PVP-CC-Rank

[Valence]

This season has been extra bad because it released at the same time than Occult Crescent. The first week was absolutely dead in ranked. It's already problematic when it releases during savage releases, but savage at least generally leaves time for people to play in the evenings their groups don't raid. This time however, it's been a disaster. I actually wanted to take advantage that it happened on my DC to play more than when it is on the other one (which is also a huge detriment to play rates btw), and I couldn't even. Add to that that the high end crowd only starts queuing at crazy times like 22:00 or midnight and you end up with dead queues.

To reply to the OP: generally ranked is extremely FOMO and you'll need to be active in the first weeks of each season, that's when people play before it peters out. Sometimes there is a resurgence in the last week before the next season patch that you can try and take advantage of.

[Divinemights]

To reply to the OP: generally ranked is extremely FOMO and you'll need to be active in the first weeks of each season, that's when people play before it peters out. Sometimes there is a resurgence in the last week before the next season patch that you can try and take advantage of.

FFXIV is a theme park MMO.
Most of its player base is here for PvE content—story, crafting, housing, glamour, raiding—you name it.
PvP has always been a side activity.
And yet, you think the decisions made around Ranked Crystal Conflict (CC) are more important than the broader game experience.
Why should that be the case?
Ranked CC is dying for the same reasons it always has: toxicity, elitism, and win-at-all-costs behavior.
That kind of environment pushes casual players away from the start.

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

Let’s be honest: ranked modes almost always bring out the worst in people. This isn't new—it’s been like this since the days of Feast. The moment a player loses a ranked match, their first instinct is to blame their teammates. It doesn’t matter if they made mistakes themselves—someone else must’ve thrown. This mindset is toxic, and it's exactly why PvP chat is disabled.
[...]
There are more people playing Casual CC than Ranked CC right now. That should say something.[...]

...let's be honest, this applies to *every* game with Online PvP in it and is not limited to Ranked Crystalline Conflict or The Feast. The average player going for the common coping mechanism of rejecting blame is also fairly common elsewhere, but specifically in FFXIV chat gets disabled and turned into quickchat - not necessarily because FFXIV players are so much worse in toxicity, but more probably because of japanese development standards doing this as a preventative measure.

As for "there are more people playing casual than ranked", this has very little to do with toxicity and everything else with the systems surrounding it. I do not like the implication that social behaviour is a primary reason here.

FFXIV is a theme park MMO. Most of its player base is here for PvE content—story, crafting, housing, glamour, raiding—you name it. PvP has always been a side activity.

And yet, you think the decisions made around Ranked Crystal Conflict (CC) are more important than the broader game experience. Why should that be the case?

PvP, within the scope of PvE-centric MMOs, may be a side activity, but has generally been the most standard side activity to be considered and worked on. Story is a baseline, crafting is a means to an end that some people may enjoy as an activity, housing is limited to availability and funds - raiding is arguably "the" main drive here.

PvP being seen as a mere side activity comes from two sides - word of mouth advertisement from other players, that it is awful / forgotten / just side content, devaluing one's opinion and interest before they even touched PvP in the first place; and a variety of rather questionable decisions of how they tried to make PvP approachable and more importantly "worth your time" (or rather failing to do so, despite the miniscule steps required to pull it off), a subject I could dedicate a separate thread to.

That said, Valence did not say that at all, even in the unshortened version. Valence made comments on the state of Ranked CC on how fast it dies out, the most likely chances to have enough games to play Ranked within a season and his experience with how much of a disaster it has been based on the timing of everything else essentially siphoning players away from it. There is no statement whatsoever why it should change, nor any thought why decisions made around Ranked CC are more important "than the broader game experience", which is also fairly odd to suggest given PvP changes can be made that do NOT impact the broader game, this isn't zero-sum game development.

Ranked CC is dying for the same reasons it always has: toxicity, elitism, and win-at-all-costs behavior. That kind of environment pushes casual players away from the start.

Ranked PvP has been a malnourished carcass due to terrible design decisions to make the mode even remotely worth playing. We have an equivalent in PvE regarding this - Criterion. Its' rewards were absolutely underwhelming to the point that active parties died out about the same rate Ranked dies out. Criterion had very little replay value and no interaction with the main gearing system (which has been criticized for a while now) and its rewards were incredibly paltry.

