Why pvp is succesful and pve is getting stale

[Rehayem]

I wasn't aware of PvP doing any better than PvE in this game. Isn't it just because you need to get to rank 25 to get that stupid modern attire glam?

PvP is more dynamic when it comes to combat which in a way forces you to actually think and plan your way to attack the enemy.

[Mawlzy]

I wasn't aware of PvP doing any better than PvE in this game. Isn't it just because you need to get to rank 25 to get that stupid modern attire glam?

I guess there are some completionists who would do that, but that gear is so hideous I doubt it's driving participation. FL on Aether pops in under 5 mins 14 hours/day. Not bad for 72-person content.

[hydralus]

PvP is more dynamic when it comes to combat which in a way forces you to actually think and plan your way to attack the enemy.

It seems pretty repetitive to me. Stand on objective, push objective, avoid pincers, gank people 5-to-1, push/pull people off cliffs. Have your kit gutted to 6 abilities (But Hell at least crowd control actually exists/matters). Cry because you went in on viper. Hell I'm running a 3:1 win/lose ratio this season but if you actually had to win in order to get the rewards I imagine we'd see a lot less participation.

I dunno, maybe if they had "participation trophies" for chaotic where you still get smaller drops if you just waste 15 minutes in there it'd have more interest. Now there's a sweet idea. Put me into the dev chair.

[Rehayem]

It seems pretty repetitive to me. Stand on objective, push objective, avoid pincers, gank people 5-to-1, push/pull people off cliffs. Have your kit gutted to 6 abilities. Cry because you went in on viper. Hell I'm running a 3:1 win/lose ratio this season but if you actually had to win in order to get the rewards I imagine we'd see a lot less participation.

I dunno, maybe if they had "participation trophies" for chaotic where you still get drops if you just waste 15 minutes in there it'd have more interest.

PvP is more fast paced than PvE. Even healers in PvP have unique skills and debuffs, whereas in PvE you barely move and spam your 1 dot and 1 dps button 99% of the time, the 1% being the aoe for trash pulls. PvP suffers from lack of rewards, and past rewards aren't even available anymore (even though they said they would do this for series).

Then again, what would you expect from a team of 5 people trying to balance 21 jobs? Shows how little they care to improve.

[Mawlzy]

PvP is more fast paced than PvE. Even healers in PvP have unique skills and debuffs, whereas in PvE you barely move and spam your 1 dot and 1 dps button 99% of the time, the 1% being the aoe for trash pulls. PvP suffers from lack of rewards, and past rewards aren't even available anymore (even though they said they would do this for series).

Then again, what would you expect from a team of 5 people trying to balance 21 jobs? Shows how little they care to improve.

Agreed, and when played well it requires a lot of cooperation. There's a common misunderstanding that a "competitive" PvP mode is out of place in a cooperative, PvE-driven game, but honestly there's a lot more working together, pleasing successes, and amusing failures in PvP than you get in the bulk of PvE.

Unfortunately, and as you suggest, the PvP "team" (a team needs more than one person, right? so... hmmm) doesn't really seem to know what it's doing. We were told changes to hit detection would make the mode feel more responsive, whereas it's had precisely the opposite effect, and in the patch notes we were informed the job changes would shift the focus from burst to sustained damage, which is simply not the case.

It's a great pity because it's one of the few pieces of evergreen, replayable, casual content in the game.

[Valence]

I don't care so much for the different systems. But this I would disagree with, I think the skill ceilling is a lot lower now. And it feels like you are telling a range dps version from your feast experience.
Feast especially, the iterations after heavensward felt that way like you describe, because it got simplified each time.
Before that we had more job uniqueness, we had something like talenttrees to differentiate even the same job, we had more variance on how to punish and kill someone, more cc more counter more mitigations and medal overstacking wasnt such a huge issue like it was the addons later, where it was a death sentence.

