So...gonna re-release previous PvP series rewards for crystals or NOT?

[Commander_Justitia]

Considering the amount of win-trading that was going on back then (to say nothing of possible cheaters), hard to tell who "did them justice" at the time either, lol.

Less than most think.

[Commander_Justitia]

It's not a medal, I find myself not caring at all about the PvP titles that say you played good in 2021 or whatever.
This is glamour, mounts, etc in an MMORPG. Any experience with the genre should tell you these are among the most sought-after items across games. The company put resources into making them and still have those assets in the game. So, why should anyone be barred from getting them based on what time it is?

It was a competition, if its not a medal - why only the winners get it?
They should be barred, because they didn't win it. It is PvP, you have winner and loser. It is not PvE - where everyone can be a winner. Like show me PvP modes where everyone is a winner?

If I want a medal for winning the world cup, I can just buy one and pay someone to put my name on it, because there's nothing in the real world you can't get with enough effort and dosh either. But this is a video game we're talking about, and the stakes are infinitely lower

As a legacy player, if they brought back all the exclusive items from 1.x back tomorrow, it wouldn't bother me in the slightest,

You personally say the stakes are lower, which is your opinion. There are many games (and players) who do not see it that way, like e.g. WoW if you want to stay in the same genre.
Some players worked really hard to obtain some of the items, if they knew they can just get them a few years later with basically pretending to afk in frontline, why would anybody spend their time in any ranked mode again? It is already bad as it is right now.
Many care about the items, but they do not care about PvP or the players who like PvP.
I know it is difficult to accept, when the rest of the playerbase is used to getting spoonfed rewards every other patch - but guess what, it is just a video game, it doesn't matter if you can't get every item in the game. Just like I can't get every item, it is just pixels, so why bother? I can use the same arguments. It is just a memory, you lost a season and didn't get anything. Too bad.
I guess if they really want to do it, they should start chronologically then, release the legacy tattoo and chocobo for everyone. Let us see the shitstorm from that... Wanna get reminded of the legacy white raven earrings? When Yoshida had to apologize? You think they will do it again? lol

Irrelevant, medals are like titles or more accurately the frames, gear is a different beast.

We didn't get medals. We only got gear/mount and titles. Titles that repeated every single season, not even more achievement points for getting them again. The gear was the medal.
One season we didn't even get a title. We only got the gear and trophy. We asked SE if we could get the team title because we won the team season, but they said No. And still hate them for that :P

I have seen people here on forums complain during seasons where the max rating to get top100 was gold. You could have gotten that rating as a good player in 5hrs playtime, as a bad player maybe 15hr, goldtier meant like a 36% winrate, platinum was 43%. And still they posted here silly threads about not having enough time to play ranked. Why should I care about what they want when they didn't wanna put in any effort at the time?
Do I get ultimate weapons from doing moogle events? It is just gear right? It is a different beast. So everyone should have it, if they are really good enough doesn't matter. /s
Next argument: "Even if I wanted, I couldn't today, because it was a timegated season but PvE can be done any time"
Well, you could actually want them to rank top100 again to get old rewards, which would be worth an idea?! But you see, PvP is now so casual that even the worst players perform decently well and the best players perform decently bad. It is no real competition anymore, it has become a grind. How is that equivalent?


The fault lies with SE for not making a better reward system at the time. Which many PvP players at the time encouraged them to do. Because the players knew it sucked getting place 101+ and not getting anything to show for it, not even a low tier reskin of a mount or skin, or any currency to exchange something with (it took them to add wolf collars, and now they are kinda worthless too). And we begged SE to finally do something about it, and they haven't done it for years, for over 20 seasons. And that dissatisfaction with the reward style, you want to take out on the PvP players who played at the time now. Nah, f that.

It's certainly more than one might be willing to accept.

US was worse with wintrading from what I could tell. EU was almost nothing. Mostly individual players, getting removed 1 or 2 was already a big story. Let us say there are 5, you still had 95 legit players...If you go on reddit or listen to your pals who hate ranked PvP and trashtalk it, you would assume the number is 50+. They are all exaggerating or referring to US datacenters. Which boils down to SE again, why didn't the GM enforce it better and banned people faster? Who knows.

