Request: Please give us alternate ways to obtain PVP armour and weapons

**Divinemights** · 04-05-2018 04:46 AM

What are you two are arguing at?
I thought OP is talking about the alternative ways to obtain those vendor PvP weapon and gear because he is on Gaia data centre and unable to get it because he is not on board with JP prime time.

**Aviars** · 04-05-2018 05:48 AM

Originally Posted by Divinemights

What are you two are arguing at?
I thought OP is talking about the alternative ways to obtain those vendor PvP weapon and gear because he is on Gaia data centre and unable to get it because he is not on board with JP prime time.

He goes into every thread trying to ask for the hellhound mount cause he like, wants it really bad! So I just try to shut down the entitled attitude that such a thing creates.

You are right that the OP is referring to items that you can buy with wolf marks already though. I personally think SE needs to do more to make PVP fun and perhaps more accessible to smaller amounts of people. Rival Wings requires I think around 48 people per game. Shatter at least 24. Square Enix should be trying to release modes that require less people. Capture the flag type gamplay can easily be made to require two 8 man teams, lowering the number of people required to get a game started by a huge margin.

However moving PVP items to the golden saucer just doesn't make sense to me at all. Fixes should be within PVP not shoved off to another game mode

**Gallus** · 04-05-2018 06:01 AM

Do you really think the PVP community of FFXIV is small because SE failed to make it fun/balanced? Personally, I don't think so.

The community is small because it's PVP, simple as that. PVP attracts the worst kind of behaviours, people that insult you, trash talk, afk, ragequit, ignore mark spam you, add you to their friend list to further insult you. That's PVP.

Not SE's fault that most people that play this game don't want to go through the above. PVP online communities are just insufferable. FFXIV is no exception.

They even had to remove the chat because the harassment was overwhelming.

I'd vote yes to not locking anything behind The Feast Ranked, not because I don't think there shouldn't be any exclusive stuff, but because locking it behind a place where you are most likely gonna get bombarded with crappy language and insults is not a very good idea. Most people won't even bother stepping in (for obvious reasons) and most new players that give it a try will not take long to regret it.

**Zojha** · 04-05-2018 09:39 AM

Originally Posted by Gallus

Do you really think the PVP community of FFXIV is small because SE failed to make it fun/balanced?

Considering plenty if not most of the top popular games on the market are PvP games and a lot of FFXIV players are playing those games on the side, especially during patch lulls...
I'd say yes, that's a fair assumption. LoL has been known as one of the most toxic games out there (it coined the term), but that didn't stop it from gaining millions upon millions of players - 100 million monthly active users, concurrent user peaks in the double digit millions. Top games on Steam are PUBG, DotA2 and CS:GO, with 2,4 million, 600k and 500k daily peak respectively. And that's just a few where you can get actual numbers (Blizzard is secretive about numbers). For comparison, our lodestone surveys usually only spit up around 700-500k characters over several months.

The main things hindering PvP popularity are:
a) It's bad
b) It requires a subscription (though as stated in a different thread, I'm not so sure about this point anymore with the Free Trial changes)

The first point is why a good amount of players who already have a subscription simply goes to play PUBG, LoL or something if they feel like PvP, rather than stepping into Frontlines or Feast. The latter is self explanatory.

And that's why I personally also would rather not have to step into it for certain rewards. In fact, it's a pet peeve of mine when people clamor for even more rewards to try and get people to put up with that mess while denying that it is a mess. Though I suppose it's natural not to consider it a mess if one is part of the enviable minority that actually enjoys it.

That said, the OP has two options: Wait until a new mode gets introduced and queues are popping briefly so he can snatch the wolf marks he needs and run off, or organize matches himself. Custom games don't give wolf marks IIRC, so they'd have to pick a different mode to farm in and Feast training is probably the easiest, since it only requires 8 players and you're not likely to disturb people much, because it's dead as fried fish.

I doubt SE would make the rewards available outside of PvP. More likely they'll just add more on top and you'll have to work off the backlog while you can.

**Gallus** · 04-05-2018 07:31 PM

You are neglecting so many things here.

Most FFXIV players did not come to FFXIV thinking they'd go nuts with a PVP system. The average FFXIV player can't deal with the sort of harassment you come across in any ranked mode. Why do you think SE tries as hard as possible to protect their players from getting harassed? They can go as far as to remove the chat in an attempt to avoid such thing. The reason they are very strict with these kind of behaviours is because they are well aware of the nature of their subscribers. Have you forgotten about the dozens of threads we had about people threatening to quit because they felt disheartened after a bunch of veterans left them behind in Praetorium when they were watching cutscenes? That's child's play compared to the garbage you have to go through in a ranked mode. And SE's policy to protect their players has gone as far as to make these cutscenes unskippable.

Second, the most obnoxious situations always happen in ranked mode, the feast practically exists only in that mode. I can go to LoL and play arams or normal games and have a much more enjoyable time than dealing with the top 100 ignore mark spammers and ragequitters from The Feast. Can I play Normal games in The Feast? Not only queues ever pop, there are no rewards behind normal games (both things are obviously related). What are my options? Frontlines? Rival Wings? They are more like a Circus of Bots than anything.

