Hello everyone! If you haven't heard already, the winners of the Frankfurt Fanfest Feast Tournament 2017 was Boyband! Regulars and Admins of the Team Tryhard Discord server.

The members of Boyband are Eggscellent Mordecai(Paladin), Dacien Darlett (Scholar), Chicken Soup (Monk), Eli Cocco (Bard). You can view the matches if you have purchased the online Fanfest tickets at Cleeng Fanfest Page.

Axxou had a chance to Interview them all after the Tournament, general questions about FFXIV PvP and opinions of the Feast chat ban crop up, so make sure to read!

Q: Hi everyone! So, where do you come from?

Eli: I’m from Czech.

Dacien: I’m from Belgium.

Egg: I’m from the UK.

Soup: I’m from Turkey.

Q: And you're all from the same free company in the game?

Dacien: Oh, no, I'm from the Odin server.

Eli / Egg / Soup: We're from Pioneer 2 FC on Ragnarok.

Q: How did you meet each other?

Eli: Well we've been PvPing a long time during Seal Rock frontline. We always met each other there, and now we are all on the same Discord server. But we still meet each other all the time in the game anyway.

Q: And how long have you playing together?

All: Around 2 years.

Q: It is your first tournament, how does it feel?

All: Felt great! [laughs] Very stressed and nervous on the stage, literally shaking. The cumulation of Yoshi P near us and the lag during the tournament was intense.

Egg: When you’re in the game, you are in your bubble and you don’t pay attention at your environment.

Eli: By the way, in front on you, you can see a lot of people taking picture and clapping at each kill, that was really crazy. You only want to focus on your own job and to do well.

Q: It is your first Fan Festival or did you already meet each other in real life?

All: It was, nobody of us were at the London fan festival in 2014. So we've met for the first time at this 2017 Fan Festival and that was a fun surprise for all of us.

Q: Do you feel this tournament was pretty easy or were you pretty confident?

Dacien: The first two games were pretty hard but the last game was easier.

Egg: Yes, the first game was also harder because we tried the setup and it was not the same keyboard as usual [German keyboard configuration].

Eli: Our first time on the keyboard, the mouse, the controller and the hotbar!

Q: So, who plays on PS4 and PC, and who uses a controller or a keyboard/mouse?

All: 3 PC and 1 PS4.

Eli: Although I play on PC but I use a controller because I got used to the controller on ps4. I wouldn’t be able to switch.

Q: What do you think about the player using controllers instead of keyboard/mouse for PvP, since the FFXIV team chose not to separate players, unlike OverWatch for example.

Eli: Well, some of the best PvP players are still using PS3, so everything is possible!

Q: Did you train together for the tournament and for how long?

Dacien: For the Feast we didn’t really train a lot, we just played a couple of games because the queue was really long as well.

Egg: There not really a competition mode ingame before the Feast so… Frontlines are fun but not competitive. You go into Frontlines to play with friends and to relax. With the Feast, you get into more serious PvP.

Soup: With the new patch and the cross-server matching, you can player together more easily. We use this new Party Finder function because we are not all on the same server.

Q: Apparently, the time to tag in PvP, especially in the Feast is really long, so how do you manage to train in these conditions?

Dacien: It’s not really complicated because we have a great community doing PvP. For example, if a team wants to train, they can ask ingame or on Discord if another team wants to join just for training.

Q: So what do you think Square Enix has to do to improve PvP and make it more accessible for new players?

Soup: The new Garo event has drawn more people into PvP, that was a good thing.

Egg: True, there a lot of new players playing the Feast and Frontlines for the mounts and the equipment, and I think a lot of these players are actually pretty good!

Q: Have you played other competitive game like Overwatch, DotA or LoL, and how do you compare their different PvP modes with FFXIV?

Dacien: To be honest, my PvP experience in FFXIV is really better than in any other game. I've been playing FFXIV for a long time and I like PvP so I've been able to improve a lot. I probably enjoy it because I'm good at it! [laughs]

Egg: I can't actually give a good reply to that, I just like how it plays out! It's fast-paced, it's burst-heavy, I like this kind of play.

