PvP Needs An Endgame Once Again

[Rufalus]

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It's the lowest resource sort of barrier I can think of from a content creation PoV to satisfy the op's topic of a separation between newcomers and veteran with a progression from one to the other, simple gate. Not in a vacuum, only in conjunction with other ideas to stimulate queues, like I did also suggest repeatable weekly quest that wants completion of all the pvp modes once each a week, since we also want seal rock and other things to be alive. I know ranked gating is flawed, I'm just spitballing ideas. Make unranked a requirement for something else then since I don't want it to be dead if it is to continue existing.

[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!

[BloodRubyXII]

Ideally there needs to be some form of decay but it's a long far-fetched wish, SE doesn't like people to "have" to do anything. It's like when they tripped over themselves with saying they'd never force players to be active to keep their plots secure, they realized it's unfeasible as it'll essentially mean no-one could ever get a house unless it's from another player once all the plots are gone.

[Zojha]

Ideally there needs to be some form of decay [...]

That's a common suggestion, but how do you think that turns out in practice?

Instead of not playing at all, people will just play the minimum amount of games possible. So that minimum needs to be high enough to make a noteworthy difference. One game a week won't, people will sit in a 60+ minute queue one weekend, do their mandatory game win or loss and then wait until next weekend. One game a day? You better hope you don't get a bad work shift and need to queue at off hours for that.

It's not very practical and it makes rating in Feast even more detached from being a proper skill rating. Reason as follows:
If a rating is to reflect your skill at a game, then what purpose does decaying a rating serve? To reflect skill decay. That happens naturally over time. Take two years break and you'll be a lot worse than you were when you quit. Take a week break and the difference is not gonna be noteworthy. And in order to set the rating decay to something that affects queues in a noteworthy way, you have to set it in such a way that it has nothing to do with skill decay.
Not that it matters much at this point - Feast rating is already a mess. So please don't mistake this as a pro or con opinion, I don't care either way because I haven't participated in Feast since Season 2. I'm just stating general issues with it because I have an easy time seeing issues in things.

[Rufalus]

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Yes all good points, already a few posts tearing me down in great detail and I regret saying it. Was spitballing some ideas, didn't think the bad one would become focus point of the discussion. The weekly reward thing was my main idea but not completely on-topic so I just tacked that other thought on; it's hard to contribute something to the endgame vs leveling pvp distinction in the op without creating more problems. I don't have a magic answer to that. You can gate or segregate things if there are enough rewards to get players invested, but S-E can't produce new unique rewards fast enough to prevent some or all pvp modes dying often.

[ThirdChild_ZKI]

As an idle thought, with the overall changes to jobs and how they work in Stormblood (talking PvE-wise), perhaps a healthy mix of what's good about the 4.x PvP systems and what gave 3.x PvP depth and substance for which a community formed around would be a positive change? I'm likening this again to how BRD was so drastically changed (and hated) in 3.x, then changed again for the better in 4.0.

[RiyahArp]

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!

They don't even do that well. The feast weapons are a joke in terms of incentive for anyone below gold. You're looking at 3-4 seasons of placing, for bronze and silver, and two for gold, platinum, and diamond. You could get savage weapons easier.

[ThirdChild_ZKI]

But people wanted a ticket system. Granted, they wanted to be able to buy past season rewards with it, and I'm glad SE didn't go that far, but people wanted a ticket system, and I think it's fair in its implementation. Top 10 gets enough for the weapon immediately. A Diamond would only need to reach Bronze the next season for enough. Gold would have to at least reach Gold again. For example: I finished S5 Gold, but only wanted to get the Bronze title this season, so if I really want a weapon (I don't), I'll have to participate in another season, at least to Bronze again.

[BloodRubyXII]

Rating decay is not designed to continuously measure skill, it's to ensure that people cannot sit on a rating for rewards which is detrimental to queue activity. Even if it's just 20 games per a reset, that isn't a lot, but it's 20 more games than a lot of people on Chaos play now lol. It's very practical, it's why a lot of other games like League of Legends use it.

[Zojha]

Rating decay is not designed to continuously measure skill, it's to ensure that people cannot sit on a rating for rewards which is detrimental to queue activity.

If the point of a rating is to measure skill as accurately as possible, changing it in any way except to reflect changes in skill goes against the point of having it in the first place, as it dilutes the accuracy.

More reasoning below, in spoilers since it's drifting off topic.

I gladly agree that a lot of modern games use it - Because their ratings aren't meant to accurately reflect skill in the first place. Since you brought up LoL, LoL uses a hidden MMR as "skill rating" to match you, which has nothing to do with your visible League rating. They are quite aware that it's stupid to change a skill rating when skill isn't even concerned, so they implemented a separate progression system so they can punish you for misbehavior (like queue dodging) without affecting your skill rating.

And this split is something you can abuse to a degree, I did that one myself for the lulz once: You could dodge your promo series in champ select and it would count as a loss. Your MMR was unaffected. If you kept playing and winning, your MMR would rise and you'd be matched with better players, but by dodging, you stayed a dirty bronze scrub as far as the League system is concerned. And then you scrape Diamond and everyone is losing their minds over the bronze guy in their group.
It was a world of fun! You got WTF messages every other game. And it was probably the reason why they later implemented the automatic promotion - They probably didn't enjoy people leading their smoke and mirror league system ad absurdum all that much.

Not sure how other games handle it - Once a feature is "established", a lot of developers simply copy it without thinking about it and the ranking system in this game is probably one of the better examples of that. They aren't much better than normal people in that regard.

That said, since this game's rating doesn't have much to do with skill either - there are people not just rising, but rising into the highest echelons by losing more often than they win since Season 1 - there is no harm in making it even less so. I just find the ranking as such increasingly pointless, but I suppose it is a form of progression system and people don't really care about it being more.


That aside... 20 games per reset? Assume 5 minute match length, 15 minute queue (optimistic guess) and you end up with almost 7 hours playtime dedicated solely to holding your Feast rating every week. Yikes! That's a lot.

For perspective, even in League of Legends Master and Challenger tiers (Top 0,07%), you only need to play roughly 1 game a day (7 a week), with up to 10 bank slots. Gold and below (85%) doesn't have a decay at all and the rest between doesn't start decaying until 28 days of inactivity, even 1 game will suffice to clear that. In other words: For 99,93% of the ranked playerbase, the rating decay will amount to one game a month at most. That doesn't increase queue activity much, does it? If we generously assume 10,000 players play Feast and translate the numbers, only the top 7 players would have to play more than 1 match a month. My, that's gonna speed up queues tremendously!
More than that, all ranks above gold only get the same rewards gold gets in a different color, yet gold doesn't have decay at all. The main reward spots that award the exclusive skin aren't even affected by decay. For them, that's ~ the top 40%. For us, that would probably be the top 100 reward.

In the light of this... do you really think they do their rating decay to prevent people from sitting on rewards and increase activity? Do you think it a practical measure? One game a month at most for 99,93% of the population? Practical? Really? It isn't. Translate the numbers to our playerbase and you can easily see how tiny the effect on activity actually is. If they really do it for that reason, it isn't fulfilling its purpose very well - I'm more inclined to think they simply want some movement in those highly visible top spots. I can't think of any game that has rating decay as strict as you suggest, most of decay implementations have such a small effect on activity that it's doubtful that is their main purpose.

That all said: That still doesn't help on the way to find an endgame. Segregation requires participation, which, in lieu of people playing it for the heck of it, requires rewarding said participation. At the same time, you don't just want to reward participation alone, because you also want people to try. And any reward you do use is only a temporary drive. Odds aren't exactly great.