3.2 PvP: Feast Game Mode Discussion Thread.

[xTysonx]

Dammit. I typed all of this stuff out, but accidentally clicked the wrong button. I'll just shorten it.

A. Do you have to participate in the qualifier again if you're demoted or can you just raise your points to automatically bring yourself back to silver (or whatever)?

Yes, I got demoted in preseason and you basically have to get back to (that ranks) min points and retake the qualifier

B. Is there a demotion period like the qualifier where you have to win 3 out of 5 matches to keep your rank or do you just drop back down?

It tells you with a giant message you been demoted and just puts you down the next rank, you will still have whatever points you had at demotion, meaning you can recover rather from starting from scratch

EDIT: Also, do rankings only update every week? I thought it would be every day, but I guess they're keeping the same format they had for Frontline and stuff, huh?

I assume its a 24hr like most lodestone stuff and its posted on the site
* Rankings are updated daily when seasons are in progress. Should an error occur with calculating results, the day's rankings will not be updated.

I put the answers in red

[Rufalus]

Saying that you would rather have the system judge player rankings based on top percentage within specified jobs rather than top overall is fine and dandy, but what are the criteria for making it to the top ranks? How would we be evaluated? If the answer is simply "by our overall number of wins," then not a lot actually changes.

Not sure if there is actually a fair way to determine that in a team game. If it say judged an individual based on their damage or healing output, it wouldn't account for all the variables in a pvp match, like a whole team relentless focusing on you and using stuns and sleeps to reduce your performance. It's not like a training dummy exercise where a person can perform a certain way with consistency, so I think any quantifiable metric isn't telling the whole story. Things could only really be fair if it was a 1 vs 1 type of game and the jobs were balanced so well that they were basically all the same.

[Nalien]

A duration modifier, perhaps? So a short match where you do the best possible ends up rewarding the same as a long match where you do the best possible.

Alternatively it can "wear off". So say you use Stun properly at the start, then never again, in a long match that wears off and you don't get the rating from doing it, since you didn't use it towards the end. That way a short match in which you used Stun properly would effectively be the same as a long match where you used it properly. If you keep using it, you maintain that rating bonus, if you stop using it, you lose that rating bonus. That way I guess it's effectively a one time thing? You'd still need to "play properly" throughout to get that reward, but longer matches wouldn't allow you to farm more of it.

[Nidelia]

I don't know. The fact is that LoL has a huge playerbase, meaning that top players plays versus equally skilled player no? (Never played it, so I really have no idea how matchmaking and ranking work). So yeah it's seems fair to say that you have something close of a 50% win rate.
ffxiv doesn't have this huge player base meaning that you kinda play with what is avalable. It's not really pitting you against equal value players, it's just that the queue is a flip a coin factor so you have a 50% win. Then if you re unlucky enough you get increadible losing strike where you can't do nothing against even if you re good.
Don't get it wrong, I know that it is the same issue everywhere. But I don't feel at all that a 50% win rate here show that you have foes with equal strenght but more that you have half of the time the weakest link due to the not that high number of people playing.
And consider too that they changed the way you lose point. Before a 51% win rate allowed you to progress. Now, at least for what I saw in bronze you have a -15/+25 meaning that you need a 41% win rate to progress. Which probably show that it was way too hard and frustrating to progress because you needed this 51%.

[TetsuyaHikari]

If this game could just stop putting me with amateurs that can't even follow simple mechanics, that would be great. Here's what usually happens for me:

A. I get stuck with a healer that can't handle pressure and our DPS (with the attack buff) dies within the first 20 seconds with our healer dying soon thereafter
B. One of the DPS asks what the battle plan is, so I inform them and instruct them to focus on the marker, but they do something else anyway
C. Even after switching said marker, one of the DPS stick to the target they were originally attacking and have tunnel vision for the rest of the match, causing us to lose since we can't kill the new target with just a tank and one DPS
D. Everyone focuses on a different target altogether and splits our DPS throughout the entire fight, then wonder why nobody is dying while the rest of the team runs around with 3 members that have 50% HP or a little less at all times
E. Someone on the team doesn't give a shit about rank, says ranks are meaningless, then we end up losing because the other team actually does care about their rank(s)

I'm sure I'm forgetting something here, but while it does seem fair that we're all queuing up with randoms under the same circumstances, it sure doesn't feel that way at times. I can't tell you how many times I got one good team yesterday followed by three or four bad teams (usually the same guys) before finding a good team again. Hell, there was even one guy trolling in there by queuing up as a CNJ. He couldn't heal for shit and would always die pretty quickly, lol. Fortunately I didn't get stuck on his party, but I couldn't help but feel bad for the opposing team that kept getting stuck with his sorry ass.

