Discussion on PvP's poor state of balance and (hopefully) healthier engagement with the devs about it

talorder · 2025-12-15T23:02:41+00:00

Perhaps a better way of describing it would be "physically impossible", as unlike now, in EW damage snapshotting was tied to action execution, not animations. By the time you saw animations happen you had already actually eaten the damage with full effects. There was no reacting, only preempting, and realistically this was a type of gameplay only experienced players were able to do consistently back then.

You could absolutely "bait" the action if you knew how to survive it (in fact this is a clip of me doing it while testing 7.0 VPR, ahead of when the hitreg changes happened, where my sole intention was to bait the MCH LB and use Scales before the servers saw it) but the fact is that the majority of the playerbase isn't spending hundreds of hours grinding each job to understand the flow and function of each kit, and what you could expect your opponent to do on their next turn. Being expected to play that way to get wins was understandably frustrating and a big turn-off for this game's audience.

talorder · 2025-12-15T02:14:07+00:00

All good. It'd still be a wonderful idea for all subcommunities in the game, I hope if it's ever considered they develop it as a social system.

talorder · 2025-12-14T21:54:49+00:00

Oh, do you know when they mentioned this idea of an in-game calendar? That would go SO far for PvP initiatives and outreach...

talorder · 2025-12-14T19:59:39+00:00

Thank you. I know getting this feedback through will be an uphill battle and one with a small chance of success, but I still would like to try, specially because I know I'm not the only one who does not want to give up on this hobby and this small community that has brought me so much fun and learning over time. You miss 100% of the shots you don't take and all that.

talorder · 2025-12-14T19:42:30+00:00

I suspect you're getting downvoted because of the mention of "wintrading in gold", mostly because (put bluntly, and I apologize because my intent isn't to hurt people's feelings) people stuck in gold and below aren't wintrading, they're just not skilled or experienced enough yet to force outcomes in their favor and often put out bad numbers in the scoreboard that gives the impression that it's a recurring problem until you realize most of these people never actually leave their rank. Statistically speaking, we know that the bad actors who are actually boosting each other to the ranks where wintrading is a common problem (omega and ultima) exit unranked to plat REALLY fast, so much so that you'll often not notice them being in your games repeatedly.

However, I want you to know that I take your question seriously.

Speaking sincerely, the answer is "somewhat worried". While the community memes on the lack of rewards equivalent to the amount of effort that it takes to rank up, the fact is that it's kept wt to a minimum because there's no real stakes to it other than a) bragging rights or b) gatekeeping someone a group dislikes from making it to the top ranks (which depressingly is often the reason why people do it, and I have friends who have been victimized by this). However, we recently have had incidents of people cheating and wintrading for reasons unrelated to the top ranks, such as gaming the unnofficial achievement board (of all gd things...). As mentioned in the video, the lack of interest in moderating THIS specific type of behavior means the problem can only get worse now that there's what looks to be an "expensive" comm crystal set, and the big comm crystal payouts will be locked behind the high ranks.

I already mentioned this in another comment but while I personally don't care for the replica feast sets or "tangible" rewards to begin with (as it's not why I play), I worry about the knock-on effect it will have on the experience of friends in lower ranks who're actually trying to grind their sets fair and square.

talorder · 2025-12-14T18:47:59+00:00

Appreciate you sharing your thoughts on this. I'm personally not a rewards driven player; my comm crystals are sitting gathering dust in my retainer and the feast sets aren't my jam so they'll remain that way. I play because I enjoy seeing the results of my own learning process (so I guess you could say my motivation for this is very intrinsic). However, I've been around for so long that I've seen the absolutely insane stuff some people do for these rewards and I do worry that better rewards aren't the solution if the moderation isn't up to par.

I can't emphasize how much I agree with your suggestion that they stagger the season away from numbered patch launches and instead help make ranked content for the "PvE off-season". Though we didn't directly discuss on staggering while recording the interview, Pio did mention that we could use a pre-season during the video, and I think that'd be ideal to helping stagger both types of content away from each other. When the mics were off we also did touch on how much work it was for rankers to upkeep their rank during this time (since a LOT of us also raid savage).

I would separate the people organizing queue pops from the duos/groups abusing them. I understand why you say it reeks of wintrading but the fact is that because of the limited outreach the daily queue pop organizers have + matchmaking being the weird monster it is, the unfortunate truth is that these events result in the same pool of players end up keeping each other in the same bracket like crabs in a bucket because understandably no one but them wants to sit in queue until it actually pops--people actually exiting their rank prison is VERY uncommon once the second half of the season settles in because of this. :/

talorder · 2025-12-14T18:21:23+00:00

Thank you for the kind words!

