We don't need them anymore.

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

As someone that did not cheat (yes, haha, anyone can say this, believe it at your own choice) and had to climb a fair bit and improve at a pace to keep up with my peers... there were more people playing legit than cheating when in the Top 100.

The main reason why it was "this easy" for me was because everyone kept saying "its full of cheaters, you dont have a chance" without trying - people gave up before starting. If a lot more players would've competed, the magnitude of cheating and wintrading would have been much lesser by virtue of them making out a smaller percentage of the total player pool.

Wintrading would also become significantly harder to pull off consistently because of frequency of players interrupting their matchmaking shenanigans.

It's frankly a self-inflicted problem.

[MayuAmakura]

As someone that did not cheat (yes, haha, anyone can say this, believe it at your own choice) and had to climb a fair bit and improve at a pace to keep up with my peers... there were more people playing legit than cheating when in the Top 100.

The main reason why it was "this easy" for me was because everyone kept saying "its full of cheaters, you dont have a chance" without trying - people gave up before starting. If a lot more players would've competed, the magnitude of cheating and wintrading would have been much lesser by virtue of them making out a smaller percentage of the total player pool.

Wintrading would also become significantly harder to pull off consistently because of frequency of players interrupting their matchmaking shenanigans.

It's frankly a self-inflicted problem.

Ye well this isn't just people's fault. This is also Squares fault for creating such bad system and bad gameplay. Nobody liked Feast as it was unbalanced mess and certain classes were dominating. Specially feast teams that massively wintraded each other and got banned for it. CC players still even today get banned for wintrading It's happening always, trolls, cheaters that use plugins to get easier wins, friends in queue,etc.

Smaller population makes sure that wintrading is possible and you will also be a target of someone who had a bad day for entire day since you can't avoid them in queue. It's very fun to play pvp when there's only 10-20 same people over and over again kek.

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

[...]

Oh I agree, Feast was an awfully designed gamemode with noble intentions of preserving trinity/roles to its fullest, but had several problems like:

• You wouldn't know which roles are already in queue unlike other duties and you HAD to have one of each role unlike now
• Throughout most seasons, impact by Healers and Melees were significantly higher than the other roles, which also lead to a medium to high degree of anxiety to that role
• Medal holding was arguably fairly unintuitive, especially after they changed the caps for each role that could carry them. There was also heavy medal and light medal status effects.

Aside from that, I was just talking about it logically of "why" wintrading is made easier, which is a lesson to learn for future iterations of PvP such as Crystalline Conflict and what lies beyond. That's why I don't like the wintrading narrative being repeated ad nauseam without players actually giving it a proper chance. It's a weird social issue that discourages players and keeps them away, but that also makes the problem worse (and also shrinks the playerpool you interact with).

[Nanne]

I wonder what happens with stuff like the crowns etc. cause they weren't given during every season

[Catwho]

Back in my very first virtual world, Dreamscape, at one point I had one of the rarest items in existence. I think I won it in a trivia contest one day, and a GM just handed it to me - the original Paper Bag head piece. It was undyeable, but only THREE existed. I wore that thing for several years.

And then one day, they added in a dyable version that could be purchased from a vendor.

Did I feel mad about it? Naw, not really. In that case, it definitely wasn't a reward I'd worked my ass off to get, I just happened to get lucky at trivia being a category that I knew that day.

[Picothea]

As someone who's played plenty of games with rare, time-limited items, I've always been in favor of giving them to everyone regardless of what I did to get my own. I own a tradeable Black Rose in Team Fortress 2, an item which people value at absurd prices ranging from hundreds of real dollars to over a thousand. Yet I would rather have all players get access to the knife as they were originally meant to, when it was an achievement reward for playing a different game. There's no reason this knife, essentially just a cosmetic skin for the default Spy knife, should be withheld from players who want it.

An exclusive item may gain attention in the short term, but it inevitably lowers the quality of the game in the long term. It is not a good sacrifice to make, dismaying newcomers and potentially even turning away customers entirely. There's many games I refuse to play simply because it contains time-restricted cosmetics. Why should I pay for a game that thinks players should be permanently unable to get some items because they didn't have the psychic foresight to play at a certain period of time?

[MoonNoire]

People getting angry over the fact other people get to wear a virtual suit of armor they've very likely used only sporadically are really funny to me. It's like those Fortnite players who don't want the old battle pass items to come back because, and I quote, it makes them look "OG". Sorry your virtual doll isn't so OG anymore I guess, but FOMO sucks and ALL cosmetics should be available to the player in some way

[IOwn92FCHouses]

You know what, I agree. All cosmetics should be available to all players. And they should be earned the exact same way as they were originally. Want some glam from an old extreme or savage? Run it synced. Unsynced runs no longer give any drops at all. This includes mounts, minions, you name it. Want some feast title or item? Get the equivalent rank and you can have it.

Not good enough to run content synced successfully or to get high enough in pvp?

To.

Fucking.

Bad.