At the end of the day, if you don't care about ranked, don't play ranked. Plain and simple. I don't care what you do in your free time, but once you start playing with other people, you better be giving it your best... Otherwise you're just wasting my time (and yours too). I'm trying to maintain my top 10 rank at the moment, so excuse me if I don't feel like laughing when you come to troll PvP for shits and giggles.

[Nidelia]

You forget what you don't see and is probably the situation I hate the most:
F. Tank who take 10 stacks then die, breaking the whole progress did before or throwing the game because he died 30sec before the end.

[TetsuyaHikari]

You forget what you don't see and is probably the situation I hate the most:
F. Tank who take 10 stacks then die, breaking the whole progress did before or throwing the game because he died 30sec before the end.

No, I didn't forget that, lol. I'm guilty of taking 10 stacks myself because I feel more comfortable taking 10 instead of having 5 (and still having a risk of dying at this point) and having a DPS have 4 or higher. Now, truth be told, I usually only reach the point of having 10 stacks towards the last minute or so, so I still have all of my CDs saved (including HG) along with a LB to use. That on top of sprinting to buy us some time usually gives us a win.

If you have a competent healer, they can keep you up even at 10 stacks. I've seen it time after time again. However, if you have a healer that's new to PvP or The Feast in general, they're not going to be able to keep up with the damage because it will be unexpected to them, but yeah... When I get 10 stacks, I usually break away from the group (since they're probably still in the center) and go back to our base to hide there for as long as I can and don't come out unless they take the lead, and we're forced to push.

I have had people try to 1v1 me before at 10 stacks, but so far... Both the NIN and SMN that tried got owned, despite having no stacks at all, lol. Then again, it's kind of silly to try and take on a PLD 1v1 as a DPS, what with his stunlock, pacification, dots, and defensive cooldowns anyway...

EDIT: Also, it says the season will end when 3.35 rolls out, but what's the timetable on that? I heard 3 months, but that seems like kind of a long time, especially since 3.30 should be out within a month from now, I'd imagine.

[Dimitrii]

Considering its the weekend and the season started, queues are pretty crap today. Figures that the first day I can legitimately sit down and pvp for a few hrs in the past 3 days I get these 15+ min queues.

[Nidelia]

Oh yeah I didn't mean that it's not possible to do it and do some nice action with that. But for example I just had a drk who jumped in melee with 10 stacks at 1min of the end. Like wth? If you want to take 10 stacks you need to perfectly know what you have to do, which is not the case in 99%.

[TetsuyaHikari]

Oh yeah I didn't mean that it's not possible to do it and do some nice action with that. But for example I just had a drk who jumped in melee with 10 stacks at 1min of the end. Like wth? If you want to take 10 stacks you need to perfectly know what you have to do, which is not the case in 99%.

Oh yeah, that's especially dumb for two reasons:

A. DRK is ass in The Feast
B. WHERE ARE MY DEFENSIVE COOLDOWNS?!

lol

EDIT: Man, today has been a really bad day for me in The Feast. I won 2 matches, then lost 10 in a row because they kept putting me with the same new/inexperienced/noob players. Just a brief summary of how my matches went:

A. I ran into the #1 player on Primal multiple times and his team won every time we played (surprise surprise)

B. This new DRG player somehow kept getting into my party and he would never focus on the target I marked, thus splitting our DPS and causing us to lose since we couldn't kill anyone

C. I somehow managed to get partied up with the #1 player on Primal, buuuuuuuuut... Just when I thought our win was secure, I noticed we had that shitty DRG and of course, we lost

D. Ran into a BLM a few times that wanted to do their own thing the entire match and undermine my plan whenever he could, telling people to do something else, which undoubtedly caused confusion and we lost due to lack of coordination

E. Queued up with that same BLM who actually had a macro that would automatically apply a marker over the enemy's head he was attacking, which caused my marker to disappear or swap to a different enemy (between their healer, who I wanted us to kill, and the MNK, who he was only focusing on) and confused the other DPS, so we were never able to kill either target. Worst part about all of this though was he told me "it's just a macro, chill" after I told him to stop putting the marker on a different target...

F. I began noticing familiar names on enemy teams... After looking over the stream, it turns out that most of the people I was getting put up against were in the top 5 or 10 while 99% of my party members were in the top 50 or lower (this is while I have the #9 spot on Primal right now, but naturally... after today, that rank is gone for sure). Now, I'm not saying rank always determines skill here, but it's very disheartening when you're a silver that keeps getting paired up with unranked or bronze guys that don't know their ass from their elbow in PvP or how to play the game in general, so the matchmaking starts to feel a bit unfair at that point

G. On my 12th match, I got queued up with 7 other new players (not even bronze yet). I knew it was a bad sign when I had to tell them to grab the defense kit since everyone just ran by it. Unfortunately... It got worse. Our SMN had already picked up the offense kit, so he ran back to pick up the defense kit too, instead of letting one of the others get it. We lost our MNK and healer within the first few seconds, but hey... At least he survived for a little longer and that's good, right? Ugh...