Remove the Grand Company aspect entirely from Frontline

[Rhekshi-Ehki]

From Lace Valeria:
The Frontline Roulette didn't kill Rival Wings. It died LONG before that due to players adopting poor strategies early and stubbornly clinging to them, exploiting job balancing (i.e. healer stacking), poor sportsmanship (giving up early, afking, being "just here for XP/wolf marks/tomes"), and some of the poor changes made to the mode itself. Skilled players got their wins for their mount, and left the players who didn't want to listen or cooperate to deal with each other and the mode died as expected.
Now then, as for the matter of GC/Freelancer queues, as I previously said both here and many times on Reddit, since 4.0 we've had a compounding issue of people believing they have to be in one particular GC - let's not be coy: Maelstrom - in order to win. They'll switch to Mael, turn OFF Freelancer, and never queue in a full party, so they'll only ever be on Maelstrom in a match, which basically lets them apply the premade concept, but bypass forced Freelancer status. There's nothing saying they can't, but it's a bit underhanded. This problem has truly snowballed in Primal data center, while it's come up in Aether, but hasn't been allowed to grow nearly as much.(edited)
It also doesn't solve the core problem that the remaining teams face: People largely just don't know what to do. Nor do they seem to care to learn, and being forced to always be on a team that wouldn't have the coordination shown by people who exclusively queue for Maelstrom and do know what to do would only serve to further demoralize and either drive people away from Frontlines altogether, or worse, resort to things like botting/afking just for XP "participation" rewards.

The answer isn't to remove GCs. Honestly, they could change the colors and call each team the Temple Knights, the Doman Liberation Front, and the Ala Mihgan Resistance and it still wouldn't matter. I personally am in favor of a forced Freelancer for all, and I say this because not only does it immediately erase the placebo fix of piling into one GC, it would hold every player personally responsible for knowing what to do and push them to work together if they want to win, rather than trying to stack one team favorably. That too, is part of why others premade. It's time to really, properly look at things.

[Ilan]

If queues are longer, those with the ability to actually win will move to GCs with faster queue times, because they don't need 'the best GC' to win.

No because people will stop to que up completly. We've already been there for a long time.

[Crit]

remove frontlines in general

[Kai_Lee]

I just think adders and flames players are all stupid.

[Arthur_Gwen]

Well I mean, premade is auto freelancer there's no option for party q

So what's your point

[Zsolen]

I just think adders and flames players are all stupid.

It is usually freelancing that is the problem. I've had a lot of Mael players either inexperienced or not learning enough play for Adders. I look at people's GCs, sometimes.

[Ariel_Valmont]

Serious question, as someone who has always been on Mael from the very 1st Frontlines- probably can count number of freelanced matches on one hand (and that was just out of curiosity when it went live): Are there ever people making call-outs on Adders and Flames (especially Flames) on objectives? It appears that Adders probably do, as they always tend to be our biggest threat in most games; but Flames really look like they spend most matches actively spoiling the game for another GC rather than play around objectives and trying to win. At least on Primal, anyway.

There's truth to Zalestra's observation that Maelstrom frequently has players calling shots (with <se.#>'s: this is crucial because the tunnel vision is real), constantly observing the map and actively reeling-in (with varying success) overzealous aggressive chasing at the expense of favorable map positioning. Premades on Mael really aren't a thing (and I think most stigma about them prior to freelance were overblown), and I say that as someone who religiously solo queues and would notice if a constant group of people kept being in the same party.

I do think abolishing the GCs in Frontlines would see a better distribution of skill and probably even speed-up queues. But somehow I feel that the devs are too invested in the shallow "lore" of Frontlines to outright do anything about it. That and they've put a good amount of achievements into it that I don't think they'll want to have to adjust/abolish.

I play Adders, and haven’t ever freelanced. I go through pvp phases, up until this most recent patch my percentages for 1st 2nd and 3rd have been pretty evenly split, last week was pretty rough for us. I’ve noticed a distinct improvement in communication, calls, and teamwork for the adders this week. It’s been great to see, to me it always seems like the flames work to let Maelstrom win (not just this patch cycle). I’ve seen Maelstrom fall apart, and melt under attack enough to feel they aren’t unstoppable. The flames seem to be playing very sub par lately as well.

I personally enjoy the Grand Companies, and the challenges it brings, I think pvp would be worse off, if they somehow removed that facet of it.

[Ariel_Valmont]

If you want to prevent people switching grand companies for wins, the easiest thing SE could do is make the timer to switch back longer, and put in a serious penalty for switching, which would deter people who are just chasing wins.

[Nova_Rox]

I play Adders, and haven’t ever freelanced. I go through pvp phases, up until this most recent patch my percentages for 1st 2nd and 3rd have been pretty evenly split, last week was pretty rough for us. I’ve noticed a distinct improvement in communication, calls, and teamwork for the adders this week. It’s been great to see, to me it always seems like the flames work to let Maelstrom win (not just this patch cycle). I’ve seen Maelstrom fall apart, and melt under attack enough to feel they aren’t unstoppable. The flames seem to be playing very sub par lately as well.

I personally enjoy the Grand Companies, and the challenges it brings, I think pvp would be worse off, if they somehow removed that facet of it.

Interesting. What exactly do you feel GC adds to the Frontline? At least when it comes to game play, not lore. I'm mostly interested in why you think things will be worse off if hey removed GC from Frontline.

[Ariel_Valmont]

Interesting. What exactly do you feel GC adds to the Frontline? At least when it comes to game play, not lore. I'm mostly interested in why you think things will be worse off if hey removed GC from Frontline.

I feel I probably chose my words poorly with the “worse off” comment. I am not sure not having GCs removed from frontlines would make the gameplay worse.

It does seem to completely negate the lore surrounding it, and it’s obvious that GCs are an important part of FFXIV as a whole. I also don’t see how having GCs attactched to frontlines “ruins” the gameplay, if you remove them, frontlines will still be the same, it just seems to remove the choice from people who are more interested in participating under the banner of their GC, than chasing easy wins.

As to the topic of the thread there are ways to prevent migration solely for the purpose of winning. We have two pvp modes that aren’t grand company based, and I would rather see effort towards making them more accessible with daily challenges. And adding new pvp modes, with and without GC relevance.