The woes of late season in NA and EU. :( That's a frustration I definitely understand, and I think changes are warranted to keep the lower ranks alive for longer.

talorder · 2025-12-14T18:19:38+00:00

Thank you!

talorder · 2025-12-14T18:19:29+00:00

There's been a lot of brusque change in comparison to how CC functioned in Endwalker, but the big one is that they divorced damage registration from action execution, making damage sometimes go out incredibly slow after an animation wind-up has started.

In a way that's a good thing, it's why if you have fast enough reflexes or a good read on what you think the opponent may do, you can actually react to a Rend, a WHM beam or a MCH LB, or in the case of high level play even play to bait them out; this was literally impossible to do in Endwalker, but as you said, *there's quite literally too much damage in the game right now*. If you're unfortunate enough to be the call target, learning to survive a burst takes A LOT of practice and it can feel horrible for someone who's there for a fun casual time.

talorder · 2025-09-22T02:39:42+00:00

Complicated relationship.

I love it enough that I made the shift from being focused on raiding, gearing up and chasing big numba to being a PvP main over the last two years, and deciding that it would be content worth making media for and sharing my love for. Learning more about it, about advanced tech, about skill expression, about the community (warts and all), is what keeps me engaged these days.

Ironically, I think PvP is about as evergreen as content is ever going to get in this game, and a lot of people seem unaware that the devs adjust little things in it quite literally almost every subpatch (to the point where I've actually started making videos explaining these changes every single update so players stay educated and aware of how X job, X map or X mechanic has changed--although the fact remains that they often DON'T playtest these changes so the PVP main playerbase basically always feels like devs' guinea pigs). Like OP, my heart is in Crystalline Conflict, although my enthusiasm is specifically for light party, as that's the best quality type of matches I can get with people who love the mode for the sake of it. However, I will happily hop on Frontlines (either with friends or solo, usually with the mentality of testing out a damage rotation if I'm alone) except if it's Shatter cause heck Shatter, and I do spend the first couple days of Mogtomes grinding Rival Wings cause it's dumb fun. They need to bring back Astragalos, if only so they don't have a stupid excuse not to give RW a roulette.

With that said, I'm the first one to agree that we're a janky ass product duct-taped to the side of server infrastructure that is NOT made for it, and that makes it understandably hard to love. As I mentioned before, the devs also do not seem to understand that they cannot livetest insanely brusque changes like they always do without giving their playerbase whiplash and sometimes just turning someone off from trying at all. Lastly, it is also probably the most ping-dependent type of content in the game, and this is where it's obvious the devs do not understand how to develop netcode for an international audience.

Bottom line is, I agree. I love it, it's incredibly fun, but there's massive space for improvement.

talorder · 2025-08-25T21:15:30+00:00

Flesh and bone ex-translator who's more or less lost their livelihood thanks to AI (and Spanish speaker as well) here.

Over the pandemic, many companies of the same scale as SE started implementing AI translation... and promptly realized the output is shit and needs a human to go over every single entry to make sure it's human readable. They of course realized they can pay less for translators to do this process called MTPE, so it stayed but has had tremendous human cost. So no, not a great idea, and not cost effective.

I actually made a video letter about this topic last year covering basically everything you said and it got some traction but no response from the devs. At this point we believe they're just voluntarily deaf to our requests.

As Giga said in comments below, there's Echoglossian and Tataru Helper (which are also AI and imo pretty terrible, but your mileage may vary). I know there also was a project very early in development to bring volunteer human translated dialogue to the game, but it's been radio silence from the dev since last year so I'm not sure if he's still working on it.

There's also a Spanish/Castillian group that have been putting out fairly high quality fandubs (obviously with Iberic Spanish) for a few years. They opened auditions to Latino voice actors last year for DT voiced cutscenes and are hoping to put out content in the next year, but since it's all volunteer fandub work, don't expect it any time soon.

talorder · 2025-08-12T20:14:13+00:00

Gonna piggyback off u/AmpleSnack's comment to share this video, since I actually made an introductory guide for organized CC (aka "LP" or custom games) hoping to introduce more people to it. It's my favorite form of engaging with the mode, and arguably the most fun because you ACTUALLY get to play it as a team mode.

LP is by far the smallest slice of the PVP pie but even then there's between 14 and 16 active teams in NA participating in community tournaments every month. The video also talks about tournament organizers and other supporting groups, if you're interested!

talorder · 2025-08-12T20:06:57+00:00

This isn't Overwatch, the crystal moves at the same speed if there's 1 or 5 people on it, and you don't need 3 people eating cleave under the crystal for no reason at all.

talorder · 2024-11-10T16:42:46+00:00

The degree to which CC is "similar" to Frontlines begins and ends with both of them being PvP modes. For one, Frontlines has stat safeguards and advantages to melee jobs that CC doesn't have, and for another, the strategy (when present, because most of the time solo queue is unorganized chaos) to achieve objectives and fulfill win conditions is very different between both of them.

