Dear Squeenix: Instead of using FOMO to promote PVP...

[Ranaku]

I mean the rewards give you no gameplay advantage and they are all cosmetic, they are freely available to every player unlike feast who was basically just wintrading and having the right connections.

There has always to be either time pressure or another reward to give people the feeling that they actually got something that is worth their time investment. Raiders get to wear really neat glam before everyone else, same with Ultimates. And though they are not timegated they still need a lot of time investment.

So it is just fair that finally pvp players also get at least something to show off.

[Saraide]

I mean the rewards give you no gameplay advantage and they are all cosmetic, they are freely available to every player unlike feast who was basically just wintrading and having the right connections.

There has always to be either time pressure or another reward to give people the feeling that they actually got something that is worth their time investment. Raiders get to wear really neat glam before everyone else, same with Ultimates. And though they are not timegated they still need a lot of time investment.

So it is just fair that finally pvp players also get at least something to show off.

Show off what exactly? That they managed to queue up enough times to get the rewards? You gain almost full progress for losing aswell.

[Ranaku]

Show off what exactly? That they managed to queue up enough times to get the rewards? You gain almost full progress for losing aswell.

Well then it shouldn't be a problem to not miss out on it, right?

[Saraide]

Well then it shouldn't be a problem to not miss out on it, right?

Sure, if you provide the time machine to people who werent playing the game at all at the time. I guess they should have just worked harder.

[Deveryn]

Sure, if you provide the time machine to people who werent playing the game at all at the time. I guess they should have just worked harder.

Moogle events are the time machines / content skips.

[Saraide]

Moogle events are the time machines / content skips.

One can only hope so. I wish SE would just state how/if/when things like the CC battlepass rewards are going to be reintroduced.

[anw]

I apologise forum format isn't really suited to posts like this so it will be a brief bit of flooding/multiposting to get it over with.

I'll start off with the rewards part and move onto the problems with the system later.
Fomo sucks for me. I hate it, I came from a PVP game that had FOMO and I couldn't always do it, sometimes I was injured or in poor health. FOMO works and players do feel bad for "missing out" and they feel pressured to play. That PVP game drained me for other reasons and it's quite similar to CC. I do still enjoy XIV's PVP and Frontlines but not a huge fan of CC.

I *personally* agree with you that CC is not fun to play, but there's no "FOMO" involved in promoting CC, in fact, one of the main reasons that killed CC "Ranked" mode is the lack of rewards & incentives in general.

And if you mean by "FOMO" the Series Malmstones AKA PvP Battle Pass .. it takes 1 day of spamming CC to get to level 25. It doesn't matter if you win or lose, exp almost the same. The entire new PvP system is designed to satisfy casuals.

Even Sprouts are running around in Gridania wearing the Archfiend set for example.

You have no excuses, if you couldn't reach series level 25 then it is what it is.

This post seems good natured at the start but the rewards are there and they are limited. They're straight out FOMO. At the end of the post you even say:

it takes 1 day of spamming CC to get to level 25.

While it's true it COULD theoretically be done in one day, that's not healthy and I'll go out on a limb here and say it's also maybe not what the development team wanted. The battlepass rewards seem very aimed towards a long grind and there'll be a breakdown below once we're done with this post.

You have no excuses, if you couldn't reach series level 25 then it is what it is.

This one's a bit off, while I can see where you're coming from with the "just one day" aspect this may be an MMO and people like yourself and myself may play enough to get to 25 but that 1 day of constant grinding may not be for everyone. You will have players who put it off, you will have players who have unsubbed (the director even stated this is fine) and perhaps returned for the holiday break who may be trying to catch up on other things they've missed and even players who have circumstances in life that prevent them from playing due to real life commitments such as work, family, education and poor health.
So you're right: it is what it is as they would say on twitter & discord.

However is that really a system that works? I want to quickly move onto the time aspect which you mentioned: 1 day of grinding. There was a good post breaking some of it down here

[anw]

Series rank 25 requires an individual to acquire a total of 108,000 Series Rank EXP

Frontlines, being a mode where there are 3 different outcomes, is a bit difficult to average per say, but generally speaking if you were to get a perfectly even amount of games where you come in 1st, 2nd, and 3rd an equal number of times, this would be equate out to roughly 108 games. FL games run, on average, 15 mins from my experience so this would roughly take, on average, 27 hours to complete assuming the average.

Crystalline Conflict on the other hand is a bit easier to math out correctly since there are two possible outcomes. Assuming the average, this would be 137 rounds of Crystalline Conflict. The shorter match timer does speed things up, but a single overtime where a stalemate occurs can easily cause the match to run as long as two or three matches since overtime's time limit is theoretically infinite. As such, the average time used will be equal to the duration of a match, being 5 mins. Using this metric, the average time required for CC is about 11.4~ hours total.

This is about right, my own calculations made for somewhere else came out at 118,000 S EXP but it could be 108k. I calculated for 118 and came out with 148 games and used an average time of 6 minutes per game (accounts for setup & post game) flat and looking at adding in the queue times, overtime etc separately. It works out with setup to be around 13.5 > 14 hours based on your 137 games figure and almost 15 hours on 148.
As you said there was no time taken for queue timers etc, so if we give an extremely swift & generous queue time of 45 seconds we're looking at a little over an hour but there's going to be natural downtime in there.
Time to dump tomes, dump wolf marks, stretch, tend to your body and accept life exists. For a grind that's around 14-15 hours you're looking at something more like somewhere between 2-5 hours of downtime.
Overall it works out as a little under a day but definitely in the range of 15-18 hours when you account for variables and downtime.

tl;dr you can do it in a day via CC but you will hate yourself at the end of it due to imbalanced and unfun game design

You certainly could, but I don't think any health professional would recommend even your lower 11.4 hours estimate in one day. We only have 24 hours in a day, if someone is extremely efficient and sleeps for 4 cycles lasting 6 hours & 15 minutes either way for waking/sleeping then you have 17.5 hours to get your XIV PVP wins in. That's not a lot of time for health, the downtime or queueing.
Players learned during this season that grinding CC isn't so easy as knocking out a swift 15 hour session and that leads us onto the next point.

[ZavosEsperian]

You certainly could, but I don't think any health professional would recommend even your lower 11.4 hours estimate in one day. We only have 24 hours in a day, if someone is extremely efficient and sleeps for 4 cycles lasting 6 hours & 15 minutes either way for waking/sleeping then you have 17.5 hours to get your XIV PVP wins in. That's not a lot of time for health, the downtime or queueing.
Players learned during this season that grinding CC isn't so easy as knocking out a swift 15 hour session and that leads us onto the next point.

Admittedly, the character limit got the better of me because I had to cut a portion of my explanation short to keep it inside the limit. The times I listed were mainly related to overall match times and not all of the extra time involving queues and the 1 minute of setup time. It would likely come out closer to the time you gave if adjusted for that but even then it is somewhat variable where the time can be as short as 15 hours but the upper bound limit can be extremely high for some players due to when they can play the game not lining up with primetime.

No sane person would, or should, grind everything out in a day for a multitude of reasons however people will likely do it because of the rewards since they, until an alternative method is given to acquire them, are affected by FOMO. This type of content does not fit in with the rest of the game's content philosophy in my view.