Ranked Feast Feels Broken

[Patt]

Hi Everyone,

I wanted to express some thoughts on The Feast and where I think improvements need to be made because unfortunately right now it is an incredibly frustrating experience to be had. Apologies in advance if this comes across as a rant, I will try and be as constructive as I can. I don't often post on the OFs so please forgive me if my post is formatted incorrectly or should be moved somewhere else.

I'm someone who likes to dip their toes in many different aspects of the game (savage/ultimate raiding, achievement hunting, crafting/gathering) as well as PvP.

I believe the following need to be addressed, however I'm also interested to hear what other people think of PvP and ranked PvP specifically.

1. Ranked PvP Giving Experience Points: I think this is a really frustrating aspect of ranked feast and a decision I cannot wrap my head around. The fact that queuing up incentivizes players to queue up on classes they're less comfortable with, or in many cases have never played before which can be a major detriment to a team. I think its fine to hand out experience points for modes like frontlines or normal feast matches, but the stakes are often too high in ranked PvP. Its really aggravating to lose a promotional match because a level 30 Astrologian with no prior healing experience is put on your team. I don't blame players queuing up as such, and I believe its just as unfair to them as it is to the rest of the team. Experience gain should be limited to non-ranked matches.

2. Allowing to Queue for Ranked With no Prior PvP Experience. I understand that the PvP queue pool is small, however I still don't believe you should be able to queue for ranked matches having never PvP'd before. With the influx of new players its becoming more and more common to get players who have never played a match before in a ranked game. For context, I am currently silver rank nearing gold, which still matches me with unranked players. It's easy to tell who is new due to the proc of the "Hungry Like a Wolf I" or "Pack Mentality I" achievments showing in the chat box. Players should have to at least participate in some regular matches before queuing into ranked, this one is just really unfair to the new player as well as the team as a whole and just ends up as a crapshoot as to if its your team or the enemy team that gets the new player that round. The solution here is to just force players to play a few normal matches before queuing for ranked.

Part 2 continued below due to text limitations:

[Patt]

3. Solo-only play and limited communication: As far as I'm aware, there has only been like 1 recent teams ranked feast in recent memory. Only allowing solo queue, paired with limited communication tools in my opinion, is severely harming the ranked scene. Although anecdotal at best, I have a lot of friends who would be interested in small-scale ranked PvP but do not participate because of these restrictions. It's nearly impossible to appropriately communicate in the feast, especially when you need to deviate strategy from simple "Focus/Kill X" messaging and often comes across as passive agressive (spamming "Grab Medals" or "Nice Job!" for example. For context I am playing on Aether on the NA Datacenter in English, not sure if other regions/languages have this issue. Alleviating one or the other (or both) issues above would tremendously increase the enjoyment out of this content. This is probably my biggest complaint with the feast right now. It's an MMO, let us communicate and play with our friends please.

4. Bad/Improper Explanations and Cues for Objectives: This is more of an annoyance than a full blown complaint, but the cues and feedback for feast objectives is lacking at best. I cant count the number of victories delayed, or even forfeited because teammates aren't picking up medals or aren't focusing the targets with ample medals. It's frustrating to have to spam the "Get the Medals!" button over and over, risking coming across as passive agressive or harassing because no one is picking them up. The solution here is that there should be some sort of feed back indicating that medals need to be picked up (i.e: big text on screen, repeating sound, etc). The only accessibly place I know of to learn what the different medal icons are or what they're for is by going to the feast website (there may be some way in game, but its not readily accessible). This sort of goes hand in hand with my earlier point in communication; I feel like it would be much easier to convey the objectives of the match [especially to players who are new] if we were able to type.

5. Win Trading/Giving Up: This one is just... ugh. Countless games lead to players giving up in winnable scenarios, or simply don't try at all. I know this point is a hot topic and maybe doesn't have a simple solution, but I figured I'd mention it anyways. Since the queue pool is so small you end up constantly paired up with these people; blacklisting doesn't prevent them from being on your team, and reporting them hasn't deterred anyone from my experiences which feels really, really bad. (Note: I don't blacklist or report folks who simply have a bad game, are inexperienced or make misplays, I only reserve those for people blatantly giving up or intentional feeding, its very obvious.)

Anyways thank you for reading, I'm interested to hear other people's thoughts.

[rofland]

Half the healers still popping crystal feast are paypigs using gcd hacks lol

[Beywolf]

Hello Patt,

It looks like you are fairly new player just as me. Yesterday i managed to get in gold league. I would like to share my opinion on your points if you dont mind.

1.Ranked PvP Giving Experience Points - i personally really like that because in this way i can work on my rating and also level up a job. To be fair you have a fair point also but for me i like it the way it is.

2.Allowing to Queue for Ranked With no Prior PvP Experience. for me this is also fine, the leagues are there for reason and the new players start with 0 rating which means that they will be teamed with other low players up to silver league. From my experience so far gold is easelly achivable with just a bit practise. Ranked matches are the better place to learn than unranked matches because people are more determined to work for the win imo, so i disagree with you on this point.

3.Solo-only play and limited communication: there is teamq only bracket which can be used to play with friends with coms, but i definitely agree with the limited communication it really does not allow players to discuss any strategy, but to be fair i understand why it is that way.. Toxicity and elitest behaviour.

4. Bad/Improper Explanations and Cues for Objectives: i agree with that.

5. Win Trading/Giving Up: i try not to pay to much attention to such players and just focus on what i could do better, but you are right and it is definitely a frustrating problem.

Have a great day!

[Anhra]

Feast and PvP in general has alot of issues that could easily fixed if Squeenix had a proper Team designing and moderating it.

If you join it just to be one of the "lucky" few who get the exclusive rewards, you might as well give up, as stated already you have to get past:

-actual cheaters/bots
-wintraders
-alt characters from said wintraders or "veterans" that haunt this place since days of eld,who WILL kick you out of the ladder (if you dont believe me, then check the top 100 from season 18 from Chaos Datacenter, as point of reference)
-new players who have literally no other choice than to join in on ranked matches, since it is the only way to soloqueue on feast and get a actual match
-special mention: melee dps not announcing targets

If you are none of the above mentioned and managed to actually get a reward legit, then i would tipmy fedora to you, but since there is no way of telling you did, everyone who does have one or many of the top 100 items, is just a cheater in my book.