PvP Rewards; 6.1 and beyond.

[Commander_Justitia]

If simply having the opportunity to obtain items without them vanishing overnight is enough to make you question why you bother to play the game, then yeah I wonder why you log in too.

I don't login atm tbh. How you worded it makes it sound like PvP is unchallenging, going against other players always has some difficulty, PvE can never deliver that as it is scripted fights more or less.
If PvP rewards would have been easy to get in the past, I probably wouldn't have bothered. The time exclusivity isn't really the point, but without a reward incentive, people won't try hard to win and then you won't get quality matches. For many players it is hard to accept that there is an inherent difference between PvP and PvE anyway, as if it has to play according to the same rules as PvE content that can be outleveled.

they want them easily and for free - which based on the posts I've seen in this thread, and other similar threads, simply isn't true. People just don't like the fact that the feast rewards literally became unavailable forever after an arbitrary point of time.

Maybe we haven't read the same, but many are asking for handouts. And even those who don't, they realize that it is hard to create a system that encourages a similar effort made.
Wolfmarks are not suitable, you get them by being afk in frontline...
Wolf collars are not really either, as you get them already for bronze, which even a bot can get (unless they change it to gold/plat minimum).
Some seasons you had a floor of 1400(gold) other seasons 2200, they were more competitive, if you normalize that, the specific difficulty of past seasons will vanish. These 1400/1500 rated bottom seasons are proof that people just didn't care about top100, it was extremely possible to get high gold rating even for firsttimer.

Combine that with the awful reward system and how many servers had open cheaters gate keeping those rewards, you just got a lot of people not even bothering to play it. It isn't a question of whether or not it's easy or hard to get the feast items. It's a problem of the feast being a badly curated mode poisoned by its reward system.

The reward system was bad, yes, but SE received feedback since like season 1 to change it. But they only introduced max rating and made it easier to climb into diamond, it didn't change much for players out of top100, as the wolf collar shop wasn't so attractive.
What numbers are you thinking of, that you think cheaters are able to gatekeep you from those rewards? The last seasons, Primal was bad and blatantly obvious, but usually you end up with like 0-5 cheater/wintrader/booster per season in other dc I know of. How are 5% of the people stopping you from getting a top100 place? I think that is just an excuse to make it seem bad.

Nevertheless SE could have handled the few cases better, but they aren't really bothering with cheaters, there were enough reports. I think it would be unfair if you blame and punish the players for a 'badly curated mode' as you put it.

They are committed to PvP, how would you keep a mode alive for over 6/7 years, when you have limited resources for development? Ranked PvP basically got something like half a mountmodel/glam set per year on average, it's nothing compared to everything else in the game. And I don't see an issue with items no longer obtainable, there are other items outside of PvP like that too. And if you wanna talk about wasted potential in this game you could write a whole book anyway. Idk when I look at WoW and they have like 50 or more mounts that nobody can get anymore, partially Ranked PvP mounts too, then FFXIV has it a lot better already. And when I would see one of them in WoW, I would be happy to see a player still playing who played back then, I wouldn't get this feeling if 20% of all people would have the mount/glam.

They can start anew now with the new mode, priority on 'fun'. I fear though, it will be too casual or messy for ranked, if you don't need a healer in the new mode... We will see. If they do bring old rewards back as their "new content" and make it casual/forgiving for bad players, then I don't think many current PvP players would find it interesting.