Hello! to the Developer Team working on PVP!

[Gserpent]

snip

It doesn't need to be a premade mode. Such a mode will be dead on arrival. Groups of casual players aren't going to want to find 2 extra friends if only three people are on at once, or if they only have the one friend that wants to PvP. Just make the casual queue allow people to queue in pairs, and adjust it to try and prioritize ensuring that pairs are against other pairs. Done and solved. This is casual queue we're talking about, half the people don't even have any clue what they're doing and half of those probably just want their credit for Garo mounts or whatever and won't even *try* to figure out what to do. The negative impact of not being able to play with your friends *in an MMORPG* greatly outweighs the negative impact of "omg, premades."

I disagree there is any meaningful difference to ranked mode. Quality of players is no different from casual mode, and there are no meaningful rewards to be gained from participation in ranked mode - not even increased XP or currency. Literally the only reason to have a ranked mode *at all* is for skill-based matchmaking, but the system in place is *not* skill-based and is in fact quite far from it. Hence, they either need to actually do their damn jobs and replace it with a proper Elo-derived system like literally everyfuckingone else, or they need to admit they were full of it and just give it the Astralagos treatment so that it's no longer splitting the player pool. Maybe you're willing to give them credit for minor tweaks and adjustments to the system, but I'm not - they fucking damn well know what they need to do, they're just pussyfooting around and hoping that there being words in patch notes is enough to mollify the average player. And in fairness, it totally is - Christ knows there's a frankly cultish devotion to Yoshida in a depressingly large segment of the playerbase, as though he's some kind of gaming Jesus and not just a really cool guy who happens to operate and manage a pretty good video game.

Actually, I can come up with one discernable difference between casual and ranked - I don't usually get one out of every three or four games in casual mode featuring at least one player on my team pitching a temper tantrum and spamming quickchat or "marks target to ignore" crap like I do in ranked. Ranked brings in all the downsides of a competitive ladder with *NONE* of the benefits, and I'm not willing to give credit to the idea that maybe someday six years in the future while they're ginning up the last patch of the expansion after the next that they might actually finally get around to making the ranked rating system *not* completely fucking worthless.

I ain't buying the brown nosing stuff, man. Square-Enix does a lot of things right - like, a LOT of things, XIV is a pretty good game and it's frankly flabbergasting at how good they are at putting out content *on schedule* and largely free of serious bugs. But they do make some mistakes, and in particular they keep doubling down on some of those mistakes, and I think we have every damn right to call them out on their bullshit when they do. We know that they are damn well capable of doing better than that, so they ought to fucking do it, or just give the content in question the Astralagos treatment.

except manipulators were rarely punished. that was the other bad thing. there aren't enough higher ups to monitor all matches 24/7 to catch that activity.

It's more than that. Because cheating and, especially, "hacking" (tools that let you do things like noclip, infinite health, etc... things clearly outside of what can be done by normal players) involve third-party tools, I'm pretty sure that it's something must be handled by a "special task force," like how they deal with RMT. That means it's just one team of people (and probably a very small team, proportional to the fucking massive behemoth that is FFXIV) based in the Square-Enix offices in Japan. That means reports have to be collected, translated, whatever data or evidence is involved attached, and then the team has to get to it and review it. And assuming that it's handled like with RMT, they will do account actions/bans in *waves*, not piecemeal - they'll figure out how the tools work, what bits of the program they operate off of, and seek to close off those access points and ban the associated accounts in one swoop. And then the cycle repeats itself because RMT and cheating are never going to go away.

In the meantime, while all this is happening, your PvP season has been ruined. Right now, no one *really* cares, because there are zero rewards of value associated with ranked. No one is going to care that much if someone cheats to #1 or #10 or whatever. But if they put out a cool glamour set or a mount for the best boys and girls in each DC? Oh man, you better be ready for some high octane caterwauling.

It's an especially thorny issue for Square-Enix, because raiding is wholly fucking reliant on ACT, and ACT is reliant on being able to hook into the program. I'm not a programmer, but I wouldn't be surprised if the programs used to execute "hacking" also rely on hooks like that. Nothing will kill XIV faster than an anti-cheating patch killing third-party glamour/visual modding tools because it nixed the same access hooks those programs utilized. Like, I would seriously expect >25% subscriber numbers bleeding off over a few months if they did something that broke those programs' access to the game. Killing ACT wouldn't have as large of an impact because Endwalker has done a better job of killing the raiding scene than anything else they could have done, but it wouldn't be healthy for their subscriber count either.