Just get rid of ranked

[Towa-Musa]

I don't disagree with that take, the ranked feast sets are something I envy, and I wish I were able to get. Wolf mark sets however... They're quite possibly some of the worst looking sets in the game, aside from a few weapons, and Late allagan gear. They may as well have not been put into the game. Of course now they put no effort into any of the sets they've released in EW besides the Archfiend set, and very debatably the False Monarchy gear.

The reskin issue seems to be a bigger problem with the game as a whole if you ask me, considering how lazy they've been with not only PvP gear, but sets in general with 6.XX patches, and even 5.XX patch gear. Bad recolors, sets that dye in horrible ways, ect. I leave that issue for the glamour addicts and miqote players to rant about, however.

I wish the PvP andies could get their points across without making themselves look insecure and either toxic, or bitter. Their commonly rude attitudes make them insufferable to engage with.

Yeah, i agree 100%
They might as well have never put those sets into the game they look so garbage.
Mfs out here lookin like they robbed a thrift store.

[anna-steele]

i like the false monarchy i use it on my paladin

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

I don't disagree with that take, the ranked feast sets are something I envy, and I wish I were able to get. Wolf mark sets however... They're quite possibly some of the worst looking sets in the game, aside from a few weapons, and Late allagan gear. They may as well have not been put into the game. Of course now they put no effort into any of the sets they've released in EW besides the Archfiend set, and very debatably the False Monarchy gear.

The reskin issue seems to be a bigger problem with the game as a whole if you ask me, considering how lazy they've been with not only PvP gear, but sets in general with 6.XX patches, and even 5.XX patch gear. Bad recolors, sets that dye in horrible ways, ect. I leave that issue for the glamour addicts and miqote players to rant about, however.

I wish the PvP andies could get their points across without making themselves look insecure and either toxic, or bitter. Their commonly rude attitudes make them insufferable to engage with.

Look, I want to apologize. I was quite rude with my posts or bitter/heated as you describe it well. And I will admit, the quality and frequency of the set releases have been a bit odd, but that also is relative to the time period they released in. If you would humble me...

For example the Beast Lord series (like Behemoth King/Queen) and the Twelve Deity series are Heavensward sets, the quality of course are a bit hit or miss. But for the time, that was great. The Feast sets that came out in the same period were the Lonewolf/Packwolf and Eaglebeak/Eaglewing(?) sets, which in retrospect don't look as crazy and actually more in line with what released then.

Pre Heavensward, the other sets are considerably less desirable, but a lot of things from ARR looked horribly basic, it was a different time and budget. Feast Ranked didn't exist back then though.

Stormblood is where I definitely see fault, releasing only a single Wolfmark series of armour, which was another asian-themed series in the expansion with three or more asian themed sets across the board from PvE. Maybe they thought the Garo series coming in late HW was enough with it, but I disagree. This was also when they really started putting some effort in their armour design for Feast ranked, starting with Season 5 Hellhound Armour. I can definitely see why people were mad / envious, quite honestly armour design in Stormblood was... bland. It was either primarily asian themed (Genji, Dai-Ryumyaku, Rakshasa, Genyo) or futuristic/tech themed (Lost Allagan, Scaevan, Omega).

Outliers were the semi-medieval Diamond series and the middle eastern Ala Mhigan gear - two of three crafted sets were recolours of Alliance sets from World of Darkness and Void Ark respectively. I will argue, arguably the worst gear design period - overemphasis on specific themes while leaving some rather popular armour sets in Feast. This was also pre-Medical Kit era Feast, which was far more punishing / difficult for newbies to pick up due to Healer stress, so this did not help.

In Shadowbringers they sort of balanced out gear designs from raid, wolfmarks and crafted and was fairly varied. It was also when they reduced the armour rewards from ranked down to the Shadowstalker armour and Shadowcrawler recolour, the rest being exclusively mounts. Garo took a leave though which was sad but we got the Republican and Late Allagan series - albeit without weapons.

And from Endwalker onward, you know how it went - 6.1 rework, Virtu / Prestige recolours for currency, some unique weapons for currency, Battle Passes and essentially nothing for Ranked apart from the one-and-done Ranked borders, which couldn't even be utilised outside of Crystalline Conflict / Adventurer Plate until a later date.

Now, info collection aside, I am genuinely happy for an improvement for Casual rewards and certain things being (more easily) available to the Casual PvP playerbase, regardless what other individuals will claim about me. Arguably in the far more accessible 6.1+ PvP, this is fairly important and I hope they not only keep it up but improve it, maybe make certain things more engaging like making Rival Wings slightly more incentivised so things don't go stale between CC and FL. Or at least giving it a chance to return a 2-man queue option like before CC so friends can play together.

In fact, as I stated many times over prior, I'd be perfectly fine if Feast rewards WERE reintroduced, meeting at least one of the following:

- marking the original items per Datacenter with a #1-100 in the name
- changing the item quality of the original to blue/purple
- calling the returning items "replica" (dyeing still fully available)
- giving the originals an option to have an armour glow maybe?
- if nothing else make them accessible via Ranked, but not necessarily top 100 (see Commendation Crystals they recently introduced).

