I will preface by saying that this is not a post about open world PvP.  While Pearl Abyss has absolutely taken an extremely convoluted route toward cutting open world PvP out of the game; that wouldn't be so severe of an issue if it had been replaced with adequate content.  This is also not a feedback post about PvE vs PvP players; both deserve to have good content and neither should feel coerced or forced into engaging in content they are not interested in at this point of the games' life cycle.

 Either by choice or misguidance, Pearl Abyss has actively been developing the game in a manner that is not helpful in fostering its PvP community.  Below is a breakdown of the PvP content we currently have and why Pearl Abyss's treatment of it has been inadequate in regards to the maintenance of the PvP community. 

Arena of Solare:  There is an entire community of players who just log in for this mode.  We can see it with the ranked season that just came out.  Queues are instant.  Interest is there.  Feedback: This mode is unrewarding.  Pearl Abyss just increased the rewards with global labs and they are still too little.  Doubling near-nothing remains a reward of near-nothing.  At 60m silver per win (before taxes), this is still around a net of 250m an hour if you win streak.  Grinders make 2b an hour.  There is no choice here for progression.  Additional feedback: Seperate MMR per class per account.  Change the way emergency escape (V) works, as too many classes can abuse its flaws.  Fix unintended scholar heal reduction stacking with innate AoS heal reduction.  Consider deletion of Berserker class.

Red Battlefield: Three maps in 10 years.  Most MMO's launch with more battleground maps than this.  Nevermind the neglect of mechanics that are universally disliked by the playerbase such as RBF DR, Point Debuffs, Terrain, etc.  Feedback: This mode is also unrewarding, even less so than AoS.  We need an updated queue UI.  We need maps.  We need rewards.  Idea:  Maps themed on different areas that, upon round completion, offer silver and rng loot-based rewards on their open world grinding equivalents. 

If Arena of Solare and Red Battlefield offered anywhere near 1 billion+ silver per hour equivalent, there would be instant queues and filled RBF's all day, I absolutely promise.  Players want to PvP but you are forcing them to grind in circles for hundreds of hours on end without the chance to even break the monotony with actual open world PvP anymore, Pearl Abyss.  This is such an obvious thing that has been given feedback on time and time again, but Pearl Abyss refuses to listen to the point that it feels malicious towards the PvP community.

Node Wars: New system might be okay if the system announced at the Heidel Ball actually forces guilds to stay in their lane of tier.  Frankly, myself and many others I have spoken with just miss being able to do uncapped 30 mans and make our own fun fights.  Feedback: Once a guild wins in X tier, they should not be able to go down in tier unless they forgo node wars for 2-4 weeks.  Node wars are once a day, winning should give 3b, losing 1.5b in rewards.  Defeat rewards should be provided so long as a guild meets the minimum participation of K/D to avoid lockout instead of requiring a tower capture.  Maybe add in a middle-tier reward for capturing a tower but not ending the war with one.  Bring back uncapped 30 mans please.

War of the Roses: Why are you designing content for only two guilds on each server, Pearl Abyss?  No region has actual, reasonable guild balance.  Feedback:  Convert this mode into a 24/7, 'open-world' style fight on Arsha to something more along the lines of Elder Scroll Online's Cyrodil or Guild Wars 2's Realm versus Realm.  Good idea of having points to separate ball fights, horrible implementation and a ton of effort put into content for what is realistically a couple hundred people when there are thousands who want to PvP.

Guild League: A weird idea to bring back the nostalgia of a GvG that in reality is unsustainable.  This content is big-dog-eat-small-dog by design.  This makes sense as a once-a-year tournament format system that lasts around a month.. but as permanent content?  We don't have enough guilds in any region to actually have novel, interesting fights.  Feedback:  My recommendation is that Guild League only come around once or twice a year with solid exclusive rewards, lasting around a month.  This will be rare enough for people to be highly interested when it does come around, and perhaps even motivate guilds to strengthen in preparation for next time it arrives.  This would leave enough time in-between leagues for the landscape within guilds to change somewhat and fights to actually be novel each time.