I think to make PvE more interesting, they would have to get rid of making dungeons clearable by trusts, as that limits their creativity. They actively change dungeon mechanics, that were unique, to make them the same like others, so they can be cleared by bots. That is boring. Also damage output from mobs are that low that trusts can clear them, for human healers, this is just not enough to have any fun. So it is flawed up from an elemental level, which they are probably unwilling to change. Removing most abilities that are considered "niche" and did something else than flat potency damage, adds to the issue. Why do they do that? Because the devs feel like they have to remove old skills each new expac, to introduce new skills that "shake things up". So what do we need? Variation. Like PvP had in 2.x ... Talent Trees/Traits/Gear with special stats or Gear that changes what your skill actually does. I know wild? Maybe even Crossskills?? But they drifted away from that path long ago. So yeah you getting more of the same for the next 2 years at least, people pay, why change?

I cannot speak for Feast before SB because I didn't play it before SB. I only played some FLs back in HW so I have an idea of what the pvp system was like, but I have no idea how it played in Feast in details, and even less in the Fold. I can only speak of my own experience in post HW Feast, ranked, plat to diamond level. Reached top 100 once, didn't really bother to do it again after, not really my thing for the reasons I explained. I actually didn't play ranged much even though I did. Most of my serious ranked climbing was made on PLD, and a bit of MNK/DRG as weird as it may sound. I do not doubt that Feast got a heavy simplification once they got rid of the pve toolkits and gear in pvp with SB. It was already a heavy learning setup to get into seriously in SB+, so I don't want to imagine the actual cliff to climb as a pvp newbie back in HW when you add 3 hotbars of pve skills + pvp skills (learned with pvp xp on top of it to add a gap with veterans), and gear/bis options.

Either way, I didn't mean to split hair between different versions of Feast, I was just referring to what Feast had turned into back in ShB after 2 expansions of staleness and scripted gameplay, and use it as an analogy with pve, and what pve could try to emulate when we look at the new pvp model we have now. I think current pvp does it perfectly fine without talent trees or anything, but I actually think the idea of sub specializations where for instance you could get a DPS samurai but also a tank samurai option for pve, may be something worthy to consider, idk.

I do not disagree with the trust/duty support problem. Some older dungeon mechanics were absolutely great, like the second boss of the Aery, which unfortunately was too toned down and people didn't even know how it worked (hint: it was actually intricate). And this is just an example that's been replaced with stupid donuts and AoE circles. Fun.

Gearing and itemization is another glaring issue and I do agree it needs a shake up, and a good one, because it could also dramatically increase the shelf life of everything, especially if even dungeons can reward trinkets or things included into the progression of gear. I made another thread somewhere about how Diadem 1.0 had the right idea on rng gear and what it could have done better not to end up in a fiasco, and I do think it's a legitimate avenue for gear, at least at the casual level not to upset the top tier savage gear. And even then, would it be so bad...? Make players proud of their own unique little gear/build.

Unpopular Opinion: PvE feels stale, but not for the reasons most people cite. The discourse usually revolves around job identity, homogenization, Pictomancer, or simplification. But honestly, that’s not the issue for me. The real problem lies in the content formula—it’s been stagnant for years. Worse yet, the community has progressively lost incentives to play together.

While convenient, the rise of cross-world visits has chipped away at the sense of belonging to a home world. I rarely see Free Companies that actively play together anymore—most are just RP hubs or venues. And it feels like the game isn’t offering meaningful ways to engage with friends or build a sense of togetherness. You can clear content with friends, but there’s no real purpose beyond "just because."

Even the new 24-man raid, which should encourage cooperation and camaraderie, has missed the mark. Instead of fostering connection, they doubled down on systems that isolate players further. At this point, the problem isn’t simplifying or homogenizing jobs—it’s the fact that the game doesn’t give us a reason to care about the people we’re playing with. The game feels way too "me first" now, with no real reward. On top of that, we’re getting less content overall, which just makes everything feel more hollow. There’s no reason to connect with others, and it’s killing the sense of community that made the game special. PvP feels better because it has more community feeling than PvE these days.

