PvP Needs An Endgame Once Again

[Rufalus]

I guess the progression could be like X amount of wins in unrated to unlock rated. So unrated is like Leveling and rated is Endgame. Would force unrated to be a necessary gate.
Add a weekly repeatable quest at Wolves' Den Pier which asks you play one of each: Feast, Borderland, Seal Rock, Glory, Astragalos, for some reward like 1 wolf collar + option of Cracked Crystal, Cracked Clusters etc, those sort of items that people can make money on.

[BloodRubyXII]

I guess the progression could be like X amount of wins in unrated to unlock rated. So unrated is like Leveling and rated is Endgame. Would force unrated to be a necessary gate.

Unranked is dead though, so you'd actually be further gating people from playing ranked when getting queues at Bronze/Silver a few weeks after the season starts is already difficult enough.

[ThirdChild_ZKI]

Unranked is dead though, so you'd actually be further gating people from playing ranked when getting queues at Bronze/Silver a few weeks after the season starts is already difficult enough.

This is another example of the problems with the Feast. I used to love it myself, but enough questionable changes and failure to address the most simple QoL concerns (like rating decay) only drove me and others away from it. And again, only SE is the one calling it their "Premier" PvP at this point. They've got a long way to go to consider that anything approaching serious, especially after all they've done til now. I have hopes for the coming season, but I'm honestly lifelining at this point. Sat out of S4 in protest to the chat ban, just stopped mid way through 5 for lack of interest, and I deliberately have only gotten to Bronze for the title in 6 and didn't miss it after.

Setting that aside for a moment, I wanted to address the thing about being abused. First, whatever was said, wherever it was said, wasn't right. I know SCH wasn't looked upon favorably (then), as were some of the other jobs that now excel in the Feast. Data Center experiences may vary, but I'd won with the "bad" comps and lost with the "good" ones plenty of times. I made tons of mistakes. I took, and still take risks (calculated, but still a risk). Sure, some people got mouthy, but it was a rare thing. To that, I ask - and I mean nothing bad in asking, please understand - what might you possibly have been doing/not doing to become such a polarized target for player abuse? Each season of course had that guy that you wouldn't want to run into on your team, but assuming for a moment that you weren't that guy, what then could make you such a popular target for players to be so nasty? I can't stress enough that I'm not trying to be rude in asking, but it really feels like there's more to that story, and I'm only asking to gain a better understanding.

Moving on from that, while I understand it's perhaps uncommon, for the person that said it, I have directed and led teams of randoms many times now to victory. Sure, it's a lot of work. It's absolutely frustrating when they don't listen, even without some of the outliers I mentioned before (the "just here for" types and so on). Fact is though, it's possible. Hell I can at least talk to my team there. I've noticed however many people don't step up. It's a lot of responsibility, and no one wants that on their head if you lose, but you can't complain it's impossible to direct a large team, yet never attempt to. You'd be amazed how simple it actually is, and how easily most people comply.

Lastly, for those claiming 3.x was more complex, please tell me what was hard to understand about your same job kit at max level with roughly 6 additional PvP skills vs your job condensed to 9 buttons, your combos all on 1 button (again, sensible for melees, but something like BRD/MCH just isn't meant to work that way), key skills just absent, sprint now being optional, cc skills you normally have in your PvE kit now missing, some skills not interacting with your gauge the same way they do in PvE, and now watered down, universal PvP skills?

[uvuvwevwevweonyetenyevweugwemu]

Rephrase that to win rates and I agree, that would be closest thing to skill rating. Wins alone arent enough. To progress to rated, they have to had (maybe) above 70% win rate. It will discourage at least alts purposely losing on rated, the mutual wintraders would still be there and can be trimmed further.

[Commander_Justitia]

They could use very loose feast ranking algorithms for frontline. You don't usually make alts for frontline, because players want the rewards, so it would be less exploitable. It would need a system to exclude premade parties with pvp players from that algorithms or like I said, make it very loose so they can still get pop. And yes, Im talking about feast rating, not your frontline winrate. It would still have flaws obviously, because not everyone plays feast.

But to see that even 8vs8 feast can match you up with 8 diamonds vs 8 unranked, I guess not..xD

[BloodRubyXII]

SMN it felt like I had more defensives in previous seasons; ability to go peel-bot mode, in a raid atm so can't really expand atm but you get where I'm going. Some jobs had a bit more depth to them.

