Story time:

While I'm proud of this, I do look back and see the flaw of it now: I once gathered some friends and maybe 2 or 3 randoms and outsmarted one of the big bad premades in Shatter. We beat them, and almost never engaged them at all. How did we do that?

I created signal macros and shared them to my friends. The plan was to split up and go after multiple objectives at once. Having been crushed by them MANY times, we knew they were going to play aggressively, and cover each other as they go purely for kills (combined with the points over time from having a base capped) and never touch the ice. So we split up, some went for ice, others went for bases. If we saw them on approach, we signaled with the macro, and scattered - they can't go after everyone without being forced to split up. While the team that spotted them would scatter, the rest rotated clockwise around the map. Base cappers went for the nearest ice, next ones behind them went for a base/near objective. It was a long match, but by the time they caught on, it was too late, and we stole a win.

We won a PvP mode without ever "vP"ing. THAT is what's wrong with Shatter. Couple that with really poor strategies ("ice > kills", waiting for large ice after all smalls activate, and while the other 2 teams are fighting, literally abandoning a strong push against an enemy team to go hit ice, etc.), and Shatter became a really bad footnote in Frontlines, especially as the most current - STILL most current Frontline mode, and the one mode everyone played after 3.5 brought in more players. "Everyone queues for Shatter because everyone queues for Shatter." It was true then, and sadly, if not for the bots and RW's novelty, it would still be true now. In 4.0, when I overheard someone encouraging their friend to queue for Shatter with them because "it's basically like PvE and you don't HAVE to attack any players" I wanted to stop dead in my tracks and correct the guy, but all that would've done is give him reason to want to avoid it still.

Let me clarify something: Player versus Player can be a broad spectrum, yes, but when a mode actively discourages direct player confrontation, that's poor design. This isn't everyone wanting all PvP to just be aimless slugfests like duels, or highly coordinated arena battles like the Feast, but it IS a competition against fellow players. Yet people treated Shatter like instanced hunts, and that was just sickening.

And let it be said that regardless of size, the former PvP community WAS a thriving organism, and quite willing to accept new people in, so long as they were willing to learn and make effort. But until perhaps 3.5, the rest of the community was too busy shunning, avoiding, and dismissing us.

"PvP sucks." (but they never tried it)/"I hate PvP." (based on experiences in other games but none in FFXIV)/"Lol, there's PvP in this game?"/"PvP is so toxic!" (but they never tried to learn, or willfully didn't participate and upset people - yes, I've seen that happen) <-------- If any of that was you before 4.0, congratulations, you were part of the problem.