I wrote this in the "Leave a Suggestion" area of the in-game Support Desk. This is my first forum post, since I want to know what other people's opinion on all this is. The post is apparently too long for one post, so I'll divide the rest into comments.
I really want to get into The Feast since I love the PvP, but it's a constant uphill battle to play PvP. The problems are that pvp is not designed in a beginner-friendly manner, the queues are impossible to deal with, and there are almost no rewards or content for doing PvP. I'll explain each of those now.Beginner-Friendly
The problem here is that if you queue up for PvP, the first thing you realize is that none of your skills work. You need to open up a new menu you have never seen before and assign your skills to a bar, and figure out what you are doing before other players kill you. It would be a huge improvement if players that enter pvp for the first time already have a pvp hotbar set up for them. I've known several people that told me when they tried PvP for the first time, none of their abilities worked, they were confused, and quit, never to return, until I tried to convince them to give PvP another shot. The next issue is that classes in PvP play totally differently from their normal classes. This means almost nothing people have learned or practiced about the base game carries over to PvP. Dying is very easy in PvP, especially when most beginners start with 72-man battles where getting too close to the enemy means you get targetted by 20 attacks and die instantly. There's no feedback for what killed you or how to do better, and getting beat up by a large army makes it feel unfair instead of something you can improve upon. Objectives are fun, once you understand them, but beginners have no idea what all the triangles on the map mean. PvP is very fast-paced and a lot of the challenge early on can come from successfully targetting the right enemy player. Tab to target will often choose a player way out of range, and clicking to target is inconsistent (an issue in the entire game, but highlighted in PvP). Designing classes around their PvE counterparts so that skill can carry over is very difficult, but people tent to prefer the unbalanced WoW PvP that has that system over the completely divorced, yet balanced, system FF14 has. The tradeoff for balance isn't worth turning off so many new players. I think the option should be given to enter PvP with normal abilities (damage reduced overall so you don't die instantly) and let gear be effective, too. I suspect even though this mode will be less balanced, it would be much more popular among beginners.
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