short straw and ended up with me.

[Nezerius]

Not quite correct - By nature, PvP has no set difficulty, it is entirely dependent on the opponent. Every mode can be "Savage" in one pop and "Story" in the next, because in the first you encountered sth like a coordinated premade or a former top 10 player on the enemy team and in the latter you fight a bunch of bots. And no matter how terrible you are, you can still be a winner if you can find someone even worse to fight against.

Hence the quotation marks, I know PvP doesn't have a set difficulty. However, ranked feast is the closest it can get to a non-casual mode. It's a small-scale 4v4 (8 players) mode, just like savage raiding is small-scale with 8 players fighting a boss.

[Rufalus]

I guess the progression could be like X amount of wins in unrated to unlock rated. So unrated is like Leveling and rated is Endgame. Would force unrated to be a necessary gate.
Add a weekly repeatable quest at Wolves' Den Pier which asks you play one of each: Feast, Borderland, Seal Rock, Glory, Astragalos, for some reward like 1 wolf collar + option of Cracked Crystal, Cracked Clusters etc, those sort of items that people can make money on.

[BloodRubyXII]

I guess the progression could be like X amount of wins in unrated to unlock rated. So unrated is like Leveling and rated is Endgame. Would force unrated to be a necessary gate.

Unranked is dead though, so you'd actually be further gating people from playing ranked when getting queues at Bronze/Silver a few weeks after the season starts is already difficult enough.