All I am asking is that people have some understanding that present day ranked has basically no actual incentive beyond playing for Crystal border or some of the Top 100 border for a season at most. We are nearing a full expansion of this dynamic, half the time I was on copium being like "surely they can't just copy paste the same reward over and over".

I fully understand people being envious. I wish everyone to have a good chance at things they want and get it, but at this point I am at least asking people to not look at me like a human pile of scum for simply voicing my concerns with their design decision to the current reward dynamic which went from underfeeding Casuals and giving a bit too much to Ranked to Casuals getting basically everything and Ranked gets arguably a participation price.

And once again I am sorry if I am getting aggressive to other forum members over this, but having to keep on reading "delete ranked" or "never give ranked anything ever again" ad nauseam while there are people who genuinely just want Ranked to coexist and have purpose other than matchmaking, surely you can understand why I am pissed. Noone ever said "never give casual pvp anything ever again" before even at the height of Stormblood Ranked having ALL the good shit. We wanted people to try the mode and get into it, but terrible design decisions about how it worked back then did nothing to help on this.

So at very least if we just cannot see eye to eye how we see things about reward dynamics, can we at least - and I apologise collectively for anything I have said to you Archeron and also Towa - agree to not attack each other calling each other "pvp andies", "toxic casuals" or other crap and instead just verbally advocate for what we currently stand for? I don't believe we genuinely mean ill for the other side, we are literally just bitter about what we lost or don't get.

(and massive apology for this wall of text)

[Towa-Musa]

i like the false monarchy i use it on my paladin

i have it too but... its a bit meh, they could do a bit better.

[Archeron]

snip

I don't disagree that ranked shouldn't have its unique rewards either. I think they do deserve something that sets them apart from the rest for their skills - Which is sorely lacking, as are most rewards introduced in 6.XX. Augmented hellhound weapons are a bad, out of season april fools joke compared to previous feast rewards. The rewards for both Ranked, and casual need to be appealing for people to want to grind. I feel that both sides seem to forget that they should not be fighting each other when we essentially have the same goals, but in traditional forum fashion the threads constantly get derailed.

The common thing that drives us all to do ranked PvP is to get sexy looking gear that impresses people with how sweaty we were to farm it out. Straight up re-releasing that gear would be a direct insult to that achievement, in the same way Ultimate players feel insulted when people get carried, and run around with their ultimate weapons, and titles they put no effort into. I have played many a MMORPG where my hundreds of hours of progress were made meaningless with an easy to accquire re-release of those rewards. Meanwhile casual PvPers have nothing to spend their crystals on, and for sometimes valid reasons choose to avoid ranked. There is nothing for them either. All of us have the season pass rewards, even people who don't care about PvP. But I leave the complaining and adjustments that I want to the crystal shop thread.

I have no ill will to anyone on these forums, and I apologise for calling you a PvP andy. I merely seek to clean these forums up, and remove the toxic attitudes and forum drama that have plagued this place and turned it into one of the worst places for discussions on FFXIV, even below Twitter, and Reddit, and even discord at times. Unfortunately as you have seen in pretty much Every single thread It is quite an undertaking to discourage that behaviour, or to make people understand that a disagreement is not a personal insult.

[Towa-Musa]

Snip

Gonna be honest chief, im sorry for being such a Nob to you since alot of my anger was from being constantly being defamed and essentially being told my opinion is less then others because X,Y and
The constant feeling of being shoved between a rock and a hard place all the while having game devs/suits that always are playing to the JP crowd instead of giving a single lick about us.... gets to you after awhile
I snapped and i apologize that i used you as a punching bag.

[RajNish]

I'm back from vacation and decided to get some fun in ranked games. Estimated waiting time is 30 minutes at my data center. Even for no rank/bronze. Wellp.

[Towa-Musa]

I'm back from vacation and decided to get some fun in ranked games. Estimated waiting time is 30 minutes at my data center. Even for no rank/bronze. Wellp.

Don't feel too bad, you're not missing much.

[Valence]

I've seen weird makeups in casual during off hours for PvP, I suspect just to get matches going when there aren't enough people queued up.

What I take issue is oddities that mathematically should not happen, aka a team with 2+ more healers/tanks/melees than the other (or the other way around, a team with 2+ more ranged DPS than the other). The algorithm seems for the most part usually to split those equally, minus one when there is an odd amount of them for the whole game, but mathematically if you get X ranged DPS for the whole pool queued for a game, then X divided by 2 should never have more than one discrepancy per team, yet it does happen, and it annoys me.

[Elfidan]

I'm back from vacation and decided to get some fun in ranked games. Estimated waiting time is 30 minutes at my data center. Even for no rank/bronze. Wellp.

Typical although we had hoped the weapons might encourage engagement. The midseason lull is here.