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.

[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.