Ranked PvP, pre Crystalline Conflict, at least had people fighting tooth and nail for the Top 100 rewards, because they were actually desirable and worth fighting for. This however was also a time when casual rewards were absolutely lacking (lack of Battle Pass, cool things outside of wolfmark vendor, etc) and the one-of-each-role queue system made The Feast incredibly difficult to approach and learn.

Ranked PvP, post Crystalline Conflict (6.1), has seen a full revision to the reward structure, with GREAT benefits to the casually available items, but at full neglect to Ranked rewarding you anything of desire (which would NOT need to be a FOMO reward, mind you). Ranked PvP went down the same path of Criterion, where the average player sees absolutely nothing worth in it to spend time on it. This isn't a "PvP is a side activity" thing either because they've made side activities with GREAT rewards multiple times - Ishgard Restoration and Cosmic Exploration on the crafting side for example.

It also currently suffers from a death spiral of "nothing interesting for me here before reaching a rank that is out of my skill potential -> I leave -> queue times get too long for me to care while casual has more games -> I leave -> repeat". Crystalline Conflict is fun - but queue times aren't. I do not like sitting between 5-30min for a game of ANYTHING, much less if the result of me doing so does not offer any tangible rewards afterwards.

To say "Ranked is dying for the same reasons it always has" means you actually do not look at the state off things with any analytical thought on objectively distinct designs on its User Experience and reward systems, but rather regurgitate hear-say of what is mostly anecdotal to begin with. This is incredibly disingenuous.

[DallsBeep]

malnourished carcass

A carcass doesn't need nourishment so how can it be malnourished? Food for thought, pun intended.

But yeah imo there should only be one queue and your rank should be tied to your job. So if you wanna play around in the bronze queue you can switch jobs. And even if you don't know how to play it that well, if you're a crystal player you'll still be better than most people at that level. And if you're just hopelessly bad and cause your team to lose all the time then you won't make it very far in which case there's nothing really to worry about. Anyone who knows what they're doing will never stay below Platinum for very long regardless of RNG with bad teams, so "bad players in muh ranked queue" won't be an issue.

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

A carcass doesn't need nourishment so how can it be malnourished? Food for thought, pun intended.

A carcass can be from a nourished entity that dies/died from other reason, a malnourished one implies starvation or malnutrition as the leading cause. Plus since we are in a fantasy game, you can "revive" and then renourish things after all.

Regarding your actual points though:

But yeah imo there should only be one queue and your rank should be tied to your job. So if you wanna play around in the bronze queue you can switch jobs. And even if you don't know how to play it that well, if you're a crystal player you'll still be better than most people at that level. And if you're just hopelessly bad and cause your team to lose all the time then you won't make it very far in which case there's nothing really to worry about. Anyone who knows what they're doing will never stay below Platinum for very long regardless of RNG with bad teams, so "bad players in muh ranked queue" won't be an issue.

Putting aside the previous points that I mentioned in this thread (ranked anxiety, "always having stakes" environment, Frontline becoming the new "casual mode") of why merging Ranked & Casual into one queue is a bad idea...

...it "will" either make queue times insufferable by metric of being queued into your rank pool (as a Gold you can play with Silvers or Plats for example) instead of having the ability to just join for a quick game OR make rank pools not become a thing and greatly diminish the average match quality for higher ranked players, essentially defeating the point of having a "rank" in the first place as it is just Casual with badges then.

There is also the seemingly unexplored idea of "high rank players maybe just want to play a chill round on a job they play less in casual WITHOUT having to wait 10-30min to get a game", which merging queues will not help with.