I think this lies more on the encounter side but all the same, if you bring up new things that one, do not constantly play on script and execution at the individual level, then you promote group play at the micro level (within fights/duties), and it doesn't prevent the same philosophy to be applied at the macro level like it was in Eureka (even with its flaws, but I'd argue the flaws of Eureka were tied to how boring/tedious the mob/fate grind was more than anything, but it nailed the cooperative macro gameplay pretty well).

I wasn't aware of PvP doing any better than PvE in this game. Isn't it just because you need to get to rank 25 to get that stupid modern attire glam?

Perhaps, but pvp also doesn't suffer constantly from negative feedback about job design, job identity, content staleness and samey experiences, which was the point of the OP. It is also fundamentally disingenuous and unfair to compare the general play rates of a side piece of content with the main core piece of content of any MMO, and even moreso when the former is pvp, which by its very nature tends to repel a majority of any player base (which is something often seen even in multiplayer online games when they open coop modes, see which mode eventually dominates in sheer play ratio).

[hydralus]

PvP is more fast paced than PvE. Even healers in PvP have unique skills and debuffs, whereas in PvE you barely move and spam your 1 dot and 1 dps button 99% of the time, the 1% being the aoe for trash pulls. PvP suffers from lack of rewards, and past rewards aren't even available anymore (even though they said they would do this for series).

Then again, what would you expect from a team of 5 people trying to balance 21 jobs? Shows how little they care to improve.

Fast paced or not, running the same objectives and strategies again and again is repetitive. Especially since there's very little that's interesting about the abilities (compared to, say, a game like Blade and Soul where you can outright pick someone up and start spam-punching them in the face and throw them into the dirt where they belong). Ohhh, you placed an AoE on the ground, good for you I guess... As for balance, I dunno what to tell you. PvP isn't balanced at all because there are jobs which clearly excel in the content (has DRK and AST ever not been meta?) and it took them ages to make SCH not feel like a crap pick in PVP. The ranged DPS meta during stormblood, WAR and GNB crying in a corner because they weren't PLD... but most people don't really care because, again, participation trophies. Guaranteed if it wasn't for the fact you always get SOMETHING, people wouldn't bother.

[Mawlzy]

Fast paced or not, running the same objectives and strategies again and again is repetitive. Especially since there's very little that's interesting about the abilities (compared to, say, a game like Blade and Soul where you can outright pick someone up and start spam-punching them in the face and throw them into the dirt where they belong). Ohhh, you placed an AoE on the ground, good for you I guess... As for balance, I dunno what to tell you. PvP isn't balanced at all because there are jobs which clearly excel in the content (has DRK and AST ever not been meta?) and it took them ages to make SCH not feel like a crap pick in PVP. The ranged DPS meta during stormblood, WAR and GNB crying in a corner because they weren't PLD... but most people don't really care because, again, participation trophies. Guaranteed if it wasn't for the fact you always get SOMETHING, people wouldn't bother.

With respect, that simply isn't true. There is definitely a sub-population of people who only play PvP for rewards and daily XP, but whenever I queue in I recognize many people who play several hours a day.

On a side note, DRK is pretty much dead in 7.1, at least on NA.

[Valence]

Because most people would bother with raiding or most pve content if there were no guaranteed rewards?

[Eyrilona]

Every time I queue into PvP, I don't know what I am going to get. It has this "let's go and find out" sense of excitement.

Every time I queue into PvE, I tend to know exactly how the next ten to twenty minutes are going to play out.

And also, in PvE, winning/clearing is the expected outcome (and the only one that earns rewards) and failing to win (by failing to clear) a fight you know is an unexpected negative, whereas going into PvP you know that for one side to win, the other must lose, and it has this built-in acceptance about it that even if you've done this hundreds of times, you'll win some, you'll lose some, and a lot of it is just up to the chemistry within and between the teams.