Eli: I love FFXIV because there a lot of different kind of PvP modes. Feast is for competitive play but if you more relaxed PvP you can go to Frontlines. It’s hard to compare to other games because FFXIV has more than just one mode.

Q: Why do you think the PvP scene in FFXIV is so inactive, in every server?

Soup: There a stigma in the community, people share the idea that PvP is bad in FFXIV so of course the new players won’t try it because this idea is so common. Square Enix has to do more about PvP in general.

Dacien: The Fan Festival is a good way to promote PvP. The Feast rewards also helped to get more people playing, and people want the PvP mounts.

Eli: The game doesn’t introduce new players to PvP, and when you are at maximum level [60], you just don’t think to do the quest to unlock PvP. And it was the same problem at level 50. Also, it’s harder to join PvP alone and to explore everything about the gameplay. There are many options to queue and you don’t know which one to choose. So ultimately a lot of people just don’t really try PvP.

Q: What do you think about an “unranked 4 vs 4” mode? Would it be better to introduce player to PvP?

Eli: Maybe, though now with the Garo event, the queue time is almost instant, not like before the event. At the time, we had to organize ourselves to push people to queue for Seal Rock or Shatter, and it was hard to reach people to do this at this time.

Q: What do you think about the chat restrictions in Feast since patch 3.5?

Dacien: There are some good things, but also bad things. New players don’t know what to do and they can’t ask for some tips or other things to help the team. The macros are not enough for effective communication.

Q: But is the PvP community of FFXIV so toxic that they had to remove the chat?

Eli: Well there were many reports of toxic players, and some of the new players could experience flaming from other players. Maybe we sometimes use hard words, but it’s just in the thrill of the battle. The main idea remains to be able to share information: how many medals people must take, when to come back, when to use mana regeneration for healers... Now if we could use a lot of macros to communicate, we could warn about important things.

Egg: Yeah, the number of macros is not enough, if they give us an option to create our own macros it would be better. Macros are not like chatting, you can create useful macros in each situation.

Eli: And it makes no sense that the chat restriction is also used for premade teams in the Feast. We are all using voice chat to communicate, but some people don’t use voice chat and when we focus a target, it’s easier to use the chat and to put a number on the target.

Q: It is really strange that they want to promote pvp on one side, but to give less liberty for players to properly communicate in the Feast. By the way, do you want to see SE putting more attention about the PvP scene and to create more events around the Feast?

Egg: Absolutely, we have a great foundation for PvP right now, but people are not introduced to PvP by the game, so that’s contradictory. PvP need to be more accessible to new people, and they must be guided to improve themselves.

Soup: People have to be introduced to things like using macro, buffs, timers...

Eli: Maybe putting more quests around PvP, in order to teach people slowly what they have to do and how they have to manage some things. There's nothing like that now.

Dacien: I don’t know what to say right now. [laughs]

Egg: Also, the Feast need to more accessible, but also there needs to be a system to push people to continue to play the Feast. For example, sometimes Feast is totally dead and people are sitting on their rank until the end of the season.

Dacien: League Of Legends has implemented decay on the top 100 list. In FFXIV, the #1 player can stay safe really during a long time. People can rush the first place and not play anymore until the end of the season.

Eli: For example, in the middle of the seasons (November – December for Season 3), people stop queuing because they are safe and they don’t want to lose 200 points in a bad day.

Dacien: Implementing decay would be great to keep an active leaderboard.

Q: What are your feedback about the PvP mentor functionality?

Egg: Maybe it’s better to put a harder requirement to get PvP mentor status.

Eli: Everyone can put the status and that’s really weird.

Egg: Maybe we can create a specific chat in-game for PvP questions managed by PvP mentors, so as to share experience but also avoid wrong answers by inexperienced PvP mentors.

Thanks you guys for taking the time to answer these questions, and keep winning like that. - Axxou