Ideas to alleviate frontlines wait times

Since there are no plans to remove the Adders vs Flames vs Maelstrom GC requirements, I'd like to make some suggestions to improve the user experience of this GC matching system.

I'm currently in a 3+ hours queue for frontlines roulette (I will probably give up if it reaches 4 hours). I know that matches are occurring on my data center, so I have to assume that there is an imbalance in the amount of people on each team.

It would be nice if the Duty Finder could display the average wait time for all three of grand companies, or at least display just the GC which is most in need of participants, the same way role in need is displayed for other content.

In accordance with this change, it would be nice to make a reduction on the number of days a players must wait to switch GC allegiance, and reduce the fee they must pay. This way, upon seeing which GC is required to fill the pvp match, we can choose to switch to that company and play.

I would take a 'Mercenary Mode', where you can check a box and agree to queue and be put in whatever GC needs players the most. I'd honestly be happy to get whipped hard as [current underdog GC] if it meant I could actually do PvP more than once per 30-60 minutes.

Similar to Adventurer in Need, it could require you Solo queue (no weirdness with premades), and offer some sort of small bonus.

If SE is determined to keep your 'Grand Company spirit' burning, it could also temporarily actually switch you to whatever GC you're subbing for. ie, Your PvP Rank / AP / Glamour display would be swapped or voided accordingly.

Seriously, the 3.2 cutscene following a particular melee offered a heavy lore perspective towards all of the GC leaders to condone the participation of the WoL in GC vs. GC battles regardless of their current affiliation. They don't even need to try hard to think of a reason for why this would work from the perspective of coming up with an excuse, especially since Sephiroth EX's lore explanation was a total joke.

A "Mercenary" type system has been my solution pretty much since Frontlines inception...

Ideally, I'd like them to implement a "Skirmish" system for Frontlines, in which you just instantly get in and the match is just a pointless free-for-all while we wait for a proper (Seize/Shatter) match to start. During which, players can be given the option to opt in as a Mercenary to speed up queues. That way you've both sped up queues and partly masked them... You instantly get into "Skirmish" to wait for Seize/Shatter and can actively see queue progression since "Skirmish" would fill up with people queuing for Frontlines...

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Originally Posted by Nalien

Ideally, I'd like them to implement a "Skirmish" system for Frontlines, in which you just instantly get in and the match is just a pointless free-for-all while we wait for a proper (Seize/Shatter) match to start. During which, players can be given the option to opt in as a Mercenary to speed up queues. That way you've both sped up queues and partly masked them... You instantly get into "Skirmish" to wait for Seize/Shatter and can actively see queue progression since "Skirmish" would fill up with people queuing for Frontlines...

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This idea is very appealing to me. Being able to just fluff around and do PvP while the queue ticks would be really seriously great. So much more opportunity to practice and learn instead of PvPing the Onion Soup market with my frypan.

Any solution would be nice. From what I have seen from peoples previous posts Japanese servers are pretty stable que times. They have been unable to move forward with any plan of action sadly. Besides the we are aware there might be an issue how many live letters ago. Frontlines was added patch 2.3 in 2014.

We have gotten two adjustments that i can think of, one the start of match with out full teams (thank something) and two the removal of estimated que times for roulette. So one good and one questionable since we all no estimated times are wrong, why remove them. Unless people realized it was dumping them into bad ques and resetting the roulette. IE when Seize had 5 min ques and roulette would magically jump to 30+ mins. I could tell it had dumped me into a dead level 50 match. So i just kept restting it until it would put me into the 5 min que and pop.

They had a chance to do some new stuff with 3.0 but it is what it is at this point. Maybe 4.0

At least could let me summon my bird companion so I can do so challenging open-world content while I wait.

And still, I think they could do more for server-based recruitment, make 72-player Frontlines queueing different in some way from standard Duty Finder queueing. Something like GATEs or open-world recruitment working parallel with a viewable lobby (all accessible from the GC hub in the 3 major cities). But that's probably beyond SEs interest.

I tried doing it today myself and gave up after waiting more than 4 hours in queue.