[Picothea]

It was a competition, if its not a medal - why only the winners get it?
They should be barred, because they didn't win it. It is PvP, you have winner and loser. It is not PvE - where everyone can be a winner. Like show me PvP modes where everyone is a winner?
[...]
Some players worked really hard to obtain some of the items, if they knew they can just get them a few years later with basically pretending to afk in frontline, why would anybody spend their time in any ranked mode again? It is already bad as it is right now.
Many care about the items, but they do not care about PvP or the players who like PvP.
I know it is difficult to accept, when the rest of the playerbase is used to getting spoonfed rewards every other patch - but guess what, it is just a video game, it doesn't matter if you can't get every item in the game. Just like I can't get every item, it is just pixels, so why bother? I can use the same arguments. It is just a memory, you lost a season and didn't get anything. Too bad.

Reading all this, I have to ask: Why does it matter so much to you that these items are time-sensitive and exclusive? Just to be clear, I haven't seen any person here say "we need ways to get them without winning" - it has been suggested, but not demanded. The main issue people take with this is the time-sensitive nature. If you could still earn these items, even if you have to reach victories to do so, there would be no problem here. Please argue in good faith.

Edit: Furthermore, ultimate raids and other high-end PvE content do not have limited rankings. It's not the first 100 clears who get ultimate weapons. It's anyone, anytime, no matter how old the ultimate raid is. Again, please argue in good faith.

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

Disclaimer - I am not sharing their opinion 1:1, as I am in the camp of "it's fine to make replicas and make the originals stand out, maybe make replicas always available but meaningful to grind to". However, as a fellow Ranker, I can understand where they're coming from and I can offer some insight on that opinion, objectively.

Reading all this, I have to ask: Why does it matter so much to you that these items are time-sensitive and exclusive? Just to be clear, I haven't seen any person here say "we need ways to get them without winning" - it has been suggested, but not demanded. The main issue people take with this is the time-sensitive nature. If you could still earn these items, even if you have to reach victories to do so, there would be no problem here. Please argue in good faith.

I'll summarize Feast rewards as such - they are not mere rewards, they are trophies visibily signifying prestige and accomplishment. They actually explained the reason for "why" the time-sensitive nature remains in place as such:

Some players worked really hard to obtain some of the items, if they knew they can just get them a few years later with basically pretending to afk in frontline, why would anybody spend their time in any ranked mode again?

If I knew that top rank rewards actually would've been rereleased at some point in the future, I'd have never bothered with Feast Ranked in the first place and opted for the path of least resistence - why sweat early if everyone can have it eventually?

This is a difficult problem, because I can speak from experience, ranking Top 100 in Feast days was tough in seasons with desirable trophies (particularly gearsets), because people really gave it their best to get them; player quality and morale was HIGH despite the issues The Feast had. It's the same reason why Crystalline Conflict Ranked also basically suffers - with very minor exceptions, there is literally nothing to aim towards when playing ranked; the tier rewards outside of Crystal are paltry and repetitive, the Augmented Hellhound weapons are "so-so" and the portrait elements Top100(300) and Top30(100) are honestly a one-and-done unless you care for specific numbers on them.

In short, Ranked feels like shit because players have no incentive to be better aside from personal desire to be better. Rereleasing the Feast rewards might turn off even more players to try hard enough because "why bother".

Edit: Furthermore, ultimate raids and other high-end PvE content do not have limited rankings. It's not the first 100 clears who get ultimate weapons. It's anyone, anytime, no matter how old the ultimate raid is. Again, please argue in good faith.

This argument is brought up quite a few times and quite honestly, it'll fall on deaf ears for a couple of reasons:

• High-end PVE (Savage, Ultimate) has you fight a scripted boss and perform a static dance; the challenge will never expire and the boss is not learning how to play against you. You are not fighting other players for your ultimate weapons and titles, you are only fighting your own competence against the content.
• High-end PvP (Ranked) fundamentally requires 50% of players to lose so the other half can win. The challenge here is learning to be better than your opponents, which will change with each match, let alone season or even expansion. The challenge expires as players shift out - you will never face the same toughness of opponents in seasons where the rewards were incredibly desired; if you weren't there for any reason when the best players were duking it out in those seasons to earn them, what reason other than essentially socialism and "I pay a sub and I think I deserve it anyways" do you honestly have if you are never going to face the same challenge as them?

