Crystalline Conflict's Ranking Rewards Suggestion

[forumaccountyippee]

I agree with the OP's change suggestion, but I believe the rewards should be opened up even more.
My suggestion is to make 1 commendation crystal the baseline reward for getting bronze, and having the numbers increase as your rank does. This is how you get butts into seats, and people into queues. A player only looking to get into bronze and check out will be happy to receive the reward after a few seasons, and you'll potentially get others to keep playing if they can get to silver and immediately buy that piece of gear they were wanting, and so on. "Oh, I can get the entire set I was wanting by getting to diamond? Sweet I'll keep climbing."

Games like League, DOTA, Overwatch, and Street Fighter 6 all grant players of all ranks various rewards for just playing the game, and have been doing so for a very long time, and it has kept those games competitive and active because of it. I don't see the PvP experience improving in any way at all unless you give players a reason to want to do it. I'm sorry if I come off as a bit frustrated, I've wasted hours of my time in hopes of getting a reward I've waited years to get just to have my dream of finally having them again absolutely crushed by Square Enix's inexplicable aversion to giving players a reason to engage with their content, making it all but near impossible for me to get it unless I decide quit my job and raid team in order to sit in these ridiculous queues or buckle up and be prepared to PvP on its release week.

this is genius can we do this please

[Stormfur]

Oh I had forgotten about qualifiers until you mentioned them, and it suddenly gave me PTFD, post-traumatic feast disorder.

I'll add that top Feast players were repeatedly playing the same elite pool of players again and again whereas CC matchmaking as we all know, is a heck of a lot more volatile.

Difficulty from Feast came from the risk of each match + pressure + punishment for losses + you had to perform consistently against top players. CC has a bit more "padding" with rank floors, streak wins, complete team RNG and shorter matches

Remember too, Feast was practically hemorrhaging players. Queue times were nonexistent. New players did a match and noped right out of there. At least CC, for all its downsides, still lets average players progress. I'm glad I got to reach platinum in Feast but I'm also glad it's gone.

[TimotheusReed]

I was inspired to get into CC ranked this season because of the inclusion of the top 100 reward replicas, but today I decided to stop my climb in part because of Square Enixs' design philosophy and me not having done any research on how rewards worked until just the other day. This sudden research stemmed from the fact that my queue times at Gold 1 have all but dried up.

[...]

I thought if I could just endure it until I got into diamond to get a few pieces of the rewards I was aiming for I'd be happy. After doing some Googling I found out that upon reaching diamond rank you receive 1 (ONE) commendation crystal for your efforts, which is not enough to buy anything at all. I'll need to wait another 5 months for a new season to begin in order to do the grind all over again, and that's just to get one singular piece from a full set if I even make it to diamond again. On top of that, I'd most likely sit in 30 minute long queues again because I dared put my focus on raiding at the start of the patch for the first few weeks, because for whatever reason both are tied to the same patch.

[...]

My suggestion is to make 1 commendation crystal the baseline reward for getting bronze, and having the numbers increase as your rank does. This is how you get butts into seats, and people into queues.

[...]

Games like League, DOTA, Overwatch, and Street Fighter 6 all grant players of all ranks various rewards for just playing the game, and have been doing so for a very long time, and it has kept those games competitive and active because of it.

Hey, your post really spoke to me. I am on EU and I got up to Plat 1 with 2 stars before falling down to Plat 4 again. I was really close to getting at least to Diamond but it was still pretty hard for someone like me who does not have the time to play Pvp all the time.
Also a lot of times the matches for PVP in EU are starting to pop at 11pm till 3 am, which is not a good time for me to play. I don't even know if they are even popping at all right now in EU.
Every time I try to queue in EU at the times that I am able to play I have to wait 30-40 minutes in queue before just giving up to queue.

At least on EU you are essentially locked out of the rewards if you are not able to play at specific times or if you dont have enough time to play pvp hardcore at the beginning of the season.
If you look at the CC Leaderboard Top 300 (https://de.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...llineconflict/), you can basically see that a big part of the Top 300 is still in Dia. So that means to get to Dia in EU you have to compete with players who are currently in Top 300.
But if you look closely you can even see that almost no Diamond player had a match yesterday.

A system which rewards ranking up in every rank would incentivize a lot more players in the lower ranks to at least try to rank up.
I agree completely with your suggestion.

[Loggos]

On top of that, I'd most likely sit in 30 minute long queues again because I dared put my focus on raiding at the start of the patch for the first few weeks, because for whatever reason both are tied to the same patch.

This is honestly what I don't understand. Imo there's no reason why they can't desync PvP seasons from the release of raids/PvE content.

It's as if in their mind raiders and PvPers are such distinct populations with zero overlap that nobody will be troubled by conflicting schedules. In reality there might be quite a few raiders/PvErs who are potentially interested in ranked but will pick raiding when forced to choose because PvE content is more popular (and then there's that whole guild/static community aspect that might make raiding more important to them as well).

If ranked (on EU, and also on NA from what I gather?) stayed active longer then it wouldn't be as much of a problem but unfortunately the start of each new season is a big fomo event. If you haven't reached at least diamond within a couple of weeks (because crystal+ regulars are much better at keeping the queues of their ranks active than lower ranks) you're locked out until the reset. So ranked CC forces you to commit to it fully for that short time frame. It's understandable that players who are also very involved with PvE don't want to or can't do that.

At the same time SE does release other PvE content like cosmic exploration after the original patch launch. So it's not an outrageous concept for them. No idea why they can't just apply it to CC ranked.

[Valence]

I'm sure others have also chimed in on the subject, and I made a post on how savage directly competes with ranked pvp for player time last expansion but I guess they don't care. Nothing will shake their holy schedule.

[Stormfur]

Yep... New stuff dropped and PVP queue went *POOF*. At the moment, it's quite literally "stay up for hours and grind your soul out for 2-3 weeks, good luck!"

[Valence]

Frankly why would they even care, it's not a problem on JP anyway.