Wolves Den !

[SeleniaArgon]

Vandril , Président !

You said it all ! More to organize fights preformed teams, there are not so many imbalances that. People should just learn to play in PvP and find parades, before complaining ...

Go remove ranks restrictions , that's all ! Objectively, I think there are always better to play with some eventual imbalances than not play!.



Sieghilde Schtauffen

[Nalien]

Given the recent changes to Morale, they really should just remove that restriction already. With i90 PvP now being readily available, that puts people at the i100 range for Wolves' Den with much less effort, and you can easily just use i110 PvE gear anyway. Only issue is i110 PvP gear is effectively i130, which only endgame raiders will have access to in PvE, but that's still only a i20 difference rather than the massive difference Morale used to play.

[TriksteR]

[blueblankets]

I commend you all for the patience to sit in queue for that long.

I agree. I don't care if people win trade to rank up its no different than botting your way to the top. If the grind to max pvp gear wasnt so insanely long, maybe the gear differences wouldnt be an issue. Regardless of balanced classes, I would prefer if den was playable. I wouldn't care if they removed party set ups and allowed for 4 healers to get on one team. Avg Rank and party match ups seems more detrimental than helpful. I'd rather enter a match vs 4 healers and die a slow death than wait an eternity for a match. I assume den works on japanese servers, which is why there is no change for us.

[Blubbers]

I think removing the rank restriction and adding an "adventurer in need" bonus to at least let us know which class has the fastest queue (and maybe give an extra +10/20% wolf marks/xp) would go a long way in reviving the wolves den. I don't queue at all currently as the wait isn't worth it, but this would definitely get me to queue more as whatever the class in need was.

[Nalien]

Stop me if this sounds crazy;

• Split Wolves' Den into several iLevel capped brackets, related to the iLevel of PvP gear (so i55, i70, i90, i100, and i110 for now).
• Revert Morale back to how it used to function, perhaps with some tweaks (i55 Morale should be a very slight advantage over i55 PvE, for example).
• Add a Wolves' Den Roulette with daily bonuses and in need bonuses in order to put i100s into the i55 bracket, for example (there's an iLevel cap, so this shouldn't be a major issue).
• Add a merchant at Wolves' Den Pier who'll sell i55 Wolf gear (NQ) for a novel amount of Gil to let players get started.

With these kind of changes in place, you work your way up the brackets as you obtain gear. The iLevel cap prevents gear overpowering, with the exception of Morale causing PvP gear to overpower PvE gear (instead of the current "You have i100 PvP gear? Wow, that's just as useful as i110 PvE gear in PvP!"). So you do i55 while purchasing i70 until you move onto doing i70 while purchasing i90, etc. etc., and the Roulette system prevents the i55 and other low brackets from ever running out of competitors. PvP retains its own progression system and (hopefully) functions.

The alternative is just out right removing Morale and making PvP Rank and Gear into vanity pieces, the only issue I then see with that is Wolves' Den becomes an unpredictable battleground that can match people in i70 PvE against people in i130. The whole point of PvP having its own progression system with Ranks and gear was to ensure players of similar iLevels get matched against each other. Right now that simply doesn't work, since Morale is now just an iLevel boost, Ranks 1 to 40 are all effectively the same as long as people have i110 PvE gear. If they did away with Morale, they'd almost certainly have to give Wolves' Den an easily achieved iLevel cap like Frontlines has.

Only other issue is how to fit Frontlines into all this. If Wolves' Den becomes popular again, Frontlines queues will suffer as a result. If you add Frontlines to the Wolves' Den Roulette, it'll never be done (filling 8 people in for Wolves' Den will occur before it fills 24 in for the lowest Frontlines match). To go back to an old suggestion I love making; Make victory or defeat in Frontlines matter. You lose a Frontlines match, you return to your server, your server logs your failure. Every weak the success/failure of individuals on each server is tallied up to rank each Grand Company 1st, 2nd, or 3rd, with bonuses for the entire server based on the outcome (eg. Twin Adder comes 1st on Excalibur, 10% off all Serpent Seal purchases, Maelstrom came 2nd, 5% off all Storm Seal purchases). This way, Frontlines becomes something everyone does each week in order to "win" each week, while Wolves' Den is simply an activity which can speed you through the Ranks.

I'd also quite like to see some more long term goals for PvP like the Frontlines Pony, though that's fairly off topic. I'm thinking PvP Relic weapons? New achievements based on PvPing as individual Class/Jobs. Either straight up "Win X matches as <Job>" or make it a bit more specific to the Jobs role (eg. "Heal X amount of HP as White Mage", "Take X amount of damage as Paladin"), or even a combination.

