PvP is BROKEN and needs FIXED

[Valence]

You'd think people would have learned not to rush ahead one by one after a team stagger in crystal either and yet they do. Not sure if removing the glass flooring in platinum is gonna magically fix it. Not opposed to it though.

[Sinstrel]

i'd like for CC to be the one place where they enforce anti-cheat and then implement a system where all the people running bots and scripts only queue in together, while the rest of us can play fair.

Scripting/hacking is far, far, FAR less frequent/prevalent than people like to beleive. What is more common is players who form PvP teams and frequently play in custom matches together who then go on to que sync together in the solo ranked mode at 4am to 7am before work (or 2am to 4am PST with no job the next day) to achieve high rank. Which is the main cause of these issues mentioned earlier:

... It is pretty ridiculous that some of the former or current best players die like wet noodles in 1s, because they get meme killed while trying to hide behind a wall. Your assumption might be wrong that the devs want tier to equal skill - I think they don't. They want it to equal time spent. Because then everyone is happy and spends another month on the sub.

Like, if a rank1 player from an older season, and there are many that I saw last days, sometimes even 2 in one team - and they are unable to carry the semi-bad player. Then a rank1 player is worthless. Then ranking makes no fcking sense at all.

Que syncing at the earliest hours of the morning to rack up 10-20 wins at a time has always been an issue in ranked PvP game modes (in many games not just XIV) and will never truly begin to be solved unless solo que is casual only, and custom, pre-made team-based matching is the only ranked option. However, this will indeed hamper the que times and likely kill the ranked mode e tirely due to the inability to participate in PuGs (pick-up groups) for ranked team games and instead being restricted to your registered team mates only as seen back in Feast days.

And please do not misunderstand, there are some truly great rank 1 players out there who consistently achieve their ranks fairly with an incredible amount of skill, persistence and patience (playing for fun instead of e-clout). Lets not discount these players' efforts by lumping everyone together due to the few bad apples.

[spoo]

Scripting/hacking is far, far, FAR less frequent/prevalent than people like to beleive. What is more common is players who form PvP teams and frequently play in custom matches together who then go on to que sync together in the solo ranked mode at 4am to 7am before work (or 2am to 4am PST with no job the next day) to achieve high rank. Which is the main cause of these issues mentioned earlier:

you'd be surprised to find out that its more common than you think. I've even gone on a fake discord account to join a server that makes and sells these scripts. so many people there. It wasnt hard to find at all either.

[Valence]

Can you elaborate on how this queue syncing works exactly?

[Zakuyia]

Hey now ppl how am i suppose to be (insert top player here) If I 1v 5 a team ill be like them said not a damn person lol all jokes I have ever only did season 1 ranked I can't stand that limited speech.

[Commander_Justitia]

I would guess there are people that track guard cooldown of enemies, or plugins that show who is the target of each enemy member - would be easy to heal/cover/support/retreat once you know there are 3 people looking at you suddenly. I usually used /as focustarget but I think they removed that capability from the game.

[Sinstrel]

you'd be surprised to find out that its more common than you think. I've even gone on a fake discord account to join a server that makes and sells these scripts. so many people there. It wasnt hard to find at all either.

I would guess there are people that track guard cooldown of enemies, or plugins that show who is the target of each enemy member - would be easy to heal/cover/support/retreat once you know there are 3 people looking at you suddenly. I usually used /as focustarget but I think they removed that capability from the game.

I hadn't even considered these types of hacks when I initially wrote my post. Spoo definitely has an argument here then actually.

Can you elaborate on how this queue syncing works exactly?

Its quite easy actually. Everyone has access to the Eorzean Time clock in-game. Picking an appropriate Eorzean Time and having everyone simultaneously que exactly when the clock strikes that time will most often get you all in the same game, and more often than not, also the same team. Even during prime time peak hours.

