Is FFXIV pvp systems that make the game more enjoyable/worthwhile now? There are basically two main camps of people: 1) Folks who love the PvP, but hate the long queue times. 2) Folks who hate the PvP. People in 1) wish PvP was more popular, but the reason 2) is such a huge swath of the population is because the PvP is just poorly done. Or, at least, not done in a way that lends well to most people wanting anything to do with it.
Why do people hate it? Some random examples ! 1) Class stacking. Sure, they’ve nerfed WHMs (no more stacking Medica II or using Cleric Stance for Medica II/Holy bomb madness) and BLMs (no more coordinated Swiftcast flares), but now the new hilarity instead of 8 WHM or 6-8 BLM is 6 tanks 2 healers in 8v8v8 Slaughter. You probably won’t get 1st, but I kid you not my team got ZERO POINTS because of being constantly harassed by the tank team and then sniped by the 3rd GC. So good, much fun. It might have been better if they forced role restrictions like in Wolves’ Den, making it so a Frontlines team had to be 2 tank 2 healer 2 melee 2 ranged, instead of nerfing everything into the ground, but who cares right? This is casual time!
2) Not even close to casual. Yoshida claims Frontline is for casual folks to just hop in there and have some fun, but if you’re not coordinated with your team or don’t know what you’re doing, especially as a somewhat non-obvious-what-to-do-goodly role like caster, I hope your idea of fun is getting pushed into the dirt repeatedly.
3) Too much focus on CC. Strangely, being slept/bound/multiple Cometeor’d to death isn’t much fun to the average person. Casters are possibly the least interesting, most underpowered, most overpowered depending on how poorly or well you are supported by your team. Casters are just about straight garbage on their own, but if they coordinate effectively with their team, can be the most dangerous. This doesn’t really lend well to “casual play”, and nothing about PvE prepares you for being a caster in PvP.
4) Secure is fine, but 3-way PvP for Slaughter is just awful. Seriously. It’s not very fun when 2 GCs are ganging up on the 3rd, and it happens a lot. You can survive if your entire team is coordinated and does the “right thing”, but it’s easy to just get overrun and get completely wiped out. When the map pulls you into different locations (like in Secure) this isn’t a big deal and not really even a thing, but in Slaughter it’s pretty garbage.
5) Targeting. Yeah, it’s bad. Try clicking or tabbing onto the person you want in 72 man Slaughter before he goes from 5% HP to 100% HP. Seriously, good luck. Possibly the thing that irritates me the most in PvP.
6) Takes millions of years to rank up so you can wear the gear you already bought while ranking up. Maybe if PvP was more fun it wouldn’t seem so bad, but the fact that it’s a horrendous grind PLUS it’s super frustrating means people who have come here for the glamours will quickly leave or just hate themselves constantly as they slog through it.
7) Etc. One could go on almost forever. Maybe PvP will get reworked when they get more serious with Wolves’ Den, since they said they want ranked seasons and such. If PvP continues being basically garbage, and they want stuff like ranked seasons to succeed, maybe they will finally listen to players and maybe even interact/discuss with them what needs to be fixed once ranked seasons come out and they fail hardcore. Like, how is there not assists in Slaughter? I don’t even.
It seems like Yoshida wants PvP to be a major component of the game, but the “work” they’ve done with how PvP works even at a base level is not really reflective of this, which is why most everyone hates it. Certainly, I want to love PvP, but there’s no real drive from the dev team to make it into something worth loving.