PvP Needs An Endgame Once Again

[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?