Regarding the per-job ranking - while it has merit on paper, the problems that arise when implementing this are the following:

• 1.) Ranking up with specific jobs that rely more heavily on team synergy (PLD, SCH, maybe DNC) so you can use them in the higher ranks will be a painful experience as a lot of the viability of said jobs hinges on one's teammates knowledge/ability to capitalize on the support they bring. The common recommendation has been to use self-sufficient or solo carry jobs over supportive jobs in the early skill tiers to climb for this reason, so job-based rank progression gives supportive jobs a huge handicap at the bottom end of the ladder, even if you might be a Crystal player usually.
  -
• 2.) This hard-enforces onetricking, which can become an issue if you play one of the more common jobs on ladder (depending on meta balance at the time) to get queues as only two of a specific job can be present per match. Making it per-role (tank, healer, melee, ranged, caster) would at least allow for "some" alternatives in your job pool to help with job diversity.
  -
• 3.) Speaking of making it per role/job, for anyone on the high-end of the ladder it would essentially discourage them to switch jobs/roles (which is something you should consider depending on maps and specific high-profile players in the queue) as it would not benefit them for Top 300 progression in the slightest. This punishes someone who may be both an excellent Astrologian and Dragoon for instance as they have nothing to gain to switch jobs.

While you might hold the opinion that it may be a good idea, this is what most likely will be the side effect if that opinion would be implemented - based on logical conclusions and/or precedence cases from other games that tried this.

[DallsBeep]

Frontline becoming the new "casual mode"

Frontline should be the casual mode. The stakes are always higher in CC because you as an individual player have much more personal responsibility than you ever will in FL, this is regardless of whether it's a ranked match or not. In fact, removing the distinction between casual and ranked would highly encourage players of all skill levels to take the matches more seriously overall. They should funnel players who are new to PVP into FL so they can learn the basics. They already basically do this by giving players a daily bonus for it, but they could do more. The basis of this thread is the fact that ranked queue dies, that's for a few reasons which are well documented. Higher ranks it's because people get their targeted ranking and then stop and there's no incentive to keep playing. Lower rank it's because most people who are really interested in playing ranked have already surpassed Gold tier and probably a lot due to the anxiety you're talking about.

No, I don't think if you collapsed to casual queue completely that ranked queue would die off, especially with the proposed change of linking ranking to job. It would have the exact opposite effect. I'm sure there are some issues it would cause, that will be the case with any change normally, but killing off the queue? I really don't see that being a problem at all. Casual players till need to get their wonderous tales done, they still want to fill out their challenge log. That's something no one ever really takes into account. All that kind of change would do would directly address the fact that lower tier ranked dies off, and plenty of other changes to reward structure could easily address higher tier ranked matches dying off as well.

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

Oh, where do I begin... first, my apologies for reformating your post a bit as I will go through specific points at a time and I think it might help readability.

[1] Frontline should be the casual mode. The stakes are always higher in CC because you as an individual player have much more personal responsibility than you ever will in FL, this is regardless of whether it's a ranked match or not. In fact, removing the distinction between casual and ranked would highly encourage players of all skill levels to take the matches more seriously overall.

[2] They should funnel players who are new to PVP into FL so they can learn the basics. They already basically do this by giving players a daily bonus for it, but they could do more.

[3] The basis of this thread is the fact that ranked queue dies, that's for a few reasons which are well documented. Higher ranks it's because people get their targeted ranking and then stop and there's no incentive to keep playing. Lower rank it's because most people who are really interested in playing ranked have already surpassed Gold tier and probably a lot due to the anxiety you're talking about.

[4] No, I don't think if you collapsed to casual queue completely that ranked queue would die off, especially with the proposed change of linking ranking to job. It would have the exact opposite effect. I'm sure there are some issues it would cause, that will be the case with any change normally, but killing off the queue? I really don't see that being a problem at all.

[5] Casual players still need to get their wonderous tales done, they still want to fill out their challenge log. That's something no one ever really takes into account.

[6]All that kind of change would do would directly address the fact that lower tier ranked dies off, and plenty of other changes to reward structure could easily address higher tier ranked matches dying off as well.

1.) You are mistaking "stakes" for "individual impact" here. Stakes are there if a loss matters more than in other environments (i.e. losing Rating in Ranked for instance), individual impact increases in modes with less players in the instance, so 5v5 Crystalline Conflict gives individual players the most impact out of all modes. That is not a bad thing, this means Player XY performing an action leads to a more noticeable outcome than in Frontlines and is a good way to learn your core kit. Frontlines are also much more punishing regarding the positioning aspect as you are potentially being stared down by up to 24/48 players if you are out of position.

