Is PVP just luck?

[Themarvin]

PvP is not just luck, you really need to put in an effort and with ranked, this more you climb this more effort people want to put in.

[Mistress_Irika]

I play monk in PVP, and the go to play seems to nuke that class down. I've had multiple games were a player on the other team will solely focus on hunting me down the whole match. I've gotten really good at delaying the inevitable, but its hard to play a mode when you spend most of it dead or running away and hiding behind barriers to use an elixir.

I am appreciative of the feedback, but overall this isn't for me.

You should give yourself more time to learn honestly.

It seems like it's more luck base, because you're still learning pvp. That's normal.

My only advice is to be greedy and care for your own survival. You're in a solo q environment. People aren't going to play like how you want them to play. Worry about you and not trying to accure many deaths. Everything else will naturally follow over time. This isn't the only team game that's like this.

[Kelayda]

I took a break from PVP, and came back to playing a few days ago. Accepting that I was just gonna lose a lot, and focused on staying alive has helped. My win/lose ratio is still abysmal, but I am seeing that there is some skill to the madness of PVP.

I still wish the mode had some kind of replay feature, or a better battle log to parse what's happening. A lot of the frustration for me comes from not knowing what's going on. Even something simple, like showing what skill killed you, rather than just the class, would help. (I can't tell you how long it took me to realize that Machinists have a one shot LB with an ungodly range).

[Mawlzy]

I took a break from PVP, and came back to playing a few days ago. Accepting that I was just gonna lose a lot, and focused on staying alive has helped. My win/lose ratio is still abysmal, but I am seeing that there is some skill to the madness of PVP.

I still wish the mode had some kind of replay feature, or a better battle log to parse what's happening. A lot of the frustration for me comes from not knowing what's going on. Even something simple, like showing what skill killed you, rather than just the class, would help. (I can't tell you how long it took me to realize that Machinists have a one shot LB with an ungodly range).

A time-consuming approach is to experiment with all jobs so you get a stronger understanding of how to defend against them and exploit their weaknesses.

[Valence]

I took a break from PVP, and came back to playing a few days ago. Accepting that I was just gonna lose a lot, and focused on staying alive has helped. My win/lose ratio is still abysmal, but I am seeing that there is some skill to the madness of PVP.

I still wish the mode had some kind of replay feature, or a better battle log to parse what's happening. A lot of the frustration for me comes from not knowing what's going on. Even something simple, like showing what skill killed you, rather than just the class, would help. (I can't tell you how long it took me to realize that Machinists have a one shot LB with an ungodly range).

Recording your games locally can already help to look them over calmly after.

What you do also can look for in the scoreboard at the end is multiple factors:

- Damage dealt isn't the alpha and omega. If you get constantly targeted and bullied, especially if you're melee or the single melee and only playing on point and pushing, it means you're gonna defend a lot more than actually attacking and your damage will be lower, and you'll soak a lot of damage that won't go onto your team mates. The good metric for this is how many times you died comparatively to the damage you ate and dealt.
- Damage dealt will depend on the job. Top damage dealers are usually heavy AoE padders and pressurers like SMN, DRG or MCH. If you know an average of what can be expected of your job (comparatively to other jobs) it can help inform a little. Obviously the longer the game the higher the damage so it's more important to see where you end up compared to others. SCH is a big exception in relation to damage because the way the job works.
- Related to just above, a losing team tends to align less damage than the winning one, which indicates that the winner has been dominating in engagements and pushed the other one on the defensive, guarding, retreating, and staggering respawn so that their damage just peters out. Sometimes a losing team can show as much damage as the winner, and the amount of deaths can be extremely low on the winner side, which usually means that one team was unable to breach through the other's defenses in spite of similar damage output and pressure. This can be due to a lack of focus burst compared to the other, and/or one has stupid strong defensive jobs like AST etc.
- Time on crystal can be important especially when you were on the defensive side all the time and lost. If someone has no crystal presence, they probably griefed you if you were defending. For the winner, it doesn't mean much since ranged jobs maybe just didn't need to get on point to push much.
- HP restored is secondary but can give you an idea how well you performed as a support (heal/tank), especially heal if your damage output is also high as well, then you're goated.
- The most important part is your total amount of kills and assists. It doesn't matter whether you killed or assisted. What matters is the total of both combined, and then compared to the total kills done by your team. If everyone in your team has a total close enough to the team kills, and yours is lower, then you're probably griefing and not participating in bursts or main action when it matters. If everyone has a total twice lower than the team kills, that tends to be a clear indicator that everybody is running around the map like monkeys doing small fights that lead to nowhere.

