Okay, It's Two-Way Communication Time

[Stormfur]

And just today after all the housing threads, we finally got a reply from the Master himself!

PVP feels like the red-headed stepchild sometimes

[ThirdChild_ZKI]

The irony of that wasn't lost on me, but this would be the part where someone chimes in and notes how housing is a "bigger" problem and such.

It is, but it isn't. And to see that there'd still been no response from even a rep after all this time is all the answer I need. I made it clear that a more proactive approach to communicating with the community and making note of their input on matters before making sweeping or surprise changes is the better approach. Yet we've come to this point.

They want to continue attempting to appeal to a new, fairweather PvP community, and not the ones who stuck with it all along, for all the good and bad of it, and at the expense of completely alienating and losing that dedicated community. Fine. Let's see how that goes.

[Geryth]

The irony of that wasn't lost on me, but this would be the part where someone chimes in and notes how housing is a "bigger" problem and such.

It is, but it isn't. And to see that there'd still been no response from even a rep after all this time is all the answer I need. I made it clear that a more proactive approach to communicating with the community and making note of their input on matters before making sweeping or surprise changes is the better approach. Yet we've come to this point.

They want to continue attempting to appeal to a new, fairweather PvP community, and not the ones who stuck with it all along, for all the good and bad of it, and at the expense of completely alienating and losing that dedicated community. Fine. Let's see how that goes.

It's all business and they put their resources and time into what makes money. Housing is 100% more important to them than PvP. We can make all the philosophical arguments we want about how PvP deserves just as much time and design and input, especially about how it's a chicken and egg problem (Players won't pay for this game to PvP until PvP is in a good place!) but it's wasted effort.

I've been in a sinking ship before. Riot Games is dead to me because of The Crystal Scar (Dominion). I freakin loved that mode. I wanted ranked so badly. An employee made an infamous remark about how ranked was all ready to go and they wanted the mode to mature before they "flipped the switch".

While waiting for them to turn on Ranked Dominion months turned into years. Balance issues went unaddressed or were otherwise extremely slow to get fixed. Communication between the Dominion community and the DEVs were sparse, vague, and one-sided. Excellent suggestions were ignored. After waiting 2.5 or 3 years I gave up and quit League of Legends for good in the only way I could protest that neglect that I could - by not giving them any money. Every now and then I would check in and see what the current state of things were. You know what eventually happened? They effing gave up and discontinued the entire game mode.

While I don't think PvP is going to get nixed like that, I see the exact same patterns happening here. It really doesn't bode well for people who are PvP focused.

[Isala]

Starting to wonder why I'm even bothering to keep hope for the PvP here. We've hit, what, over a year... two years of unanswered, unacknowledged questions about the direction and choices of PvP? We've been lied to, especially about how "seriously" they take match throwers, and win traders. We've been told that our reports are "exaggerated", and that killing chat brought in new people. Has anything of value ever been addressed? We get, what? One official response every six months in this forum? But they IMMEDIATELY jump on topics, such as how unfair it is to put a minion in PvP. How unfair it is that not everyone has a house. Instant responses to literal nothing content. Minions and houses are not content. One cannot raid a house. You cannot earn tomes or gear from owning a house. But holy crap. "I can't have a house!" BAM! Yoshi P appears, and tells them that everything is going to be alright. Meanwhile, the PvP community is ignored, lied to, shunned, and left to rot while the hackers, win traders, bots, AFKers, and all around scum get away with literal murder. But it's not PvE, so that's okay.

[Krolja]

We get, what? One official response every six months in this forum? But they IMMEDIATELY jump on topics, such as how unfair it is to put a minion in PvP. How unfair it is that not everyone has a house. Instant responses to literal nothing content. Minions and houses are not content. One cannot raid a house. You cannot earn tomes or gear from owning a house. But holy crap. "I can't have a house!" BAM! Yoshi P appears, and tells them that everything is going to be alright. Meanwhile, the PvP community is ignored, lied to, shunned, and left to rot while the hackers, win traders, bots, AFKers, and all around scum get away with literal murder. But it's not PvE, so that's okay.

