Remove "Casual" from CC / CC needs another overhaul

[Blinding_Awesomeness]

True words :/

[Valence]

I have been mulling over the same thing recently and do think that both modes compete with each other in a bad way. There should only be one CC mode that you queue up for, and an elo behind everybody to keep people of similar skill matched with each other preferably. I have actually no illusion that this will always pair similar skills together with the small population of the pvp game, and we might see occasionally some crystal level player thrown into a gold or lower game, but that would keep the queues alive anyway (much like current casual as well, high rated peeps also play in casual if just to learn other jobs), and I also believe the current elo system doesn't work well either due to the insanely disparate skill levels at the level I can judge: plat to crystal.

Go back to the basics, make the system work like this, keep elo hidden not to spook casuals and to prevent endless whines about unfair pairings, just show it privately to the player they belong to. And make people able to queue with a single friend, I am extremely confident it would boost queues tenfold. Actually, also add a roulette for the mode. Why is this a thing for a broken mode like FLs but not CC?

And introduce team ranked maybe, but I really doubt that those queues would ever pop, as much as I wish they would.

[ThaCa]

Overall pretty good points. I would personally like to see it consolidated into Crystalline Conflict and forego both the Casual and Ranked in name, have it still calculate rating on the back ground without all this star nonsense and either allow showing your current situation under the PvP tab or reveal them to everyone at end of the Season.
I think the current system of highest achieved score is still good in a way that it in theory keeps people pushing up, whether it should revert or stay should probably depend on if your final rating is visible at any time or only at the end.
Passive decay could be nice even if it counted the highest achieved, this would help rusty players a bit if they take longer breaks

Pre-made parties should be allowed, at the very least up to 3 players. Prioritize matching similar sized parties as long as it doesn't break the team ratings too much and if it can't match soon enough it will give some estimated extra for the partied team to compensate in team vs team rating if it has to put it vs solo or smaller parties.

Overall rewards should be revised, there's so much filler levels in Series with Trophy Crystals and yet you can't use them for much anything. Wolf Marks can buy plenty of random jank, allow at least the same for the Crystals to cut the janky Crystal to Collar to Wolf Mark boogaloo (which isn't very good rate anyway). There's been plenty of good ideas from others over time like having some sort of PvP relics that could cover other modes too or just straight up "upgradeable" Hellhound weapons for effects.

Almost anything would be better than the current inactivity of the mode, even just slapping a roulette for it and RW would help a bit.

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

Can we please not merge them, thank you very much? I am not sure where this hellspawn of an idea came from, but I am opposed to the idea to merge Casual and Ranked into one abomination of a mode by pitting people who want to have casual fun with people who play for ranked performance. Leave the split where it is, Casual works perfectly fine as is. It is a good introductory mode and fantastic for just some casual PvP after work without having to worry about performance.

You want Ranked to work? Then work on the things that make Ranked "Ranked".
- rewards are dogwater and are an insult to be called incentive. "glory" and a number on a board are not enough in an incentive-driven game with an incentive-driven community, no matter how you slice it. It needs something you can only get in ranked and ideally something that incentivises ALL ranks to be active (i.e. tier-based rewards that AREN'T extra trophy crystals and bad borders, yet unique to ranked)
- map "pool" is on a rotation rather than random each game, leading to "oh it is <xy>, I don't like/am not good at <xy>, time to queue down"
- PvP used to have an actual community representative for transparency and mediation, this would be valuable if returning
- an overhaul to report systems for pvp cheating cases so extreme cases with extremely obvious things like speedhacking are taken off the census within the hour of the report coming in

And in general:
- Trophy Crystal vendor needs an update. BADLY. Four seasons and two series of Crystals is just a bloat of currency and nothing to actually spend them on. I currently turn them into wolf collars and use those for wolf marks to buy consumables. BUT OH WAIT IM ALSO GAINING THOSE EVERY MATCH. I have literally nothing to spend Trophy Crystals on. With how much I have with Collars taken into account I could probably buy out the whole shop 2-3 times.

[Gserpent]

Can we please not merge them, thank you very much? I am not sure where this hellspawn of an idea came from, but I am opposed to the idea to merge Casual and Ranked into one abomination of a mode by pitting people who want to have casual fun with people who play for ranked performance. Leave the split where it is, Casual works perfectly fine as is. It is a good introductory mode and fantastic for just some casual PvP after work without having to worry about performance.

As far as I'm concerned, the people that want sweaty matches can just organize in discord servers or CWLS and use the arranged mode to play against each other. We're pretty clearly seeing that there's not enough of a playerbase to sustain two separate queues.

The solution to concerns about lopsided teams is to simply implement an Elo- or TrueSkill-derived system in the background. Never show this rating to players, because it's a well known thing that some subset of "casual" players are actively discouraged from playing if they see their score/they get anxious over their score (this is why most games have shifted away from proper, visible numbers/ratings into vague "tiers"... it's still all based on ratings, but you don't see them, only the "tier.") Same reason there's no inherent DPS meters or scoreboard at the end of dungeons etc. Some folks see performance metrics and get really anxious or discouraged. I don't understand it, but it's definitely a thing. In a game like this, those players are a considerable portion of your revenue stream so you can't risk alienating them.

As for lack of rewards... yeah... It's exactly as expected, Square-Enix just refuses to properly support their side content and it makes no sense to me. It's so absurdly wasteful of resources. I seriously doubt making new virtu sets for each series would consume *that* much of the art team's resources since it's just upscaling and occasionally editing old artifact armor sets, not creating something new. But it gives players something to pursue, being based on the more limited crystal trophies ensures they have to spend a lot of time on the content to unlock multiple full sets, etc.

I'd also recommend adding all of the poetics-dump components of relic weapons to Wolf Marks at a 10:1 ratio (2000 max poetics, 20000 max marks.) I would *much* rather do FL or RW or CC than grind MSQ roulette or whatever for poetics to move through a relic step, and I doubt I'm the only one. Relics, in general, should be all about driving players to engage in side content, and this seems like a completely brainless way of driving a little more activity to PvP.

[Sinstrel]

And if they are too lazy to create more re-skinned virtu sets, they could even more lazily create seasonal titles for various random arbitrary achievements. I'm under the impression that something like this wouldn't take more effort than a couple lines of code. I can't think of anything even more bare minimum effort.

[Nanne]

And if they are too lazy to create more re-skinned virtu sets, they could even more lazily create seasonal titles for various random arbitrary achievements. I'm under the impression that something like this wouldn't take more effort than a couple lines of code. I can't think of anything even more bare minimum effort.

They wanted to have unique titles for all the restoration seasons but people were against it so giving unique titles for all the seasons wouldn't probably work either

[Bobby66]

So the logic is to remove the one that pops? Maybe it is time to face facts ranked is just not in FFXIV cards? Play the mode for the sake of playing.

[Sinstrel]

They wanted to have unique titles for all the restoration seasons but people were against it so giving unique titles for all the seasons wouldn't probably work either

Ugh, I remember that. Why is our community so fragile?

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

Ugh, I remember that. Why is our community so fragile?

Jealousy under the guise of hating on FOMO.

Sounds dumb and I don't mind the normal person hating on FOMO, but competitions having unique stuff has somehow been bashed regularly like "I am not good enough for xy, therefore I feel it is unfair that I don't have a chance on ABC".

Always wanting to deny others from having things instead of asking things to be expanded upon. A shame really.