To Square-Enix.

[Valence]

CC has been a huge success for casual (as seen with the casual mode), but ranked has issues for sure, especially on the longer run during each seasons once everybody reaches crystal and stops playing. This is without mentioning technical design issues like the last riser of a league being queued with the league above, which completely blocks people from leagues lower from rising to the next if the next has stopped playing long ago. One just has to look at the rankings of every season to see that the ranked population at diamond and crystal level has shrunk by 4 or 5 at least, with some variations depending on the datacenter.

Now then, it really annoyed me seeing SE spend a lot of resources and dev time over exclusive pvp rewards for top rankers and whatnot (during feast especially), which was essentially resources literally spent for a handful of players at best. I don't think this is a good way to spend valuable resources, much like it is not for the paraserpent or whatever, that could instead be dedicated to more valuable things to have ingame that actually touch a lot more players. FOMO rewards is also problematic in that regard, albeit it at least reaches more players (the ones being able to play the content while the rewards are in place). On top of this, Feast had a lot of competitive rewards as mentioned, and yet wasn't played much with a tiny community, which makes me question if the exclusive rewards the ranked crowd keeps asking for is the correct solution to be honest.

Fact of the matter is, most players don't want to play pvp for competition in this game.

[Boomoo]

It's a pity "Feast" was not built upon and just removed. Some ideas could have influenced "Crystal Conflict" for the better. The resources and manpower could have been recycled for the better.

Some of the issues may be fixed. To increase participation and prevent sitting on rating. They could seek influence from other games and achieve the goal. Compromises between casuals and competitive players can be achieved.

That said, I just sincerely hope they try to tune issues. Even if it's a small fraction of players, putting it all aside won't benefit the company or players.