Good afternoon,

I am here to express my frustration with the lack of action across the ongoing ranked mode of Final Fantasy 14, The Feast, aswell as the handling of Ishgard restoration. Time gated rewards need some kind of maintaining of the integrity of competition and having competed in several seasons on feast now I have seen square ignoring RMT in the form of players paying to get their accounts boosted onto the boards, collusion in the form of players win trading, and just general unsportsmanlike conduct in players prematurely rage quitting matches or forcing losses because of pettiness.

The feast community is quite insular and I've interacted in streams and discord servers with some of the players who do one if not all of the above complaints, and they brag about how they face no or minimal punishment. This is not a critique of my interaction with the GMs as they are polite and do their job to make you feel listened to. But the lack of any substantial action as players ruin the competition and take away rewards from players who actually deserve them. I've experienced harassment beyond my breaking point from some of these players and I've watched targeted harassment live on stream to other players. This has been going on for the years I've been playing Feast, and for years before I took the game mode seriously, it has been tracked extensively by some members of the feast community and our cries for help feel like they are always falling not on deaf ears but rather apathetic ears as we are told our experiences matter and see no solution as exclusive rewards are torn away from people who put in time and effort to give it to people who bribe their way onto the board or simply cheat.

When I had started playing Feast I was told the shady interactions were dying down, and I believed it to be true as I experienced very minimal toxicity within my games. As I climbed up the ranks it became more apparent that it hadn't died down, it was just more covert. With these last few seasons, in particular season 18 of Feast, it was no longer covert as players cheated and abused the system laughing in the greater community's face that they would not be punished, admitting everything they do.

Similarly the 3 Ishgard restoration ranked seasons had their own issues with botting and it doesn't really seem that much was done about that either given how short the seasons were.

There needs to be some kind of expediting of reports being done regarding time sensitive content such as Ranked PvP especially when the rewards are never going to return.