The general player base needs to improve

[ThirdChild_ZKI]

PVP in FFXIV has always been terrible though. Neither the servers, the game engine or the gameplay is suited for it. And it's not a matter of being good or bad at it.

You know, I've covered this one a lot in the PvP forums.

A lot of people that said it was bad largely never even tried it, rather they just accepted word of mouth about it. Sometimes that word of mouth came from someone who stepped in, performed poorly or was uncooperative with their team (the ol' "first strike", get-them-before-they-get-you defensive attitude) and had a bad experience for it. Some actually did try it and didn't like it, and that's fine. Fact is however, before 4.0, a LOT of people not only enjoyed it, they were good at it. It's popular thought that PvP was "dead" before Stormblood, but there was in fact, an active and competitive community; one that's been all but destroyed by SE's questionable attempts to "fix" and foolproof PvP.

It's also popular thought that the game engine/gameplay isn't suited for it, and that's just not true. It could be better, yes. Hell, it WAS better before Stormblood, but if it wasn't suited for it, they wouldn't have added it. It might come as a surprise, but some of the PvE skills considered useless in PvE were strong abilities in PvP. It doesn't help however, the general avoidance and misunderstanding, combined with overall lack of knowledge of PvP that makes the idea that "PvP in FFXIV was always bad" so popular.

Remember when Yoshi said that he wanted PvP to be an esport? I mean, I think they did a good job with revamping the PvP for stormblood, but even then this games PvP can't really compare to pure PvP games.

You might want to look again. I think it speaks in volumes when the players who were once dedicated to PvP when it was supposedly "bad" largely hate it enough to quit FFXIV entirely. SE ignoring issues with botting/exploiting for XP for half a year, kneejerk changes to a new mode that didn't fix the big problems and made things that worked NOT work, and the repeated, questionably poor changes made to the Feast in an attempt to "foolproof" it and make it an e-sport (while still not addressing the bigger issues like all the cheating and such) really paint a whole different picture.