PvP devs: PLEASE communicate with us more!

[SimonYorke]

See title. It's been over 6 months since the last feast season, and while I'm personally excited for the new frontlines map, could we please get even an inkling of an idea why we still haven't seen a season? I personally feel that it's due to the ongoing changes and feedback regarding the state of current PvP, but again, it's been an inordinately long amount of time.

Further, a lot of the changes that have come to the mode (that I personally feel are a good thing in the long run) come without much context to them, and it would do the community a great deal of good to hear the internal thought processes and intentions behind them. The lack of communication regarding PvP changes is especially stark compared to the amount of information that PvE changes get; I recall one of the previous live letters spending what felt like 20-30 minutes explaining the changes to Ninja's mudras in PvE when PvP changes and information get generally pretty glossed over. Maybe it's not something to do in a live letter format, but a developer blog posting? I'd love to hear what Moriguchi's aims are for the mode and more about the process.

It's very tiring feeling like the community that cares about the PvP in this game is grasping for any sort of communication at all. Please consider opening up lines of communication in some fashion to rectify this.

Long story short: feast players are starving out here. Please communicate with us more!

[BloodRubyXII]

Pretty much everything Simon said, I'd add more but there's so much feedback given already that hasn't been addressed - and we're talking issues that aren't even specific to this expansion they're issues we've had since THE FOLD lol (things you've proven already you have the knowhow to fix like ability ticks as seen with the changes to SMN's dot applications), that I'm past the point now where I can be bothered to add anymore until what's been already parroted many times in most recently, Feves' thread as well as numerous threads in this section has (have? grammar failing me) been addressed. SC2 season started last week fortunately so that's excellent timing.

On that note btw don't think this game has PvP devs, think it's just gets resources allocated from the general battle team whenever they feel like sparing it lol. If it wasn't for the fact we have a really good CM who cares about the PvP in this game I don't think we'd ever see any SE staff post in this section.


Also:

long story short: feast players are starving out here.

Brilliant.

[Nalien]

Forget Live Letters, how about they just communicate with us on the forums the same way they used to? How does 4.3 get something like this, but we were left completely in the dark until 5.0 regarding those changes? I believe they even declined to comment or show anything regarding PvP in the press events leading up to Shadowbringers (despite clearly actually having something, but no instead they locked the PvP Profile at press events so PvP inclined attendees couldn't do their job for them and give us some details...), and of course we've not heard anything regarding the 5.1 changes either...

I honestly don't blame them for glossing over PvP in Live Letters, given what XIVs Twitch community is like regarding PvP. Would be nice to see those old community manager PvP streams make a comeback though, and just let them discuss upcoming changes more. A stream that's largely PvE related isn't going to have a warm reception to PvP news, but an official stream dedicated to PvP? I imagine that's the kind of content we want to tune in for? When even was the last official PvP stream? Chaos Showdown? Good to end on a high note, I guess...

[SimonYorke]

this

Something like this would be a godsend for the community right now.

The press event stuff was really weird, too - While I kinda took it as 'it's not ready yet' the same way most of us took 5.0 to be something that was pushed out just to have something pushed out, the radio silence felt awful. I know Frosty and others would have LOVED to have even the smallest morsel to report on, but nothing.

I agree with the bit about the live letters - dealing with an endless stream of residentsleeper spam and furious kvetching about PvP/rewards makes moving PvP details offstream a no-brainer. That makes me think that doing something PvP specific would do a world of good, even if it's smaller and doesn't pull the same kind of numbers. Maybe Adrenaline Rush TV with some infodumps/discussions with dual language slides so the English speaking community can hop in on the hype too. Anything.

[Esmoire]

I am surprised they included no balance changes with 5.15 to maybe iron out some of the outliers for PvP as the new map ships. In general I think a lot of us would agree The Feast balance is more important though surely there are ways to tweak some stuff that impacts FL tremendously more, like letting WARs Nascent Flash without a target.

Don't get me wrong. Balance isn't perfect but I think it's in a relatively good state and a lot of the perception is the meta and how that varies across regions. That said I would like to hear more of their design philosophies and goals and just information in general to help better our discussion and provide more useful feedback.

[Shinklet]

As players it's probably the best and healthiest to just stop investing so much into something so clearly neglected, unless of course you're earning them frc trips.

There's so much overlapping feedback regarding frontlines and at the very least, range hp, but yet again we see a pvp update that's going to have people play pvp and none of them are going to stick around, then the bad mouthing reddit meme cycle will continue for yet another expansion.

It is very expensive and time consuming to have a dedicated pvp team, but that's what mmos have, at the bare minimum.

Current pvp fits the aar mantra that se said they avoid as much as possible and that's 'they might fix it later'.

[BloodRubyXII]

This is classic SE by the way, new Season in just over a week, we're almost certainly going to get balancing changes with them (if not, oh boy, enjoy every range in your queue being a dancer dealing sick, riskless damage from max range and having some of the best cc and group utility afforded to a DPS in this game), and we've gotta go straight into the season with them without any kind of testing or feedback.

Love it.

[Nalien]

The lack of communication regarding PvP changes is especially stark compared to the amount of information that PvE changes get; I recall one of the previous live letters spending what felt like 20-30 minutes explaining the changes to Ninja's mudras in PvE when PvP changes and information get generally pretty glossed over.

I think the 14h Live Letter takes us to a new low; In depth detail about how 2Bs ass works, why they disabled it, and what they're planning to do to re-implement it. Oh and we'll do some PvP balance changes, no details though.

Talking about virtual ass glamours is higher priority that communicating with the PvP community. Honestly that perfectly sums up XIV...

14h stream was mostly for fun though, so I'll give it a pass. 2Bs ass is just too funny not to point out. Still waiting on a community rep post detailing the devs intentions like we used to get, though.

[Divinemights]

Asking the right question is very important. Understand the what really happened is also important. When you in need to communicate with Devs is through Adredline TV; therefore, the correct question need to be ask at next English developer’s letter should be this:

Can you have the English version of Adredeliine TV so we can communicate with the dev?

If you are expecting them to answer every single PVP related questions one by one at developers letter, you got the wrong idea

[BloodRubyXII]

Asking the right question is very important. Understand the what really happened is also important. When you in need to communicate with Devs is through Adredline TV; therefore, the correct question need to be ask at next English developer’s letter should be this:

Can you have the English version of Adredeliine TV so we can communicate with the dev?

If you are expecting them to answer every single PVP related questions one by one at developers letter, you got the wrong idea

I don't think we've had ARTV since like January. It's incredibly rare compared to live letters and only comes up every considerably large PvP patch (ie when we got Rival Wings, Feast, etc - even Onsal Hakair wasn't worthy of an ARTV stream). If you think that's a reliable and sustainable way to get feedback to Square Enix about PvP, that might be the most delusionally optimistic thing I've ever read in this section. We're not expecting every query to be answered in live letter, just the same way they don't answer every PvE one either - only the main points and the most popular ones as those generally denote things that require urgent attention.

It being in Japanese isn't the problem, the JP PvP players share a fair amount of our concerns anyway they're practically on suicide watch atm. We would rather get answers in Japanese than nothing at all.