There is no reward for playing well.

[Mistress_Irika]

Something funny about CC is you actually get disproportionately punished for playing well, even beyond the degree to which it happens in other PvP games with SBMM.

The reason for that is the gcd based combat, which makes for gameplay with a very low skill ceiling. I'm sure you've noticed that when someone gets picked off, the team fighting 4v5 becomes heavily disadvantaged to win that engagement. As the odds get worse, 3v5, 2v4, it quickly becomes almost impossible to prevail. Unless you're desperate to stall the match, your best recourse is to run and regroup.

When the combat is fundamentally just rolling your gcd, it's very hard to overcome a difference in manpower. This isn't an FPS where even a single person can threaten to ace a team with raw skill, it's more like trying to do a parse run with someone dead.

As a result, the weakest player on your team controls the match outcome more than your strongest player.

This leads to situations where if you happen to be the highest ranked person queuing in your bracket, you're likely to get paired with the worst person in queue. If that person is a feeder, your winrate that session will plummet to 20 or 30% through no fault of your own. Conversely if you dodge getting put into the 'loser pool' you'll coast along with an inflated winrate and easy games. If you queue randomly then sure, in a big picture sense your winrate will average out close to 50%, but on a match-to-match basis it swings between 20% and 80% in reality. I've never seen a PvP game where so many matches are either stomps or unwinnable.

It applies to top 100 matches too. Sometimes it's beneficial to snipe someone higher ranked because they'll get saddled with crystal 0s while you get a more balanced team. Being the best player in the queue is less important than avoiding getting paired with the worst player in queue.

If you've ever felt like you've gone on a losing streak despite topping the scoreboard and having 0 deaths each time, it's likely due to the above. It takes a lot of fun out of CC for me, knowing that gaming the matchmaking affects your results way more than personal skill does.

Carries are getting harsher punishments this expansion, because the pvp kits aren't exactly designed for solo play. Sure, you can play well and get a high KDA. However, if the rest of your team is not doing so hot then you may end up getting a lackluster reward in game like stalling to a useless overtime for example. Even with classes like NIN, SAM, and, to a certain extent, MCH that can get an advantage by dealing damage according to percents those using the classes cannot escape this effect.

System just heavily rewards players who can work together in teamfights. 1v9 when it comes to cc is just about nonexistent. I dont see how that can work when almost every class has some sort of aoe ability that does about 10k dmg.

[Gserpent]

You need rewards for a ladder in this game, because that's how the game is designed. Sad to say, people generally don't do things "because they're fun," they do them "because I want the pony, and also it's fun." I mean, hell, how many folks do you know that engage in raidlogging, and actually *enjoy* the raids? Maybe they're fun at first, but people will be reclearing weekly for months on end because... I dunno, I guess they just want all the gear? The rewards. I know several people with the S rank hunt mounts - you think they actually enjoyed doing 1,000 of those damn hunts? Probably not, but they enjoy having the pupper.

Ladders in other games may not need rewards (but note that they still have "tiers" and profile portraits or skins or other rewards associated with doing well - it's not just a simple number), but they serve a very different kind of playerbase than the one we have here.

I don't see a "core issue" with adding new rewards to PvP series/vendor every major patch. We're constantly adding new items to the database with every single patch, Gold Saucer is up to 6 separate non-seasonal vendors (1-4, the rainmaker hairstyle vendor, and Kasumi) for the rewards they've added over time, etc. I don't see why it would be a problem for new housing items, mounts, and other things to be added to the series or vendors every major patch cycle.

As for currency, between wolf collars, wolf marks, and crystal trophies we should have the bases covered. Maybe just add a way to convert wolf marks to wolf collars, maybe more expensive than crystal trophies since crystal trophies are more limited.

[Gserpent]

I just assume it's easy to increase potency on something by 1,000 or whatever, but harder to make actual changes to gameplay elements. Or they somehow, for some absolutely insane reason, believe that Resilience basically not working is okay and working as intended.

[Claustrum]

I just assume it's easy to increase potency on something by 1,000 or whatever, but harder to make actual changes to gameplay elements. Or they somehow, for some absolutely insane reason, believe that Resilience basically not working is okay and working as intended.

But how hard is it to test that the change is needed?

Edit: What I mean is: how many resources do they spend on researching how much each ability needs to change? It's not about how hard it is to actually make the change, it's about how hard it is to decide the change is needed.

[Gserpent]

Who knows? It's entirely possible they don't see it as a problem. I mean, it wasn't that long ago where Yoshida's response to complaints about lack of healers/difficulty of finding healers was "idk just play healer I guess?", which came across as pretty tone-deaf considering what a huge pain it is to gear up multiple roles at the same time with any degree of speed. It would certainly explain why Purify continues to do only half of its intended job several months down the road...

Square-Enix has gotten better about gauging opinions of players globally, but JP players are still going to be the primary place they draw information from. If JP players aren't raising hell over something, it probably gets set on the back burner. Seems to be that way, anyway. With regards to the ranking system, I'm pretty sure it's "we don't see it as a problem." For some insane reason, they deliberately decided to avoid any sort of Elo-derived system and went with the crappy system that Feast was running off of. Maybe it was just a matter of saving development time and effort, or maybe they actually believed the Feast system wasn't broken six ways from Sunday despite mountains of evidence to the contrary. Who knows? Yoshida is more open about things than a typical AAA dev, but he's still going to avoid telling players the truth if it would make the company/development team look bad.

I feel like saying "we thought the Feast system was fine as-is" would make the company look bad, in light of how poorly ranked mode has gone over since CC's debut.

[Bobby66]

The comeback matches are the expectation and not the rule. I am a try-hard and will always push for the victory no matter what, but I do get why some people may rather just give up and head on to the next match.

[Valence]

Comeback games are most of the time due to the winning team throwing the game hard. They're an anomaly and generally not really actually pushed from any defender's advantage.

The spawn being closer to the defenders doesn't actually constitute any defender's advantage as the speed ramps on every map allow the attacker to get there as quick (speed ramps are actually one of the worst design in that mode but that's another story). Spawn points can even be harassed hard when the attacker is already snowballing and don't hold any special effects in favor of the defender either.