And last, the Ranked PVP of this game is bound to fail no matter what changes you make. Seeing a lot of people going nostalgic over the old PVP system when on reality there were less people playing back then than now is mind boggling. Why do you think the PVP Ranked community slightly increased? Because they made PVP more interesting? They removed the chat and alleviated the harassment problem to a certain extent that is, but people are already starting to grief others in other ways now that they can't do it through chat anymore; ignore mark spamming, whispering you through an alt or outright leaving the match are apparently the new trend. It won't take long until The Feast is reduced to the same bunch of people that played back then. And it's going to be once again the nature of the ranked players' fault that's gonna ultimately make the Ranked community marginal again; nothing to do with fun or balance.
Watch time prove me right.

**Stormfur** · 04-05-2018 11:43 PM

Originally Posted by Gallus

Really good points

I like PVP, and I like Feast, but putting rewards (not just the exclusive ones, but the GARO horse and such) in there is like "here, drink this toilet water and tell me how delicious it is." Most people hated it, but slogged through it anyway to get the thing and never went back. That's not how you create a community or foster a spirit of cooperation and collaboration -- all things this game is well-known for.

**Kai_Lee** · 04-06-2018 12:34 AM

Your forgetting there is a lot of pve award which will never be available again. Should SE make them available again as well? Would unfair to the players who struck around to get them.

**Zojha** · 04-06-2018 07:32 AM

Originally Posted by Gallus

You are neglecting so many things here.

As do you. And it's gotten lengthy, so I'll put it in spoiler tags to not clutter the page.

Your entire premise for the first paragraph is: FFXIV players are more sensitive than players of other games. Okay, let's accept that for now. It then doesn't make sense however why those same players would play any other PvP game on the side where it's just as bad. You cannot explain that with toxicity as your only factor.

You might have noticed that yourself, because in the second paragraph, you then point out that this toxicity is largely related to ranked and you can play nonranked modes elsewhere where it isn't as bad. Makes sense, considering that they only restricted the chat in Feast.
What doesn't make sense then however is that Frontlines was dead long before Feast or Ranked were a thing. You can blame bots now, but those weren't a thing back then. Bots weren't a topic during the Seize days. And after a short while of quick 72 man pops, it died down to 24 man pops and ridic queues regardless. Shatter, same thing. We also had unranked 8vs8 Feast for a long while. No bots either, no to low toxicity. But they all died regardless. You're free to look at the JP data centers as well - They don't have a big bot issue. Everything dies just the same regardless.
Those modes also already had rewards - An exclusive achievement set (Field Commander), a mount (Aerodynamics System), the PvP exclusive ADS, the Warsteeds, the Fenrir Pup (Feast Unranked), tomes AND wolf marks. They still died. They also tried having dedicated PvP gear and progression as rewards for PvP in the early days. Result? Dead content and people abusing the lack of players to reliably trade wins.

And because they all died, SE over and over decided to increase the rewards. The first bot sightings apparently came with Garo, XP with Stormblood sealed the deal. That's why it's a "Circus of Bots" now and you don't have those options anymore. Ironically, it's a consequence of your own mindset: To shift the blame for the lack of popularity to side factors.
The issue isn't rewards. The issue isn't toxicity. The issue isn't bots. The real issue is that the gameplay is bad and because of that, the game mode keeps requiring more and more rewards to compensate for the lack of innate enjoyment which in turn lures in the bots who want the rewards without having to slog through the actual content. You can argue that this then creates a feedback loop where bots reduce the enjoyment even further, causing SE to require even more rewards leading to even worse botting. Be my guest. But the root of the whole thing lies elsewhere and remains unaddressed.

As for ranked PvP in general, it's a well known fact the vast majority of the playerbase in a given game isn't interested in it - Blame it on toxicity if you like. Even in the actual "E-Sports" titles, you won't find more than about 10-20% of the playerbase participating in Ranked. That is naturally bound to fail in a game that can't even attain a decently sized regular PvP population.
That's why attaining one is the first priority if you have ambitions to create a ranked mode. They just failed to do that since ARR because their PvP is bad and hasn't gotten much better since. And that's what's my concern here. People name all kinds of factors, but all PvP, ranked or casual, large scale or small scale, keeps dying regardless of them all. So it has to be something else. Something they all have in common. Gameplay is by far and wide the most likely candidate.

Finally, I personally doubt the Ranked PvP community truly grew. I think it largely just shifted around as old people left and new blood came in. If it did in fact grow ever so slightly and I'd have to point fingers on the reasons why, my first bet would be the introduction of wolf collars (I.E. guaranteed rewards for participation) coupled with the fact that the Rating system has been turned into a grind metric until Diamond thanks to skewed gains and losses.

I don't think anyone who didn't play before due to toxicity plays now after the chat ban, because you can be toxic without chat as you yourself ceaselessly point out. And if you are right and the chat ban did not in fact alleviate toxicity in a noteworthy manner as people start to be toxic in different ways, then it logically also cannot be a factor for growth either, because the growth is attributed to toxicity being reduced and you yourself claim that it didn't actually do that. It would be a contradiction in itself if it then did contribute to growth.

**Gallus** · 04-06-2018 08:26 AM