[Bureda]

Go AST, SAM, PLD, RDM, SCH and you'll climb through attrition. The match making is non existent and the only two consistencies are it will try to bring you around 50% WR and it depends on which team ends up throwing the hardest. Unlocking a point is worthless, overtime makes no sense so unless you have a good game sense or lots of free hours I would just pick a stat check META job. Green jobs do everything better except for Sage. That one is balanced but seems pathetic by how excessively effective their green cousins are.

[Kelayda]

I played around 40 hours of last season, and around 1 for the new season. I don't think I'm ever going to get out of bronze. I have been pitted against the same pre-made FIVE TIMES IN A ROW. I don't understand. They've curbstomped me every match. This isn't fun. This is awful. If this is how normal ranked PVP is, I get why no one does it.

EDIT: PvP is pure luck and rng. I'm done.

[Sinstrel]

I played around 40 hours of last season, and around 1 for the new season. I don't think I'm ever going to get out of bronze. I have been pitted against the same pre-made FIVE TIMES IN A ROW. I don't understand. They've curbstomped me every match. This isn't fun. This is awful. If this is how normal ranked PVP is, I get why no one does it.

EDIT: PvP is pure luck and rng. I'm done.

Its unlikely you ran into a pre-made in Bronze. Most likely what is happening is that matchmaking system is trying to create a Bronze lobby and you all were the only 10 players still in Bronze at the particular time you qued. This is most likely due to de-rank protection, where once a player makes it out of Bronze, they can never fall back into bronze and populate your que/lobby again.

I think its time we get rid of the de-rank protection. Its an archaic system implemented at CC's conception to give all players a false sense of progress by helping everyone who participated reach Crystal rank in Season 1 (2 and 3?). The system was later nerfed a bit to provide protection at Platinum 4 in order to keep Diamond lobbies active and que times reduced. All players are required to come together on a single data center to populate ques now, there is no need for de-rank protection to exist anymore and the de-rank protection is no longer helping improve que times, it actually is damaging to que times at lower ranks since 60% of the playerbase is locked at Platinum 4 and can never fall down to populate these lower rank ques with more players.

[ShiyuuHQ]

But they locked cool weapons and armors behind ranked pvp, in a 'very good' pvp. You'll surely do PvP for cool armors right? It's fine, I'm in the same boat. I'll never see crystal rank, but here we go again. Had to take a week off work, because after 2 weeks of the new pvp seasons from bronze to gold is dead.

[ThaCa]

I played around 40 hours of last season, and around 1 for the new season. I don't think I'm ever going to get out of bronze. I have been pitted against the same pre-made FIVE TIMES IN A ROW. I don't understand. They've curbstomped me every match. This isn't fun. This is awful. If this is how normal ranked PVP is, I get why no one does it.

EDIT: PvP is pure luck and rng. I'm done.

They practically ruined the lower brackets for late comers. The extension of the first bracket from Rank +/- 1 to Unranked -> Gold makes it so that those few who didn't push Platinum or up now have to deal with the cess pit where only handful of players play which results in harder and harder matches the closer you get to ranking to Plat. My diamond friend struggled with it for a while because once he hit gold he had to deal with 4 unranked/bronze teammates who probably didn't have all the buttons bound to play against a team of silvers who despite being bad would still run over the unranked/bronze team. So if you are late to the party you have to punch way past Gold skill level to actually get out from the bracket or be lucky enough to play at a time when the lobbies are mostly silver/gold if there even is that many players left.

As for rng, good players can still climb, but you might need to game the system if the player pool is limited. Like counter picking the same Job that the weakest player in current pool is playing and just outvaluing the matchup hard or taking a break if the system keeps pitting you into a team that is heavily disadvantaged against the opponent several times in row. For lower ranks I recommend choosing a Job based on what you think is the winning move. If you have no idea what's going on with the player pool just pick some heavy duty carry Job and outvalue the enemies hard. If you want to push player number advantage get a Job that has big burst and crippling stuns/silences and just follow up on your teammates targets the whole match. If everyone keeps just running around, pick a Job with good survivability and try to aggro 2 or more enemies and keep baiting them to chase you around the map.

If all of it was pure luck there would be no way the same names keep hitting the top 100 lists every season.