And I was just bad. Like nothing else. Obviously at Plat the amount of points you lose isn't much, at Diamond it is. So get matched with diamonds -> cost them points = you're going to get flamed. Hard.

[ThirdChild_ZKI]

SMN it felt like I had more defensives in previous seasons; ability to go peel-bot mode, in a raid atm so can't really expand atm but you get where I'm going. Some jobs had a bit more depth to them.

And I was just bad. Like nothing else. Obviously at Plat the amount of points you lose isn't much, at Diamond it is. So get matched with diamonds -> cost them points = you're going to get flamed. Hard.

That happens, but it's no excuse to abuse someone. What's done is done, I understand that, but players need to stop and remember that they themselves aren't perfect. If anyone, especially at Plat/Diamond level doesn't grasp that, they're just not being very realisitc, and only harming themselves driving others away from the mode.

[Rufalus]

Unranked is dead though, so you'd actually be further gating people from playing ranked when getting queues at Bronze/Silver a few weeks after the season starts is already difficult enough.

That's part of why I said it, to make it not dead any more. If something is a requirement it means it needs to be played.

If queues are that bad in ranked (you're right, I have to stop at silver because can't get matches any more) then I think progression through ranks should be based more on some individual metric rather than team win or loss, and you can put everyone into the same queue then instead of only your rank+1.

I know that makes downsides to match quality, but can't get matches at all in the current system if joining season late. I like to play other content first, the new content they add in patches...

[BloodRubyXII]

snip

I feel like you skipped over the main flaw I found though - once people are attuned for ranked (which won't really be that many people), unranked gets longer and longer queues, so you'd be gating people from ranked whilst also passively gating them from unranked because they'll struggle to get the required wins to queue ranked. This is no way also makes ranked more appealing to play, it actually may even just prevent more people coming into it because they can't be bothered to win 50 games of clown fiesta unranked feast or w.e

[Zojha]

That's part of why I said it, to make it not dead any more. If something is a requirement it means it needs to be played.

And those players playing unranked for the requirement would otherwise play ranked instead, so you increase the ranked queues for the benefit of the unranked queues. The same queues you already realize are bad. In general, when you segregate or split, you're gonna end up increasing queues one way or the other, because you spread an existing amount of people around, rather than getting more people.

Feast isn't overly popular. It's kept on life support with the recurring season rewards, but once people secured themselves their spot, they tend to stop queuing, because the incentive to queue turns into an incentive to not queue. Those who really like the mode will play unranked only from that point and behold, it's fairly dead, much like pre-season was (To the point they said they didn't even have enough data for job adjustments, lul).
People who don't consider themselves top 100 material had little reason to bother with Feast at all until recently, hence why they made the weapons available with tokens - they are desperate to make that mode work against the odds. But these people, too, will only play until they got the rank needed for their tokens and stop, because they don't like the mode either and playing more isn't beneficial.

And individual metrics aren't a particularly good way out. Think no further than a healer bot - If you get him on your team, you'll do less damage, get less kills and you'll die more often. By every metric you can pull, you'll look terrible. De facto, your metrics will depend on the team either way and the only thing you achieve is that people will stop focusing on winning the match and start focusing on maximizing whatever metric is giving them the best results. Side effects like farming kills instead of ending the match in lopsided matches come to mind as well.
And going by metrics relative to your teammates instead of absolutes? You then have an incentive to make your teammates look bad, because that makes you look relatively better. You can just let people die as healer if their death doesn't affect your rating and you can suicide into the base as DPS if it does affect the healer's rating. And then you need a hugely complex net of conditions for the system to check whose fault what was and how each person contributed, the code of which would probably exceed what you need for an entirely new game mode.

"Downside to match quality" doesn't even begin to describe the effects that would have.

You're ultimately dealing with a popularity issue there. Standard procedure for trinity designers is to add rewards there, which is what SE has done and the incentives are set up to create that initial rush, followed by a slow queue death. SE thus decided to just heed player feedback and shorten the seasons so you have the rush phase more often. That doesn't really solve the issue, but it's what "you guys" (don't feel addressed if you aren't) wanted, so hey!