For Top Rank rewards to make sense, there needs to be a time gate, otherwise it is no different to Wolfmark and Trophy Crystal shop items. It simply is not comparable to Ultimate Weapons in any way other than being from the highest relative content of their type (PvE and PvP).

[Commander_Justitia]

.....

Yes, thanks for explaining further.

Once again like so many years ago I present my model. Which is not that different from WoW.

You can make 3 tiers of ranked PvP rewards.

For

A) the casual PvP players, who do not really want to play Ranked - but want to have something to do
- you give them a base version of the mount/glamour that they have to painstakingly have to grind out over several weeks per item, it is a longterm reward, a punishment for not being in that season and competing in it
e.g. a token for 20k wolfmarks, you need to collect 20-50 tokens per piece to complete a set or buy a base version of a mount

B) the players that play Ranked PvP, but do no rank in the top ranks
-previously they were place101+, it might now be place301+, these players did get nothing in the past. With how the tier system works today, Crystal Tier being the new top tier, I would make a cutoff at platinum. Everyone with platinum rank or higher would get the base version immediately after season ends. These players will not have to grind the items over weeks, they can show them off directly. As extra you could make them dyeable and the ones with wolfmarks could be not. If you rank below platinum, you get tokens according to your tier. Which will make the grind less long.

C) the maniacs who played this abomination and actually ranked in the top rankings
- give them a unique version of the mount or glam that has some differences, that will set it apart from the base version. This could be particle effects, this could be added details to glam, this could be more dye options, this could be being able to glam them on every other class, while the base version can not. And if SE really wants to invest here, they could allow players to unlock e.g. new limit break animations or victory animations in PvP with that set equipped. In Guild Wars 2, if you unlock a new PvP rank, you will unlock finisher animation for killing an enemy player. And the higher you get the more awesome they look. This is horizontal progression, skills stay same, they just look cooler.
-For mounts, I like the WoW approach, on top of a bit difference in detail, they had different mount speeds, gladiator mounts were a little faster than your regular mounts. Or once again, animations. Some mounts have skills that perform an action etc. They could have made a hellhound mount howl loudly with a reddark aura around it like you know from Void Arc before the endboss, on a 10min cooldown or something. It would have set these players apart from the base version, which would not have these effects.
Making these things special, costs dev power though.

Achievement hunter would be happy, they get the same mounts, just effects are different. Glam collector are happy, they get the skin they wanted, better than not having it at all. (disregarding how many users now use mods anyway, and dont really care how they look like without mods, they could just give themselves the ranked PvP glam, like some do). And Ranked PvPers are happy, they invested time and skill, and got something to show for it. All happy.

SE did good initially with wolf collars. It was the right way. Then they devalued them by adding yet another PvP currency Trophy Crystals...
Then they added wolf collar upgraded versions, which I am happy about, I suggested it often back then. I thought they would make the upgrade with x amount wolf collars, but nope.
Wolf collar #2 - these red victory crystals that you need to upgrade the wolf collar weapons, which you only get by Crystal or top rankings. They could have just kept it at just wolf collars...without Trophy Crystals without Red Crystals...

They basically created two PvP shops for different currencies, but both do the same. You get wolfmark/trophycrystal currency for playing PvP, lose or win, doesn't matter. So why do we even need both? Why couldn't they just simply increase the wolfmark limit to 50k or something and adjust prices accordingly. And keep a way to get "token" type currency, like wolf collars, based on your ranked tier.

Because now.... They will need to add yet another currency. That does the same as wolf collars did initially.

But I assume, it is too much dev time spend on PvP for such a system. They would need to create 2-3 slightly different versions per series instead of only 1. And fixing old Feast rewards like that...where top100 on chaos was the only EU datacenter back then...It means like fixing it for a handful people that still play, possible under ten. I do not think they will want to spend hours on items like a hellhound upgrade, for a few people.

They will either just give it everyone, or will never do anything about it anymore. But both options will cause a dissatisfaction in the community.

