"The Consequences of Reducing the Skill Gap" (A Video Relevant to the 4.0 Changes)

[Kisagami]

I just want to clarify - none of the people I mentioned play the Feast or have even successfully gotten a short queue into Rival Wings. We’re usually thrown into Shatter. And that’s the mode I like.

Also, when we do drunken dungeon runs, we do not use duty finder. We don’t subject other people to that. Sorry if I made it sound like that. I’ve never subjected other people into this play style, and stay away from savage content. I usually keep myself at extreme mode.

But, the point is this: If PVP was how it was, my friends and I would have never tried it. We would have-never tried shatter. Hell, we usually use the frontline roulette and it NEVER puts us in anything but shatter. We can’t even get anywhere else to see if we like it or not.

[ThirdChild_ZKI]

Arguably the worst PvP mode they ever added, where you can win through passive means by focusing ice and avoiding actual Player versus Player gameplay. . .

Of course you like that.

[Kisagami]

Arguably the worst PvP mode they ever added, where you can win through passive means by focusing ice and avoiding actual Player versus Player gameplay. . .

Of course you like that.

I actually don’t avoid it. I’m a bard. Sure I avoid one on one, and stick with my team, but I’m pretty good working as a team and lending assists. Never would have gotten more confident if I didn’t follow their example AT MY OWN PACE.

[Wintersandman]

AT MY OWN PACE.

I noticed you put this in caps. I don't see how it is relevant to the conversation at hand when Secure has PvE objectives in it. They just carry less weight.

[ThirdChild_ZKI]

That's exactly what you do to learn. That's what anyone who played 3.x did to learn even that "difficult" PvP, and most realized it wasn't difficult at all.

Especially for the "can-100-to-0-you-with-their-burst" BRDs.

[Squintina]

I'm not going to comment on the correlation to FF14's pvp,

just that it was an interesting video and I feel like I learned a lot about the Fighting Game community!

[funkman]

As somebody who hated PvP prior to Stormblood but was able to enjoy it since 4.0, I don't expect my opinion to count much. But I just want to comment on this misconception of what Player vs Player content is.

I see a lot of people whinging about how Shatter was not "PvP" since you could win through objective-based gameplay. Well, I quite frankly miss the 72-player shatter as it was some of the most fun I've had in this game, playing with friends. You see, PvP doesn't need to be the dueling circle. It can be competing against other human beings (rather than AI) with the intention of achieving a specific goal.

You want a situation in which we both wail on each other until one of us is KO'd? I think the Feast & the Dueling circle do that fine enough.

From my experience - and I'm not generalizing here, just mentioning what my experience has been - pugs in PvP are much more intolerable than pugs in PvE. Perhaps because of the competitive nature of it, I don't know...

I want everybody to find something they enjoy in this game. And honestly I see that a lot of old-timey PvPers are not happy with the status quo. I'm sorry about that, but I don't really empathize, since I personally did not enjoy PvP during ARR. And many of the complaints about the current state of PvP I just don't get, because again, I think Shatter is just as good of a PvP mode as Rival Wings and the Feast both. They all offer something that isn't mindlessly gathering mobs of enemies together & wailing on them until they die.

I would like to see the PvP community become a thriving organism & bring something different to our options for gameplay. I wish you all the best!

[Wintersandman]

As somebody who hated PvP prior to Stormblood but was able to enjoy it since 4.0, I don't expect my opinion to count much.

Why did you hate it before 4.0? I am genuinely curious. Also please expand because "Too complex" is very vague as an example.

[ThirdChild_ZKI]

Story time:

While I'm proud of this, I do look back and see the flaw of it now: I once gathered some friends and maybe 2 or 3 randoms and outsmarted one of the big bad premades in Shatter. We beat them, and almost never engaged them at all. How did we do that?

I created signal macros and shared them to my friends. The plan was to split up and go after multiple objectives at once. Having been crushed by them MANY times, we knew they were going to play aggressively, and cover each other as they go purely for kills (combined with the points over time from having a base capped) and never touch the ice. So we split up, some went for ice, others went for bases. If we saw them on approach, we signaled with the macro, and scattered - they can't go after everyone without being forced to split up. While the team that spotted them would scatter, the rest rotated clockwise around the map. Base cappers went for the nearest ice, next ones behind them went for a base/near objective. It was a long match, but by the time they caught on, it was too late, and we stole a win.

We won a PvP mode without ever "vP"ing. THAT is what's wrong with Shatter. Couple that with really poor strategies ("ice > kills", waiting for large ice after all smalls activate, and while the other 2 teams are fighting, literally abandoning a strong push against an enemy team to go hit ice, etc.), and Shatter became a really bad footnote in Frontlines, especially as the most current - STILL most current Frontline mode, and the one mode everyone played after 3.5 brought in more players. "Everyone queues for Shatter because everyone queues for Shatter." It was true then, and sadly, if not for the bots and RW's novelty, it would still be true now. In 4.0, when I overheard someone encouraging their friend to queue for Shatter with them because "it's basically like PvE and you don't HAVE to attack any players" I wanted to stop dead in my tracks and correct the guy, but all that would've done is give him reason to want to avoid it still.

Let me clarify something: Player versus Player can be a broad spectrum, yes, but when a mode actively discourages direct player confrontation, that's poor design. This isn't everyone wanting all PvP to just be aimless slugfests like duels, or highly coordinated arena battles like the Feast, but it IS a competition against fellow players. Yet people treated Shatter like instanced hunts, and that was just sickening.

And let it be said that regardless of size, the former PvP community WAS a thriving organism, and quite willing to accept new people in, so long as they were willing to learn and make effort. But until perhaps 3.5, the rest of the community was too busy shunning, avoiding, and dismissing us.

"PvP sucks." (but they never tried it)/"I hate PvP." (based on experiences in other games but none in FFXIV)/"Lol, there's PvP in this game?"/"PvP is so toxic!" (but they never tried to learn, or willfully didn't participate and upset people - yes, I've seen that happen) <-------- If any of that was you before 4.0, congratulations, you were part of the problem.

[ArianneMartellMateus]

The only frontline mode that encouraged player vs player was slaughter, and that mode was removed. In every other mode the objectives far outweigh player kills. Seize was the worst PvP mode. Teams would afk and 'defend' their tomelith, they don't even have to dps it; just tag it and afk. Shatter fixed this by making people actually have to do something other than tag nodes and afk, but people complained that they wanted to afk like in seize. Hence the bots.