Changes to "smurfing" policies, starting the Feast Season 18 and later?

[JeanKamiyuki]

It’s a long-discussed topic amongst PvP game designers and communities that smurfing* is big issue in the competitive games and should be dealt to guarantee fair play and healthy player base. Titles such as DOTA have announced it as a ToS offense as it ruins the experience for both newcomers / veterans. Player surveys have also shown that smurfing is one of the most common reasons why players quit and should be taken as a serious issue.

I’d like to believe that PvP of Final Fantasy XIV has reached the level of maturity to take major steps in order to tackle the issue right now.

Reason: Many high-end players take pride in how they have multiple characters at Top 100 across Data Centers. However, this does not seem to be intention of the design — it introduces major conflict of interest with fair gameplay, rules and reward distribution. A bad situation that can be fixed without penalizing players with ”sudden rule change”.

This is what could be done:

Action: Similarly to the Fanfest rewards etc., only one character per service account will receive the Feast Top 100 reward now. This way a player cannot hoard multiple spots for themself. Make the player choose the main character for the reward or the highest ranking character.

Result: This way “before-the-rule-change” smurf players will still receive their rewards – but also people, who suffered from their anti-competitive practices, will be on a better footing at receiving the rewards as the rankings will actually reflect the reality. Generally, this will open up approx. 10—20+ spots per data center.

Players shouldn’t be worrying about competing against the same person through different characters. A perfect existing in-game rule analogy is private housing: both are limited, earned and highly desired. Players may only own one private and one free company estate per World on any given service account. This should apply to Feast rewards as well considering how limited and prestigious they are. Cohesive ToS should be enforced to bring trust and clarity to the in-game policies.

This a great chance reform integrity of Final Fantasy XIV PvP and show player base that you are committed to improve the PvP even at a fast phase, and that match manipulation will not be tolerated. This kind of pro-competitive actions will lift up the player morale and trust in the future content such as the PvP mode in Endwalker.

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*Smurfing is when a highly-skilled player creates an alternative account as a disguise to play against less proficient opponents. This almost always results in steamrolling their lower-level skilled opponents but Feast matchmakes higher rank people on their side for even more effortless climb in the Rankings. The complete stomping of other players might be hilarious for the better player but usually leaves their victims bitter and quitting the game altogether.

[Divinemights]

They are able to do this only because Feast is not popular due to its toxicity created.
All the patch up idea will not works when fundamentally low participating provide easy accessibility of what those guys are doing.
The only solution I can see is to put all NA datacentre in same bracket and all EU datacentre in the same bracket.
Instead of originally 150 ppl compete for 100 pots now you have 300 at least.

Also, people want competition, so why not Top 100 of NA instead of Top 100 of a datacentre

[BloodRubyXII]

Reason: Many high-end players take pride in how they have multiple characters at Top 100 across Data Centers. However, this does not seem to be intention of the design — it introduces major conflict of interest with fair gameplay, rules and reward distribution. A bad situation that can be fixed without penalizing players with ”sudden rule change”.

I don't care about getting rewards on my alts. It's not a pride thing, it's a "I'm working nights for an entire week and my options are queue on JP or don't play feast at all because this mode is only active at specific hours".

If I could play EU feast whenever I wanted I probably wouldn't have as many alts, I tend to play different jobs on all my chars too, if I do this on my main I just get flamed for inting lol.