The basics are best learned in a smaller environment - 5v5 CC. By removing/merging Casual CC and "only" having Ranked, you remove an essential training environment for a mode where it matters. You cannot learn the nuances of Crystalline Conflict in Frontlines. Between the role action, differences in objectives, reduced damage per individual and more enemy players and their toolkits to account for, it offers a poor learning environment for future Rankers.

We literally "had" this problem with Feast Training due to the forced-role system - due to queue times, newbies were forced to learn Feast immediately in Ranked, which made for a piss-poor learning experience and caused many to avoid the mode because of this.


2.) They do this because its a 72-man mode. It's essentially similar to roulettes, there to encourage at least once a day to help fill the queue (per player). There could be "more" yes, by also making "Daily Challenge: Rival Wings" (large-scale mode) and "Daily Challenge: Crystalline Conflict" (to encourage 5v5 Casual interaction) - one for reach.


3.) Kind of, close. Correct on the upper ranks, there is no incentive to keep playing for them (no Top XY rewards like back in feast, no Ranked Currency to spend on a lot MORE things than Hellhound upgrades). Lower ranks its actually a bit more than that - there is many that might forever be Bronze, Silver or Gold - which is fine, these players are the foundation for anyone to keep playing. But because there is no incentive for the lower tiers (think Ranked Currency, not Commend. Crystals), there is a pool of players saying "whats the point, I can't climb to Diamond anyways and I get nothing for being here".

This lengthens queue times, which affects a different pool of players that doesn't want to wait in a queue to have "balanced matches" forever and instead goes for 5v5 Casual or Frontlines (if at all) - which is a death spiral, as you can tell. We had this exact phenomenon happen multiple times in PvP, even Frontlines - and it essentially all boils down to "incentives not found".


4.) I'm gonna address this one more time, under the assumption that if a merge of both queues happen, it would retain Ranked Mode's matchmaking for skill tiers (i.e. a Platinum player can be matched with Diamond or Gold, but not Crystal+ or Silver-Bronze).

Casual Mode's distinct property is that it forms matches regardless of skill tiers in Ranked, which allows for matches to be created much more quickly. It also does not affect ranked so you can learn and experiment with your job rather than just stay with cookie-cutter "do only this" strats - or you could play FOR FUN. (reminder that Frontline is NOT a good environment to learn 5v5 job impact and strategies)

Ranked Mode's distinct property is that player queues are separated by skill tiers, so a Diamond wont be stomping on Golds and Silvers. Ideally matches are much closer to its respective skill tier and offers a general challenge, it will make you use what you learned and practiced, either in previous Ranked matches or in Casual.

If you full-merge Casual + Ranked into one mode, you will sacrifice either:

• A) match quality & Ranked integrity by making matchmaking ignore individual ranks and skill tiers (i.e. why is it even Ranked)
• B) fast queues by matchmaking with a skill-tier based system (i.e. nothing casual about it)

These are mutually exclusive. Without a stable onboarding and churn of players (which we DO NOT HAVE thanks to a lack of meaningful incentives), pulling on one side will affect the other. Furthermore, by going for Option B, everyone's Rank and therefore ability to play the mode is now at stake if they don't climb at equal paces with everyone else. You are forcing two or more fundamentally different player groups into one and tell them to deal with it, regardless what their goal in 5v5 is.

On the matter of linking Ranking to job (or role), I think you are not seeing the issue at all with it here. Currently queue times are affected by onboarding (new players), retention (players who stay for longer) and churn (players who quit) in short human resources. They are also affected by skill tiers, naturally as players progress (or don't which is a reality we must face).

If you add job-based Rank, you add a third layer of things that will affect queue times, which can either be "it added absolutely nothing" because players don't switch their jobs anymore because onetricking for higher ranks is now encouraged since only your highest job now counts, or creates a scenario where Crystal player "John FFXIV, the Warrior" can't get his match because "Brave Lee, the Paladin" and others decided they wanted more access to jobs in higher ranks for some odd reason. It will also lead to Brave Lee curbstomping half the players he moves across if he is any good, something many do not like happening in Casual in the first place.