This has various uses:

For mentoring

You can organize like this through a linkshell, FC chat, or PvP Team to teach a friend, family, FC member etc. how to play CC and help get them up to speed with all of the current game knowledge/mechanics faster.

For example if you have a friend wanting to learn how to play DRG effectively, you can pick DNC and teach them how to, and get them practice with, limit break syncing. You can guide them on how they should be preparing to set up thier LB and give very good practice with timing thier LB to slam down during Dancer's charm. You can help them get familiar with paying attention to when they have dance partner and sabre dance buffs so that they can get maximum strength wymwind thrusts every time. You can start off by teaching them in a way where you always ping your DNC LB before using it, and gradually increasing the difficulty by no longer pinging and instead having them pay attention to when you are getting into position for a DNC LB to more closely mimic a real ranked match. Or pinging "Covering Dragoon!" when you throw them dance partner and sabre dance, then slowly transition into no longer pinging and teaching them awareness of their buffs and of how thier burst cooldowns align well with abilities like sabre dance, just as a true high elo player would.

You can teach someone good positioning as a healer by playing a ranged job and having them stand on top of you throughout the whole game as you stand in all of the sweet spots for healing on each map until they start to get the hang of it on their own. There are near endless ways you can use this to mentor.

Mind you, all of this can be done by forming a custom party instead and playing custom matches, but what if you dont have 10 players? Or if you just want to mentor someone 1:1? There is currently no better way I can think of personally. But this also leads into the second point.



*For cheating solo que ranked matchmaking*

There are many folks who organize custom match events where you find friends and other players to form a team with and play private games of full pre-made vs pre-made teams. In an earlier iteration of PvP in XIV there was even a ranked team mode where you and 3-5 others could go to Wolve's Den to sign a petition which would ratify a PvP team that you could name and get an additional chat channel. You can still see vestiges of this feature in the Wolve's Den actually.

Forming PvP teams in-game is probably a lot less common now (I don't know) but custom games are alive and well and people do have teams or a group of players they most often do cusrom matches with (like the PvP equivalent to a static).

As you are trying to improve your gameplay, you learn to play exceptionally well with your teammates, learn all their habits, and generally have a good awareness of when to combo your abilities due to having played so many challenging matches with eachother vs other pre-mades.

There is nothing stopping these types of players from que syncing in ranked solo que on Eorzean Time to get onto the same team, especially when the ques are just about dead in the very early hours of the morning. Having just 1 other player on your team who you've played countless challenging matches together, using all of the strategies you guys have practiced together, and know all of thier habits and positional tells inside out gives you an enormous advantage over a solo que player on a team of randoms. You're effectively playing an entirely different game since many of the custom-match strategies are nearly impossible to execute with a group of randoms as the solo que mode is intentionally designed to be this way.

There are occasions where you guys wont get on the same team, and one of you will lose a few hundred points every now and then. But more often than not you will be on the same team together if you guys are playing the correct jobs and que synced correctly. And you will have ssuch an enormous advantage over everyone else in the lobby allowing you to go on 10-20 game streaks in crystal rank every time you guys sync like this.

Hope this helps explain what I meant in my previous post.

[Mawlzy]

There are occasions where you guys wont get on the same team, and one of you will lose a few hundred points every now and then. But more often than not you will be on the same team together if you guys are playing the correct jobs and que synced correctly. And you will have ssuch an enormous advantage over everyone else in the lobby allowing you to go on 10-20 game streaks in crystal rank every time you guys sync like this.

Hope this helps explain what I meant in my previous post.

Aha. This is a factor I'd missed. So the point is, because CC matchmaking tries to balance jobs for the two teams, careful selection of jobs greatly increases the probability that collaborators get on the same team?

[Valence]

Hope this helps explain what I meant in my previous post.

Ah yeah ok, you mean people just sync queueing as duos (above wouldn't work since the matchmaker tries to balance out ELO at least a little as far as I'm aware). That's what I was missing. Does ranked actually pop early morning? It doesn't seem to start before reset here.