[Atreus]

You're talking about splitting the queue even more which is adding more to the problem. The issue isn't that people can't get i80 (like... it's stupid how accessible it is), it's the lack of interest in Wolves' Den. The way morale is now, I think, is far better than it was before. Morale was a broken stat that created a wider gear-gap than anything in this game.

Wolves' Den becoming popular again won't ruin Frontlines, especially if they eventually decide to get rid of GC restriction. Why? Because all the excess players from whatever GC that aren't getting in every match will then be pooled in to fill in the blanks where needed.

An "adventurer-in-need" would be very good to determine what's missing to get a match going in WD. Most of the time it's just waiting on healers but you just never know exactly with how it is now. :/

[Nalien]

You're talking about splitting the queue even more which is adding more to the problem.

Which is exactly why I followed it up with Wolve's Den Roulette. Yes you'd have people split into different brackets, but a Roulette effectively gives players in a higher bracket reason to enter lower ones. A daily boost of PvP EXP and Wolf Marks, and a permanent boost to Wolf Marks for the in need bonus (or whatever rewards could be) should effectively counteract the negatives of splitting the queues into brackets.

Wolves' Den becoming popular again won't ruin Frontlines

Why would you bother queuing for Frontlines if Wolves' Den functioned though? Faster queues (requires 8 people instead of 24). Faster matches. More people would do Wolves' Den for ranking up and Wolf Marks and Frontlines queues would be worse than they currently are. It would be the opposite problem with have now; the majority would queue for Wolves' Den and the minority would queue for Frontlines, except the issue would be much worse for Frontlines given the numbers required. If it's taking people over 300 minutes to get into 4v4 matches when it's the less popular of the two, imagine the queues on 8v8v8 matches if the same were true for Frontlines.

especially if they eventually decide to get rid of GC restriction

I've posted elsewhere why I hope they'll never do that, and given the infrastructure around Frontlines I doubt they will. How would one go about "Guiding the Twin Adder to 100 Frontline victories" if Frontlines is reduced to Fangs verses Claws verses Other? The issue with Frontlines isn't that it is a static team based event, it's that they gave zero purpose to the teams. People generally join a team for a reason, and Grand Companies in Frontlines have no reason. They should attempt fixing that before gutting the content, in my opinion.

[Atreus]

1) That's like saying, let's add a problem... then add something else to make it less of a problem.

2) Except that's never going to happen. 4 on 4 is more appealing to a smaller, more hardcore PvP sect. Even if Wolves' Den became more worthwhile in EXP and marks than Frontlines, all you're going to get are groups wintrading and going back into Frontline. As you had to have clearly seen these last two patches, larger scale PvP is more appealing to the masses.

3) I don't get it, you don't want it to change, but you think GC's shouldn't be a thing? What are you talking about?

[Nalien]

1) If you want to look at it that simply, sure. The point of brackets is that they're a better solution to matching players up than the current Rank matching. Matching players up based on iLevel provides a more balanced playing field, that's exactly why Frontlines has an i80 cap, doing the same for Wolves' Den allows them to maintain match balance without splitting players up based on Rank. A Rank 45 in full liege could enter the i55 bracket and they'd be no better than anyone else in i55. The alternative is just having no system in place to balance the matches, and when someone in i110 enters Wolves' Den and gets crushed by someone in full liege, they simply don't queue again (pretty much the same issue Wolves' Den originally had). That or they just do away with the idea of progression in PvP, like I said originally. Have a single iLevel cap on Wolves' Den like Frontlines, make Rank purely a Title grind, and PvP gear purely vanity. That works too, I just think it's a boring alternative.

3) Not sure where you read that I think Grand Companies shouldn't be a thing. They should, Yoshida should just take a leaf out of XIs book and give us a Conquest style system so Grand Company verses Grand Company has actual weight behind it, rather than being a novelty. Right now it's just a novelty, I happen to enjoy aspects of it, but I fully understand why people dislike it given its effect on queues. Still, I'd rather them put some actual weight behind the concept than just do away with it. Long standing faction verses faction rivalries in a MMO tend to lean towards the sandbox style of content and can keep players interested regardless of new content (where as theme part content relies on constant new content), something this game currently lacks outside vanity. Given the rate of PvP content we actually get, they really should opt for sandbox style content over theme park.