[Commander_Justitia]

Reading all this, I have to ask: Why does it matter so much to you that these items are time-sensitive and exclusive? Just to be clear, I haven't seen any person here say "we need ways to get them without winning" - it has been suggested, but not demanded. The main issue people take with this is the time-sensitive nature. If you could still earn these items, even if you have to reach victories to do so, there would be no problem here. Please argue in good faith.

Edit: Furthermore, ultimate raids and other high-end PvE content do not have limited rankings. It's not the first 100 clears who get ultimate weapons. It's anyone, anytime, no matter how old the ultimate raid is. Again, please argue in good faith.

Because the time to fix it, has passed. You have a wildly different PvP game now. It is simply not comparable anymore. It has experienced massive casualization. Like I said..

the players knew it sucked getting place 101+ and not getting anything to show for it, not even a low tier reskin of a mount or skin, or any currency to exchange something with (it took them to add wolf collars, and now they are kinda worthless too). And we begged SE to finally do something about it, and they haven't done it for years, for over 20 seasons. And that dissatisfaction with the reward style, you want to take out on the PvP players who played at the time now. Nah, f that.

I think it is good to have a game where some items are rare. This game has almost no rare items. Everything is obtainable fairly easy. To have a few rare items that only a few players can get, shouldn't be such an issue. But if you only played this game, and only experienced getting every item and reward as handout, if you only experienced, that you cannot lose, and that even if you lose, you get items like in PvP modes today - then sure "you" come to the conclusion that "you" should have every item in the game somehow. I think ranked PvP players got for their effort not really much to show for. We are talking over almost a decade and we have like 5 unique armor sets and 5 unique mounts total? With 2-3 reskins at least. Even the Gold Saucer got more item updates than ranked PvP.
And regarding ultimate weapons, if you want it to be fair, PvP got easier for a newbie, then you would need Ultimate to be easier for a newbie too. Make me an Ultimate where you only have 6 buttons to press and even if you wipe 50 times, you slowly get your item. That would be "fair". LOL.

[Picothea]

This argument is brought up quite a few times and quite honestly, it'll fall on deaf ears for a couple of reasons:

You misunderstood why I brought up the Ultimate comparison. It's because Commander_Justitia made a bad-faith comparison himself, asking if we should weaken its rewards by offering it in moogle treasure troves:

Do I get ultimate weapons from doing moogle events? It is just gear right? It is a different beast. So everyone should have it, if they are really good enough doesn't matter. /s

Speaking of bad-faith arguments about Ultimates...

And regarding ultimate weapons, if you want it to be fair, PvP got easier for a newbie, then you would need Ultimate to be easier for a newbie too. Make me an Ultimate where you only have 6 buttons to press and even if you wipe 50 times, you slowly get your item. That would be "fair". LOL.

I will simply add this person to my ignore list. Let's argue in good faith, please.

As I'd been trying to say, players here are not unwilling to play PvP. I myself never enjoy PvP, yet I have continually played it to get the rewards which I want. The only problem is time-sensitive rewards. If we have to get a "replica" version of them, that is fine by me.
Regardless of how a ranker feels, FOMO will always hurt a game in the long run. It only grants a short-term benefit of player engagement, at the cost of all future arrivals contending with the knowledge they've been barred from collecting certain rewards due to an arbitrary measure of time. For a game that has been running for over 10 years, these are dangerous notions if they continue to pile up.
If there's rewards, players will play whatever difficult content you throw at them. This is why Ultimates don't need to be nerfed, and nobody here is asking for PvP to be easier. If you build it, they will come.

On the other hand, where is the fairness in cosmetic items being locked (simply, outright locked) to 100 players per leaderboard? Do you know how many thousands of players play this game? If someone cannot even agree the quantity of a few hundred players is far too low, then I can only call them selfish and vain. I do not even know why we should give filespace on our computers to these assets if we are going to be permanently unable to obtain them and unlikely to so much as lay our eyes on them - they're not even used by NPCs, so when do we get to opt out?
But, that is just a spiteful suggestion. If we're never going to get replicas, there's my proposed compromise.

[FudoMyoo]

Considering the amount of win-trading that was going on back then (to say nothing of possible cheaters), hard to tell who "did them justice" at the time either, lol.

omg yes this, i got pissed off with Feast and refuse to take part.