Arsha feedback: PvE is too specialized between gems, artifacts, lightstones, and PvE class imbalance.  Either make swapping to your tag an instant-protected-transition like going into the Elvia Realm or give us a way to instant swap to a preset.  Another option is to auto-max stats at all grind spots on Arsha; example:  Even if you are in Tuvala gear, when you go to Arsha you can go to Tungrad Ruins and be at the monster AP cap for that spot.  This would let anyone go to Arsha in their PvP setups without worrying about PvE stats, and whoever is strongest and able to hold the spot will be able to grind it.. which is what the intention of Arsha should have always been.  Just a recommendation; lots of fine solutions to this issue.. just pick one and implement it, please.

Hardcore Servers: Frankly, I don't know who asked for this, or why development time was pointed here instead of literally anything above.  We have three RBF maps in ten years and no rewards for it.. and Pearl Abyss is spending time on this?  Another random gear cap that has nothing to do with anything else, doesn't tie into the progression loop of the rest of the game, and anyone who actually PvP's realizes will be a horrible experience where classes with high mobility and self healing will dominate?  Who else wants to fight a succ zerker running around with infinite stam who just runs in circles forever until he lands a grab and one combos them?  Nobody?  Oh.  Feedback: Stop development on this mode, make RBF maps and give RBF and AoS rewards. 

This is a long-ish post, thank you if you read it in its entirety.  I'm certain that there may be some disagreement on the details and my recommendations.  What I hope everyone can agree on is that PvP should be rewarding enough for players to feel like they at least don't have to grind alone in a circle in Marni's Room for 3,000 hours to progress their account.  I hope most can agree that Pearl Abyss should be focusing on content that already exists and people would enjoy far more if it just received less neglect; especially RBF.  PvPers are dying for accessible content that they can do 24 hours a day and actually be rewarded for. 

 Finally, I'd like to address anyone who wants to tell me that there simply is not a large PvP playerbase.  Give RBF 1b an hour for a week and I promise every instance of it will be full even with how horrible the current maps are.  Give AoS actual rewards and I promise queues will be instant forever.  Ever heard of League of Legends?  Apex?  Call of Duty?  These aren't PvE games and yet are some of the most popular out there.  People want to PvP.  Let us, please. 

TL;DR -- People want to PvP but can't / opt not to because most of it offers no rewards and they feel directed to go grind in a circle instead.  This leads to a negative feedback loop where the PvP modes we do have are either underpopulated or have slow queues.  RBF dies at night because it effectively has one map and costs silver to play instead of rewarding it. 

AoS dies at night because it has an arbitrary cut-off for no reason and offers around 1/10th the reward that grinding does. 

Developer time is spent near-exclusively on content that is time-gated: node wars, war of the roses, guild leagues.  AoS has not received simple, needed fixes in 2 years.  RBF has been negelected since launch aside from one half-decent map over 2 years ago.

Development is spent on new modes that take more time and resources to build from scratch instead of existing content.  They could easily cut out 5-10 new RBF maps and slap some rewards in for far less time than making hardcore mode. 

PvP feels like it is effectively turned off for half of the day and it's not due to a lack of interest.  It's due to a lack of development and reward and both are painfully clear and easily solvable for this to have been going on for so long. 

The PvP in this game is actually so fun that people log in just to enjoy it in AoS even though it doesn't allow them to progress and do other forms of pvp or content in the game.  It's like Pearl Abyss made a racecar that is super fun to drive but only let us take it out on a dirt road full of potholes and also won't give us money to buy gas.

Solid post, maybe if we push it to 17.5k reactions it does something

Good post, but to them pvp ıs silver sink and a content that very small portion do the player base does. But that isn't true at all. Their most successful content is a pvp content that called shadow arena, it was a pvp content and it was so successful they thought they could turned it into a different game. I have no idea why they are also so obsessed with large scale pvp while large scale pvp consistently proved itself to be most unstable and poor experience form of pvp.