5.) Wondrous Tails, Challenge log - former can be done without 5v5 with up to 15 duties that you can also repeat, latter is just wolfmarks. They are in the grand scheme of things negligible


6.) Your "solution/fix" is forcing everyone into one pool, disregarding what the individual modes' purpose and their players' interest is supposed to be in a ham-fisted attempt to solve the "queue crisis of Ranked" like Thanos snapping his fingers. It does not organically address that the incentive structure for Ranked is awful across the entire board since Season 1 and in fact will only excarcebate things with your job-rank link.

I'm gonna say this not as someone looking critically at design, but as a player - I want my limited time I can spent on FFXIV to be rewarded with something I can put on display on my character. If the activity that I intend to put time into to learn its nuances, get good at and excel in doesn't respect my time with adequate rewards or benefits, then I will not do the activity.


Mind you Dalls, this is nothing against you, no hard feelings - I am just annoyed at the concept/idea and criticize that instead, because it has been thrown in the ring (also dissected and refuted) multiple times. In the end, you believe in that and I believe in something else.

[Valence]

On the merging of casual into ranked, I'm opposed to it. It would just kill the mode (and the potentially coming dual queue as well).

[*]1.) Ranking up with specific jobs that rely more heavily on team synergy (PLD, SCH, maybe DNC) so you can use them in the higher ranks will be a painful experience as a lot of the viability of said jobs hinges on one's teammates knowledge/ability to capitalize on the support they bring. The common recommendation has been to use self-sufficient or solo carry jobs over supportive jobs in the early skill tiers to climb for this reason, so job-based rank progression gives supportive jobs a huge handicap at the bottom end of the ladder, even if you might be a Crystal player usually.
-[*]2.) This hard-enforces onetricking, which can become an issue if you play one of the more common jobs on ladder (depending on meta balance at the time) to get queues as only two of a specific job can be present per match. Making it per-role (tank, healer, melee, ranged, caster) would at least allow for "some" alternatives in your job pool to help with job diversity.
-[*]3.) Speaking of making it per role/job, for anyone on the high-end of the ladder it would essentially discourage them to switch jobs/roles (which is something you should consider depending on maps and specific high-profile players in the queue) as it would not benefit them for Top 300 progression in the slightest. This punishes someone who may be both an excellent Astrologian and Dragoon for instance as they have nothing to gain to switch jobs.[/list]

While you might hold the opinion that it may be a good idea, this is what most likely will be the side effect if that opinion would be implemented - based on logical conclusions and/or precedence cases from other games that tried this.

Having been a big defender of the per job ranking option (I don't know who came up first with it):

1) It may be incredibly easier to carry with melee jobs and specific ones (DRG, GNB, etc) especially at lower ranks, doesn't mean it's a painful experience to rank up with team oriented ones. If you're good enough you'll climb. Anybody knows it takes more effort to climb with team focused jobs, until you reach a point where your skill with even more individualistic jobs averages over 50%, and then it becomes identical. I fail to see how this is a problem. We have many people way past gold that do main support or team focused jobs (ranged, buffers, etc). Maybe there is less of them even in high crystal, but that's a problem of meta there if anything, because some melee jobs like VPR don't fare much better.

2) I do understand it may be frustrating to have longer queues when a job is saturated in the games you play, but that's like queuing as a DPS in pve: you can choose to keep doing it (it pops eventually, it's not like you're getting 1/10th of the game pops anyway), or you can choose to try and rank up another job. I understand your argument there, but I don't think that's a problem at all.

3) That could be a problem for very high ratings (with the coming Ultima and Omega ranks). On the other hand, they're also no lifing this so...

[Valence]

And yet, you think the decisions made around Ranked Crystal Conflict (CC) are more important than the broader game experience.

I'm sorry, I think what now?

[CidHeiral]

Ranked CC is dying for the same reasons it always has: toxicity, elitism, and win-at-all-costs behavior.

How can anyone be elitist in a mode where chat is disabled?

And what does "win-at-all-costs behavior" even mean in a competitive game mode? Are you only supposed to try half the time?