Quote Originally Posted by Thekk View Post
But yeah, taking a look at the top 100, over half of it hasn't played a game on any given day, and it's usually the same people.
That's pretty common in rated PvP with rank-based rewards. Another common thing is getting boosted to a high rank, then just losing a game a month or so to keep the rating from decaying. Since you can lose your rank and thus reward via playing, the reward serves as an incentive to not play anymore once you qualify for it.

As for season 2 - I consequently doubt it'll be dead instantly. People will once again try to solidify their ranking for the reward, then drop out, playing the bare minimum of games needed to not have their ranking decay (0, in FFXIV case).

As for 8vs8, well...it has role requirements. That's quite a bit worse than GC requirements, because it relies on gameplay popularity which, uh...especially in the case of tanks tends to be on the low side.