They are scared to give good silver rewards into small scale pvp because that would increase competition, to me unironically this company does not want competition in their game. 

if adding more rewards to a "fun" mode makes the mode more attractive, does that mean that ppl dont want to play this "fun" mode without rewards? Does that mean this mode is actually not fun in the first place?

Hard agree on hardcore this nonsense will die out within 1 or 2 weeks and roses is just stupid, timegate + guild gate?

I opt out of pvp since 2016 due to lag latency desync hit reg issues and now sticky keys for example holding sprint and w realease shift and w to hit E to use my grab with fingers off of shift and w my breathe of elion will fire so instead of grabbing a guy im wasting a heal and promptly get cc'ed to death and pvp has never been fun its rock paper scissors of cc sure it can be mitigated (git gud) but why should I spend hundreds of hours running in circles in pvp arenas's adapting to junk mechanics when I can run in circles for hundreds of hours stacking junk loot. I've goofed off in red battlefield a little back in the day is there really only 3 maps? *sighs* I am warming up to solare and it is always fun dueling guild mates...

Time is a currency/recourse in an mmo. I enjoy rbf and I enjoy grinding but I'm obviously significantly hindering my account progression by spending time in rbf vs making 2bil an hour grinding. I don't expect to make total silver parity doing rbf over grinding but to make the 10%-15% the amount of silver for the same time investment  is just a joke. 

Open world pvp used to be conflict over resources(grind spots) now also effectively dead to the point where a griefer can just grind over you with impunity. If you try and defend yourself you go red and potentially downgrade items worth hundreds of billions of silver. The changes are just  idiotic and one of the most dissapointing to a returning player after not having played for a year. These changes sort of make sense when 90% of the server wanted to grind 4 Elvia orc rotations for two years. Now there are so many grind spots that are considered high end I can go for days without seeing another human but if a griefer does show up I'm forced to swap without being able to fight back or guild Dec. It makes zero sense.

Great post overall. I can't speak to large scale as the lag, rubberbanding, desync, and general bugginess just made me avoid it. The fact that they are doubling down on it is as bizarre as ever but par for the course for PA.

These are things I wanted to go into as well but it was already very difficult to keep the post concise, especially with the limited ability to format on this forum.  I truly believe that Pearl Abyss has been afraid to reward PvP ever since they couldn't figure out how to stop cheaters in Shadow Arena (it was as simple as not giving away the game for free at the time / adding a requirement to entry / actually banning people who cheated). 

The other sad truth is that they are indeed obsessed with large-scale PvP when, in fact, their game engine can't handle it. Another reason why their obsession with pouring time and resources into Node War, Siege, and War of the Roses is misguided.  Doubly so with all of the mobility creep on horses, mobility creep on class skills, and introduction of so many ranged classes.

Thank you for adding to the discussion. 

Thank you for the question, this was expected.  As someone else explained, it is an entire negative feedback loop system where, because people don't receive rewards, they choose to engage in something that is rewarding.  You open the RBF menu at 3am and see less than ten people in there.  What do you do?  Go grind or turn the game off.  20 other people that wanted to join in just did the same thing.  Lack of population and long queues negatively feed into themselves and cause less and less people to engage.

More simply, let me answer with my own question.  If grinding gave no reward or something like 100m an hour and PvP content was shelling out 1-2b an hour, do you think people would still be going out to grind because it is so very fun?  Or do you think every RBF might just be full of people?

People who genuinely enjoy grinding should be able to go out and be rewarded for doing so.  People who genuinely enjoy PvP should be able to go out and be rewarded for doing so.  People who love both (I fall into this category) would feel like they are actually playing a real MMO again.

For real, I haven't even touched other gamemode since AOS came out, got locked in 

Also full agree with WOTR, locking it behind being in top 2 guild and rng selection is just so much wasted potential

Really though, the money from pvp is so substandard and rbf is so boring right now. RvR is going to be so awesome if it could even be a thing