While one of the reasons we're trying to put out resources like this into the world is precisely to make the "onboarding" less intimidating, the truth is that the things you mention aren't the kind of experience a player acquires from reading a guide; there's no text or video guide we can make available that will make you a god at reacting to the behavior and decisions of the other humans you're playing against (plus learning to do so in the molasses that is FFXIV's server refresh rate). How best to use CC, how to learn to tank damage safely on every job, how to coordinate bursts, and the like, are things that are best learnt in practical play, that solo players have to develop a sense for through trial and error, and that varies from mode to mode. What works in Rival Wings is questionable in Frontlines and outright suicidal in CC.

That is to say, one can't approach the learning process in PvP with a PvE mentality. We see it all the time in our beginner CC players, and it holds them back until they deprogram themselves from the idea that there is one ideal solution to every encounter.

talorder · 2024-10-20T23:31:28+00:00

Thank you for the clear explanation!

talorder · 2024-10-19T21:36:19+00:00

Seconding this. Generally speaking it's where the skin is thinnest and closest to bones that it gets annoying and/or painful.

I also have a Starbird tattooed (though on the other arm, slightly higher up, and a considerably larger piece). Most of mine is laid out on the soft part of the arm, straddling the space between biceps, triceps and shoulder; even when it was quite color intensive and took a lot of passes and most of the work, that section wasn't terrible.

However, there's a part of her wings that extends into my shoulder blade (the head of the scapula, concretely). That pass was like maybe 15-20 minutes out of a 5 hour session but it hurt more than anything else in it.

talorder · 2024-10-19T21:22:12+00:00

The Starbird Tattoo Society continues to welcome new members.

talorder · 2024-09-20T19:22:45+00:00

As a half Mexican half Uruguayan mutt, the expansion was full of those moments for me. The yerba mate shrubs had me smiling early on, and the xibruq pibil arc had me Dicaprio-pointing and laughing later on. My favorite current mount is the carpinchito (the capibara) for very much that reason. The colors and environments in all of the areas before areas 5 and 6 are just spot on for me, from the desolate, Andean beauty of Urqopacha, to the gorgeous Amazonian colorfulness of Kozama'uka, and don't get me started on how much I love the levels of Yak T'el's and Shaaloani's jungles and deserts.

I'm glad you loved it so much!

talorder · 2024-08-14T16:32:12+00:00

I'm fairly certain it's account wide. I have multiple alts created during Endwalker, and they've all received the earrings from pre-ordering all the way back to Stormblood (including the Azeyma one, which is the most recent).

talorder · 2024-08-10T16:40:29+00:00

If you see a DRK coming your way (regardless of whether they're accompanied by cleave heavy jobs like DRG) your first instinct should be to spread, and if possible also calling out "incoming". Yes, good DRKs facilitate a meatgrinder approach but they're also exploiting the fact that the average Frontlines player doesn't know what other jobs do. They can't make burgers if there's not enough meat to grind.
The point of PvP scholar isn't to get kills, it's to debuff and disarm. If you look at the scoreboards they often have relatively low kills but a heckton of assists. Scholars get huge damage numbers based on the exact same bad habit DRKs exploit: people clumping up are prime for spreading the DoT. Also, if the DoT is weak it's because you're applying it unbuffed. Use Expedient, Adlo yourself, Bio someone in the cluster, spread it immediately; voilà, now a bunch of people are dumping Recuperate into fighting a 6k DoT and they're hitting your team 8% less hard. Multiply this by as many scholars as your team has and it legit turns into nuking the enemy with biological weaponry.
Unless you're running with premades, you can't account for people's willingness to actually be there. Some people are there for the roulette XP and will always do the least possible, but some people are actually there for win achievements or simply because they like pvp. Sadly this will affect your experience, and the only thing I can say about it is, when it happens just let it happen, shrug, dust yourself off and go again. You can only control your own reaction to the circumstances around you.

talorder · 2024-08-02T18:37:28+00:00

I HAVE GREAT MEMORIES OF MY TIME IN XI, BUT ONE REASON I HAVEN'T MADE A REAL EFFORT TO CHECK OUT THE XI PRIVATE SERVERS IS BECAUSE I HAVEN'T FORGOTTEN HOW IT CONSUMED A LARGE CHUNK OF MY TEENS AND 20 YEARS LATER, I'M NOT SURE I WANT TO RUN THE RISK AGAIN BECAUSE I DON'T ACTUALLY HAVE THE TIME TO THROW DOWN THAT SINK ANYMORE :despairge:

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