Shall we start a petition for more communication between PvP devs and players and form an open dialogue? The people whining about housing did and they got a response in less than 24 hours. Perhaps there's something to it.

[Geryth]

Shall we start a petition for more communication between PvP devs and players and form an open dialogue? The people whining about housing did and they got a response in less than 24 hours. Perhaps there's something to it.

The squeaky wheel gets the grease. The problem is there's not enough wheels to squeak in the PvP forums to get attention.

If they would just put the resources, time, dedication, and love into making PvP in this game a great form of content then it could have a large enough community to get instant responses when things go wrong. As I said, I've seen this before - it gets neglected because there's not enough players to justify the resources and there's not enough players because it's neglected. There's one way out of that cycle - SE needs to double down and fix the mode with the required costs or it's going to limp along in a broken state until they decide to put it out of it's misery.

Titles and mounts are band-aid temporary fixes that pull players in for the flair and when they get it they're out. Those are not lasting solutions. Lasting solutions are taking a creative approach to make each game fun enough for long-term replayability and fostering a populous community to make queues short (the community itself can only do so much). I really do want The Hand of Mercy (1400 kills to go) and The Knight of Glory (70 wins to go). Every day is a chore - Shatter just isn't that fun. Since 4.1 came out I've had some Secure's and Seal Rocks. They are a little better but not much. Can't say I'm going to hang around for more riveting games of Frontlines once I get those titles. I try to break it up with some Feast but I can not get a ranked game to pop in a reasonable time frame (I have limited time to play I'm not going to twiddle my thumbs in queue for most of it).

[Krolja]

Maybe the Devs shouldn't have said things so ambitious as "e-sports" and "competitive" when talking about PvP in this game in it's current state. With the little to no effort they are making on helping curb cheating and balance issues I feel like you did when you were excited for the Dominion ranked. I WANT to love PvP in this game, I love everything else about it, but when I do PvP and then compare PvP in other MMOs...it's just night and day how much better other MMOs handle it. Granted it's been quite some time since I've sat down and tried to PvP in any other MMO so they could also be suffering from the same issues we are. At this point, I'm just stuck trying to figure out how we as a community can communicate and be heard. Housing hits the fan day 1 and they get instant response. PvP hits the fan for 5 seasons, and we've just now had 2 responses. It hurts.

[Krolja]

Understandable. Queue times are pretty bad on Primal these days. Even before the 4.1 changes I was getting MAYBE 2 games per hour, and after about 2-3 hours of games people just stop playing. I sat in one 64 minute queue before I gave up and decided to just go to bed.

[Theodric]

The queue times are pretty bleak on Chaos as well. I do hope we see more incentives added over time - especially the sort that make use of wolf marks. Maybe some sort of special crafting material that requires 20,000 wolf marks, can be sold on the market board and is used in a recipe for a very appealing glamour? Let's say ten of this item are needed per craft - that'd go a long way towards making PvP at least somewhat profitable.

[Moomba33]

The lack of action against botting and win trading is pretty baffling. Even as a very casual pvp player I don't want to see bots in my matches and I don't know how SE expects to make XIV's pvp an esport if they can't even prevent cheating.

On the subject of non player objectives in pvp I'm not sure if SE is in the wrong. In my own social circle no one enjoyed Slaughter. We got pops for all 3 current FL modes near the beginning of Stormblood but my friends soon took Secure out of their queue list because they felt the matches took too long compared to Seize and Shatter. It wouldn't surprise me if Shatter is genuinely the most popular FL mode among the masses.
This isn't to say the hard core pvp community doesn't deserve a more pvp focused game mode of course. But Rival Wings looks like its going for the more casual Shattter crowd that likes other objectives.