Concerns about the Feast.

[Kaliesto]

Now I just started the Feast for the very first time, but I immediately read there was huge issues with botters and Scripters (they're called WinTraders?) in there, and the people behind them have been bragging about it because Square Enix won't do anything to them.

Honestly if this has been a thing in the past few years then why not just give them a alternative punishment and release all past prizes using collected Wolf Collars? That will probably make their blood "Broil II".

Easier route to punish them all, but it just won't make the mounts unique anymore.

Also a lot of Feast Veterans are pretty pissed off this has even been happening.

[Jeeqbit]

In my opinion, there should not be a top 100 because that is just asking for win trading to happen. You should just have to win the feast 100 times in a season to get the rewards. Most people still won't do it so the rewards will still be rare, but it means that nobody can prevent other people from progressing.

[TeraRamis]

In my opinion, there should not be a top 100 because that is just asking for win trading to happen. You should just have to win the feast 100 times in a season to get the rewards. Most people still won't do it so the rewards will still be rare, but it means that nobody can prevent other people from progressing.

I agree. The rewards system is built as if the PvP is ultra-competitive, but that couldn't be further from the truth. They don't design PvP to be balanced (or, at least, they don't work on it enough to ever make that more than an aspirational, permanently-unachievable goal), and, unsurprisingly, as a result it isn't. So people who might otherwise constitute a hardcore, competitive PvP base for the game (however small) don't bother with it... because it's inherently broken, and they don't feel like hurling themselves against that wall. It's time for SE to just acknowledge that.

[HermitUK]

The reward structure could do with an overhaul, and I'm hoping this is coming with the new mode in Endwalker. Rather than time-limited rewards, a top 100 finish should give you a prize voucher you can exchange for any of the previous or current top 100 rewards; that takes some of the time-limited nature out of it, so if there's a mount or armour you really want you can focus on improving over multiple seasons to get a top 100 finish without the pressure to do it in one particular season or lose that reward forever. It also means that you don't end up with very similar rewards between seasons; I fell off the Feast bandwagon in season 8 because the reward was basically the same as season 7's, and haven't really been back since.

Recolours (or in the case of armour, an undyable variation like the Gold Saucer variations of the Garo gear) should be available for something like 10 wolf collars. So you keep the rarity and distinction of the top 100 prizes, but if someone just wants to play a couple of seasons and casually get to gold, they can buy something they like. The current reward structure doesn't offer any value outside of going for top 100 (the PvP weapons from Wolf Collars are all pretty boring), so having some more obtainable prizes would actually encourage more people to play the mode.

Also agreed that SquareEnix need to do a better job of policing those who aren't playing fair. Wintrading can be difficult to prove, but botting at least should be obvious enough to punish. It should be said that there are plenty of people in the top 100 each season who aren't cheating. Those who are do need to be banned, though, and this isn't limited to the Feast, either. There were lots of reports of people using gathering and crafting bots during the Firmament rankings as well which never seemed to be dealt with.

[TeraRamis]

The reward structure could do with an overhaul, and I'm hoping this is coming with the new mode in Endwalker. Rather than time-limited rewards, a top 100 finish should give you a prize voucher you can exchange for any of the previous or current top 100 rewards; that takes some of the time-limited nature out of it, so if there's a mount or armour you really want you can focus on improving over multiple seasons to get a top 100 finish without the pressure to do it in one particular season or lose that reward forever. It also means that you don't end up with very similar rewards between seasons; I fell off the Feast bandwagon in season 8 because the reward was basically the same as season 7's, and haven't really been back since.

Recolours (or in the case of armour, an undyable variation like the Gold Saucer variations of the Garo gear) should be available for something like 10 wolf collars. So you keep the rarity and distinction of the top 100 prizes, but if someone just wants to play a couple of seasons and casually get to gold, they can buy something they like. The current reward structure doesn't offer any value outside of going for top 100 (the PvP weapons from Wolf Collars are all pretty boring), so having some more obtainable prizes would actually encourage more people to play the mode.

Also agreed that SquareEnix need to do a better job of policing those who aren't playing fair. Wintrading can be difficult to prove, but botting at least should be obvious enough to punish. It should be said that there are plenty of people in the top 100 each season who aren't cheating. Those who are do need to be banned, though, and this isn't limited to the Feast, either. There were lots of reports of people using gathering and crafting bots during the Firmament rankings as well which never seemed to be dealt with.

I thing a 'top 100' system is going to be garbage until such time as they design a system that doesn't allow for win trading. And since they seem to outright refuse to police their own design for that very behavior, then the top-100 needs to be dropped. As Jeeqbit said, just turn it into a grind, because 99 percent of the people playing this won't be able to stomach the Feast anyway. At least open a clear avenue for people to be guaranteed the rewards if they put in the effort. Because the current system isn't rewarding skill.

[HermitUK]

I thing a 'top 100' system is going to be garbage until such time as they design a system that doesn't allow for win trading.

As a starting point they should prevent people playing alts in the Feast; it wouldn't stop every instance of the practice but I think it would reduce a lot of the behaviour, since you wouldn't be able to trade without losing your own ranking.

You'd probably need to limit Feast to one character per data centre, or maybe even one per account (to stop Player A throwing games on Chaos while Player B throws games for him on Light, for instance). It is a bit silly that one player can earn rewards multiple times, given the already limited number of them.

Better monitoring on SquareEnix's part would be good, too. You could punish traders by removing rewards and issuing bans from future Feast seasons, even if you didn't want to outright ban them from the game. But proof is tricky - it would be good if the servers saved Feast game recordings (bit like how Duty Recorder works) so that GMs could review the games of suspect players when they get reported.

[Nanne]

. You could punish traders by removing rewards and issuing bans from future Feast seasons, even if you didn't want to outright ban them from the game. .

There was a wintrader during Stormblood that was removed from the top 100 list. They got banned for 1 week but GM's didnt remove their rewards so they still to this point have the reward from that season.

[Vejjiegirl]

Now I just started the Feast for the very first time, but I immediately read there was huge issues with botters and Scripters (they're called WinTraders?) in there, and the people behind them have been bragging about it because Square Enix won't do anything to them.

Honestly if this has been a thing in the past few years then why not just give them a alternative punishment and release all past prizes using collected Wolf Collars? That will probably make their blood "Broil II".

Easier route to punish them all, but it just won't make the mounts unique anymore.

Also a lot of Feast Veterans are pretty pissed off this has even been happening.

I've been pvping since Season 1 and top 100 every season..
In older seasons Boosting and Alts were the main problem as wintraders were normally banned or removed from the board very quickly.
It wasn't until recently (Season 17,18 and 19) that wintrading became much more of a problem.

It also depends on what Data Center you are pvping from as well. Primal Data Center has the most cheating and wintrading, while it's harder to find on aether and crystal. It's mostly due to how the pvp communities on these Data Centers
Handle cheating. On primal it has sadly become more accepting to allow cheaters in the community many turn a blind eye to the cheating or even go as far as to befriend the cheaters so they don't get their games thrown.

There was a wintrader during Stormblood that was removed from the top 100 list. They got banned for 1 week but GM's didnt remove their rewards so they still to this point have the reward from that season.

This happened in Season 18 as well there was a very big twitter post by a pvp streamer trying to raise awareness to the major problems happening in pvp, Long story short the cheaters were abusing the current ranking system and cheating with teleport bots in order to get free wins. The Cheater apparently got banned but their top 100 ranking didn't get removed. You can probably find the tweet itself by typing "Cheating in Feast Season 18" in Google. It was a very very big issue as the person in charge of the cheating actually stole the rank 1 spot by wintrading and organizing with another player to tie