It will never thrive, though. PvP is side content. Square-Enix's established pattern of handling side content is to *mostly* abandon it once it's out the door. I'm actually surprised we're getting a new map in 6.3, considering new maps is typically a "once an expansion when we remember this exists" kind of thing (how long did we go before Onsal Hakair was our new FL map?), but I think it's high grade hopium to expect them to actually make systemic changes. One, because that will be a lot of work and require a lot of fine-tuning, and two... because it would *require* them to admit they fucked up. And to the people that are paying attention, that they fucked up *for no goddamn reason.* I refuse to credit the idea that Yoshida and whoever else is involved in developing and managing PvP (we know Yoshida is involved because he's said he's a fan of old school MMO-PvP like DAOC etc in interviews... Crystalline Conflict existing at all is almost certainly due to him wanting to do it and not player demand) are somehow aware of trends and concepts in competitive gaming, but aren't aware of the outright necessity for Elo-derived systems for skill-based matchmaking.

I also don't credit ideas that would suggest Yoshida and his crew were unaware of how people like to PvP with their friends. But they still launched the ranked mode without *actual* skill-based matchmaking, they launched casual *without* the ability to play with your buddies, and they have still gone multiple seasons now without meaningful rewards. Shit, they did season 1 without realizing the utter stupidity in not setting it so that achieving a certain tier by the end of the seasons also gives you all of the rewards for previous tiers. And now we're seeing them double down on idiotic moves like "your tier is based on your highest ever placement, not your current placement" and them further expanding the matchmaking range because queues are dying, making the delineation of tiers even less meaningful than they were before. Fuck's sake, just remove everything but Crystal and change Crystal Credit to be a proper Elo system! You're two thirds of the way there, stop pussyfooting and just fucking do it already!

CC Ranked is turning out to be *exactly* like Feast was before it, in all of the worst ways of that old system. There's no reason they couldn't have done better, from the start, because they can easily reference games that have been running for a decade or longer and have made all of the major mistakes, then corrected them, so they can literally see what to avoid when doing their own system. But whether it was hubris, a desire or need to cut work-hour costs, or something else, they thought their garbage Feast system would still work out fine.

I'd rather they just scrap ranked entirely and stop splitting up the already diminished CC playerbase. It's not like there's a goddamn difference between casual and ranked in 90% of games, anyway. Even in crystal, you still have plenty of morons playing like complete monkeys. Because it's not skill-based, and it was never setting out to be. But if that's the case, literally what is the point of a ranked queue? You could still have tiers for casual queue, they'd just be based on total wins or total games played or something. You could still give people that little serotonin drip from hehe monke brain like big number.