PVP-CC-Rank

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

Let’s be honest: ranked modes almost always bring out the worst in people. This isn't new—it’s been like this since the days of Feast. The moment a player loses a ranked match, their first instinct is to blame their teammates. It doesn’t matter if they made mistakes themselves—someone else must’ve thrown. This mindset is toxic, and it's exactly why PvP chat is disabled.
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There are more people playing Casual CC than Ranked CC right now. That should say something.[...]

...let's be honest, this applies to *every* game with Online PvP in it and is not limited to Ranked Crystalline Conflict or The Feast. The average player going for the common coping mechanism of rejecting blame is also fairly common elsewhere, but specifically in FFXIV chat gets disabled and turned into quickchat - not necessarily because FFXIV players are so much worse in toxicity, but more probably because of japanese development standards doing this as a preventative measure.

As for "there are more people playing casual than ranked", this has very little to do with toxicity and everything else with the systems surrounding it. I do not like the implication that social behaviour is a primary reason here.

FFXIV is a theme park MMO. Most of its player base is here for PvE content—story, crafting, housing, glamour, raiding—you name it. PvP has always been a side activity.

And yet, you think the decisions made around Ranked Crystal Conflict (CC) are more important than the broader game experience. Why should that be the case?

PvP, within the scope of PvE-centric MMOs, may be a side activity, but has generally been the most standard side activity to be considered and worked on. Story is a baseline, crafting is a means to an end that some people may enjoy as an activity, housing is limited to availability and funds - raiding is arguably "the" main drive here.

PvP being seen as a mere side activity comes from two sides - word of mouth advertisement from other players, that it is awful / forgotten / just side content, devaluing one's opinion and interest before they even touched PvP in the first place; and a variety of rather questionable decisions of how they tried to make PvP approachable and more importantly "worth your time" (or rather failing to do so, despite the miniscule steps required to pull it off), a subject I could dedicate a separate thread to.

That said, Valence did not say that at all, even in the unshortened version. Valence made comments on the state of Ranked CC on how fast it dies out, the most likely chances to have enough games to play Ranked within a season and his experience with how much of a disaster it has been based on the timing of everything else essentially siphoning players away from it. There is no statement whatsoever why it should change, nor any thought why decisions made around Ranked CC are more important "than the broader game experience", which is also fairly odd to suggest given PvP changes can be made that do NOT impact the broader game, this isn't zero-sum game development.

Ranked CC is dying for the same reasons it always has: toxicity, elitism, and win-at-all-costs behavior. That kind of environment pushes casual players away from the start.

Ranked PvP has been a malnourished carcass due to terrible design decisions to make the mode even remotely worth playing. We have an equivalent in PvE regarding this - Criterion. Its' rewards were absolutely underwhelming to the point that active parties died out about the same rate Ranked dies out. Criterion had very little replay value and no interaction with the main gearing system (which has been criticized for a while now) and its rewards were incredibly paltry.

Ranked PvP, pre Crystalline Conflict, at least had people fighting tooth and nail for the Top 100 rewards, because they were actually desirable and worth fighting for. This however was also a time when casual rewards were absolutely lacking (lack of Battle Pass, cool things outside of wolfmark vendor, etc) and the one-of-each-role queue system made The Feast incredibly difficult to approach and learn.

Ranked PvP, post Crystalline Conflict (6.1), has seen a full revision to the reward structure, with GREAT benefits to the casually available items, but at full neglect to Ranked rewarding you anything of desire (which would NOT need to be a FOMO reward, mind you). Ranked PvP went down the same path of Criterion, where the average player sees absolutely nothing worth in it to spend time on it. This isn't a "PvP is a side activity" thing either because they've made side activities with GREAT rewards multiple times - Ishgard Restoration and Cosmic Exploration on the crafting side for example.

It also currently suffers from a death spiral of "nothing interesting for me here before reaching a rank that is out of my skill potential -> I leave -> queue times get too long for me to care while casual has more games -> I leave -> repeat". Crystalline Conflict is fun - but queue times aren't. I do not like sitting between 5-30min for a game of ANYTHING, much less if the result of me doing so does not offer any tangible rewards afterwards.

To say "Ranked is dying for the same reasons it always has" means you actually do not look at the state off things with any analytical thought on objectively distinct designs on its User Experience and reward systems, but rather regurgitate hear-say of what is mostly anecdotal to begin with. This is incredibly disingenuous.

[Valence]

And yet, you think the decisions made around Ranked Crystal Conflict (CC) are more important than the broader game experience.

I'm sorry, I think what now?

[Degunuts]

Your best bet is either a low rank queue sync or just afking in queues. As the season winds down, activity might pick back up, but best practice is to queue early in the season. Once you get to plat and above, its much easier to get pops. As for queue syncs, theres a few discords like revival, emperor gray's discord that I dont remember the name of, etc that do them.

Making comm crystals obtainable from something other than ranked makes the joke of a prize pool ranked already has more worthless, so I dont agree with the achievement idea. Square just needs to add more incentive to queue.

[CidHeiral]

Ranked CC is dying for the same reasons it always has: toxicity, elitism, and win-at-all-costs behavior.

How can anyone be elitist in a mode where chat is disabled?

And what does "win-at-all-costs behavior" even mean in a competitive game mode? Are you only supposed to try half the time?

