What do you guys think of Yoshi-P's eSports Dream?

[Mimilu]

Q. You talked about FFXIV moving into e-sports before, but any updates on that?

Yoshida: We're actually right in the middle of having discussions with sponsors. We'd like to have an official league, but at the moment we are getting feed back on the various problems that might come up, while we are preparing for it. Problems such as needing to go through PvE content to gear up and level up before you start PvPing, having too many skills where players wil get lost and confused, the need of a spectator mode (which we already solved by adding it in patch 3.4). We'll be solving these 3 problems and preparing it for the new pvp content which is planned for patch 4.0.

Quote from Korean Fanfest Interview. Link to Translated version of the interview

Now, I only ever touched PvP for the Garo event and mainly stuck to Frontlines but even I can tell that the whole PvP system would need almost an entire overhaul before SE should even breath the name "eSports" or "Sponsored, Competitive League".

I'm just interested on what your guys' thoughts on the subject... >3>

Just in case a Rep is looking and wants to report our concerns to the Dev team:
-Hackers, Cheaters, and Win Traders are not being punished. I get that these players are giving you guys money, SE, but not banning these types of players will only ruin your image in the eSports community and alienate players who aren't using cheats or hacks.
-You don't really seem to connected with your NA and EU fans. The above complaint being a key example of this...
-Job Balancing and Adjustments aren't happen frequently enough and the dev team's "Wait and observe for 3 months" attitude is not going to help.
-PvP is too attached to PvE (Gear, Level, Skills, Unlocking, Job Adjustments leaning more towards PvE's needs)
-PvP needs to be accessible as soon as you make a new character, no PvE Quests
-You need to remove PvE gear from PvP completely. I might even suggest removing gear completely from PvP and have it just be cosmetic, like PotD.
-The PvP modes (Feast and Frontlines) are too different from each other and need separate balancing and adjustments
-Skill Bloat and too many useless Skills (even more then PvE). You need to separate PvE and PvP skill-kits from each other and cut down on the number of skills each job has.
-Animations are too big, flashy, and distracting
-The game is to slow-pace and hard to follow to be entertaining to an audience
-Objectives and Progression need to be made clearer for both the players and audience
-DPS and Healers (especially healers) are too durable. All roles need a balance of Healing/Support/Utility, DPS, and Durability. If a job is extremely too proficient in one of these categories, they need to suffer accordingly in the other two.
-Healer's burst heals are too powerful for a PvP environment.
-Healer DPS is non-existent. While it is true that Healer/Support characters in eSports games need to focus on Healing/Supporting, they still need ways to protect themselves, especially with the system we have now where only PLDs are the only tank that can actually protect people (via one, 120 second cooldown).
-You NEED a dedicated PvP Dev Team separate from PvE's Dev Team. You will stretch yourselves too much if you have to go back and forth between the two and both will suffer from it.
-Players that aren't communicating via a separate, third-party Voice Chat app need a way to communicate and coordinate. Especially in PuG groups.
-Improve Server Latency

[CyrilLucifer]

Maybe once SE gets rid of the rampant third-party tool users in Feast.

[Exiled_Tonberry]

I think he should actually fix PvP, make it fun, more balanced and give jobs more PvP skills and unique utility before thinking about anything else.

The day PvP feels like more than an afterthought is the day they can worry about esports.

[SuperZay]

First, this game is not popular enough for e-sports. Second, it has the worst PvP in all MMOs and with their low priority of anything PvP-related it'll take years to fix all issues. And when they'll be fixed the game will be on its last legs when most of current players will move to other games making it desolate wasteland like FFXI after 2010 (where PvP was more fun but died pretty quickly).

Sorry, but let's be a bit realistic, this will not fly. Maybe designing FFXVII or whatever next MMO will be with actually PvP in mind is a better idea.

[Esper]

Nothing more boring then watching gamers play the game you pay to play yourself, nor more insulting to know it has the word "sport" in it.

[Elleia]

This makes no sense to me considering the amount of cheaters in PvP that have been reported over and over, with video proof, only for nothing to happen to them. This issue definitely needs to be taken more seriously for our PvP to ever get to this level.

[Iromi]

They need to focus on cracking down on cheaters before anyone will even begin to take this seriously.

[Zojha]

Honestly? I'm laughing at it.

This game's PvP can't even sustain acceptable queues most of the time, they helplessly had to mute everyone to cope with the toxicity a ranked game mode brings, they don't have the playerbase to afford a proper MMR system, their maps suffer balance issues, as do their jobs, which are also designed for PvE, just as the the server ticks are set for PvE encounters; the gearing is a complete and utter mess with pointless materias, materia slot and a stat dedicated to be useless, the spectator feature is used by close to nobody, the premade scene and thus only scene with E-Sport potential is so dead that their mode is largely left to wintrading hyenas and none of the old maps can be played consistently either.

Also note:

Problems such as needing to go through PvE content to gear up and level up before you start PvPing (1), having too many skills where players wil get lost and confused (2), the need of a spectator mode (3) [...]. We'll be solving these 3 problems [...]

We can now all speculate how 1 and 2 will be solved.

Overall, it's a fools endeavor. But not unexpected after they pushed ranked into the game - That's often the first step.

What do you think, will players be gagged in their officially hosted tournaments? :3

[Lavafrost]

Maybe Yoshi is hoping that by doing the Esports thing, more people will PvP, and there will be a better reason to fix it? Idunno though, everything I'd say about what SE needs to do to get PvP fixed for Esports has been said already, especially the hacking problem.

[Esper]

To be fair, this will likely be used to promote blitzball coming to the game sometime next expansion. Not that it will be a popular watch, but many asked for it.