We don't need them anymore.

[SalamanderIX]

There's a lot of people who don't want to play ranked at all. Even some people who consider themselves competitive.

There's matters like, ranked anxiety, or not wanting to get caught up in the frustrations of a ladder system.
I think there's a larger issue with any ranked fomo, since a lot of people *do not want to interact* with ranked. It's not like Savage. Savage isn't for everybody but you can get the rewards with less effort next expansion, but rather even if ranked rewards were recursive, some PVPers will never want to play ranked, ever, for any reason.

I'd know from my time in other online games, most people don't really play ranked for the rewards anyway. They play it for wanting that rank. I rarely hear XIV players care about it, which might be partially because the PVP just isn't very engaging or competitive anyway, and I don't think rewards will help. Those Augmented Hellhound weapons looked sick, but it didn't make me want to bother trying to grind ranked CC to the top 100. I got other things to do and not sure I'm in the top 100 of the server anyway.