[Infindox]

Being afraid to make your bronze/unranked teammates lose is a bit odd, but funneling everyone into one queue i feel like is more valuable than considering people's anxiety. The ranked queue is dead because people would rather press the casual button so just kill the casual button.

I mean... Using your idea, the ranked queue would become even more dead.
The ranked queue being the way it is has nothing to do with people just wanting a casual match for various reasons, and everything to do with the ranked system having a lot of issues.

[VictorSpoils]

Bad take. This alienates players that want to practice jobs in a 5v5 environment or feel ranked anxiety when playing Ranked modes in games, because they will now feel responsible for the losses their teammates might incur. Remove casual CC and the casual players will not offboard from Casual into Ranked, they will go and do Frontlines/Rival Wings. This is not the way, the lack of players in Ranked can barely be attributed to split queues.

Practice part is true, but the anxiety™ people never touch ranked anyway. Maybe if they went back to having no rank decay.

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

Practice part is true, but the anxiety™ people never touch ranked anyway. Maybe if they went back to having no rank decay.

I know. Now imagine if you merge Ranked and Casual. The "anxiety™ people" as you call them (also those suffering from impostwr syndrome) not only not interact with Ranked, but in this hypothetical scenario also Crystalline Conflict in general because anxiety doesn't just go away from merging modes.

Basically it a placebo change for those that believe this to be the issue until reality hits again, that this change benefitted nobody.

[DallsBeep]

malnourished carcass

A carcass doesn't need nourishment so how can it be malnourished? Food for thought, pun intended.

But yeah imo there should only be one queue and your rank should be tied to your job. So if you wanna play around in the bronze queue you can switch jobs. And even if you don't know how to play it that well, if you're a crystal player you'll still be better than most people at that level. And if you're just hopelessly bad and cause your team to lose all the time then you won't make it very far in which case there's nothing really to worry about. Anyone who knows what they're doing will never stay below Platinum for very long regardless of RNG with bad teams, so "bad players in muh ranked queue" won't be an issue.

[DallsBeep]

How can anyone be elitist in a mode where chat is disabled?

And what does "win-at-all-costs behavior" even mean in a competitive game mode? Are you only supposed to try half the time?

ikr I'd rather deal with 200 hundred toxic "elitist" PVP chud goons than 1 guy that needs to bring moral grandstanding in to a video game. Absolutely insufferable.

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

A carcass doesn't need nourishment so how can it be malnourished? Food for thought, pun intended.

A carcass can be from a nourished entity that dies/died from other reason, a malnourished one implies starvation or malnutrition as the leading cause. Plus since we are in a fantasy game, you can "revive" and then renourish things after all.

Regarding your actual points though:

But yeah imo there should only be one queue and your rank should be tied to your job. So if you wanna play around in the bronze queue you can switch jobs. And even if you don't know how to play it that well, if you're a crystal player you'll still be better than most people at that level. And if you're just hopelessly bad and cause your team to lose all the time then you won't make it very far in which case there's nothing really to worry about. Anyone who knows what they're doing will never stay below Platinum for very long regardless of RNG with bad teams, so "bad players in muh ranked queue" won't be an issue.

Putting aside the previous points that I mentioned in this thread (ranked anxiety, "always having stakes" environment, Frontline becoming the new "casual mode") of why merging Ranked & Casual into one queue is a bad idea...

...it "will" either make queue times insufferable by metric of being queued into your rank pool (as a Gold you can play with Silvers or Plats for example) instead of having the ability to just join for a quick game OR make rank pools not become a thing and greatly diminish the average match quality for higher ranked players, essentially defeating the point of having a "rank" in the first place as it is just Casual with badges then.

There is also the seemingly unexplored idea of "high rank players maybe just want to play a chill round on a job they play less in casual WITHOUT having to wait 10-30min to get a game", which merging queues will not help with.

Regarding the per-job ranking - while it has merit on paper, the problems that arise when implementing this are the following:

• 1.) Ranking up with specific jobs that rely more heavily on team synergy (PLD, SCH, maybe DNC) so you can use them in the higher ranks will be a painful experience as a lot of the viability of said jobs hinges on one's teammates knowledge/ability to capitalize on the support they bring. The common recommendation has been to use self-sufficient or solo carry jobs over supportive jobs in the early skill tiers to climb for this reason, so job-based rank progression gives supportive jobs a huge handicap at the bottom end of the ladder, even if you might be a Crystal player usually.
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• 2.) This hard-enforces onetricking, which can become an issue if you play one of the more common jobs on ladder (depending on meta balance at the time) to get queues as only two of a specific job can be present per match. Making it per-role (tank, healer, melee, ranged, caster) would at least allow for "some" alternatives in your job pool to help with job diversity.
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• 3.) Speaking of making it per role/job, for anyone on the high-end of the ladder it would essentially discourage them to switch jobs/roles (which is something you should consider depending on maps and specific high-profile players in the queue) as it would not benefit them for Top 300 progression in the slightest. This punishes someone who may be both an excellent Astrologian and Dragoon for instance as they have nothing to gain to switch jobs.

While you might hold the opinion that it may be a good idea, this is what most likely will be the side effect if that opinion would be implemented - based on logical conclusions and/or precedence cases from other games that tried this.