Frontlines - Remove GC restrictions

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Originally Posted by tehomegaking

But I CAN'T get into 8vs8 for practice, I've queued for it for the last 5 days, and got two games! I've queued for frontlines for hours too, and never seen a single game pop. This is just unacceptable, it's madness, how can you expect PVP to thrive when people can't easily get into any games other than 4v4, something has to be done now.

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The unrated 8 vs 8 feast can be a lot of fun too. Is a real shame that it has too long queue times.
More relaxed / less pressure than 4 vs 4, more parts of the arena accessible with places you can fall down. I like it.
I would do unrated just for fun if I could get in there more often.

Topic has been brought up several times. There have been many suggestions on how to work around it. I've also made seral suggestions including: http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...3275-PvP-leves

My idea here is to improve queues while not removing GC restrictions and not kill any other content. It could work several ways.

In the end, SE will not spend much effort/resources to "fix" old content. Their budget mentality does not allow it. And if the new frontline does not have GC restrictions while the old ones have, then goodbye old frontline forever. Queue would never pop. Just like The Fold now. Dead and gone.

As stated before, SE really miss out on a huge player-base the way they treat PvP. It's the PvPers that basically play just to play; keeping their subs just to play. They don't need constant new content to keep them interested. I'm sure many developers in SE are fully aware of this, but are held back by company/development philisophy, resources, budget, etc. However if they honestly -and with their best intentions- are giving it their best to keep PvP alive in this game, they are not doing a very good job. Sorry, but that is the ugly truth. I suspect that this is not the case though. They focus most of their attention on endgame-glamour-grinders, while hoping their minimum effort on PvP will keep the PvPers around.

One thing when I was doing Frontlines for ADS that used to annoy me, was that sometimes one team would just feed another team/throw it to another team, and our team would lose as a result.
For example, If I am adders coming 2nd place. Adders and Flames have around the same pts. But then Mael comes along, and hits adders when flames have 2+ nodes up and adders have 1 node. Adders now cannot fight flames as they are defending against mael and now adders lose, as flames are getting more pts from the 2 nodes up.

Another example of what can happen: Say, Adders and Flames have around the same pts, but mael is so terrible when they hit flames, that they just feed them more and more pts (since when you die, you lose pts, and the team that killed you gains pts).The mael keep dying to flames, flame's pts jump up, Flames now wins, and adders lose.

Another suckie scenario that I have seen: Sometimes it's mael and flames are 1st and 2nd, they'll just both hit adders, 2 teams vs 1 that is already losing, Adders would have no hope, they would have to defend against 2 teams, and it becomes a race from the other teams as to who can kill the most adders for the most pts. Not at all fair for the adders.

If it was just 1 team vs another team, you wouldn't have these problems, adding the 3rd team means that the better team might not win, depending on how the 3rd team plays. Too often I have seen "Mael is so stupid, now flames will get the win -.-" and visa versa when I am playing as adders. This shouldn't be a thing.

As a sort-of new player (6 months now I think?), I just want to add that GC restrictions are the last thing that has kept me out of PvP. I'm not arguing that it may be the ultimate limiting factor for experienced players, but I've encountered many more obstacles.

Basically I think PvP is way too inaccessible in FFXIV, here is a brief freethink of all the reasons I've been playing 6+ months and only just now even considered PvP (and only because I wanted an Axe for PvE sold for PvP points).

I learned Frontlines exist last week.
That's 6+ months of playing and I never even came across information that FFXIV has Battlegrounds. It's buried behind reaching L50, completing a totally-unrelated quest (Pup No Longer, which I never completed, because I had no interest in Deathmatch PvP while still learning how to tank Brayflox Story), and then hidden behind a generic quest symbol at my GC headquarters (I don't hang out in Ul'dah much).

In other worlds I've played, I'm encouraged to get into casual Battleground PvP from about Level ... 10? maybe?
It's introduced in a gentle, carefree way while I still have a tiny ability set and it's easy to jump in and try things. This is the same reason early dungeons like Sastasha exist — it gets people comfortable with the ideas early on. Restricting PvP until Level 50 is like making someone's first dungeon Aurum Vale, then being surprised they don't ever want to do dungeons again.

I'm not bribed into PvP.
Developers need to understand, most average players of worlds like Eorzea are not 'gamers' the way developers usually are. They don't want to do something with potential ego-deflating consequences just for the challenge. That's why they enjoy PvE, it constantly pats you on the head and tells you how amazing you are and doesn't let you lose (not intended as cynicism — this is part of what makes questing adventures fun). Propose getting torn apart in PvP by master players — which is stressful, not fun — and it's like: "What do I get out of it?" Note the Relic grinds, for example; players will do a lot of things if you bribe them sufficiently.

Something as simple as opening up Frontlines at level, say, 20? And including a 'PvP Roulette' with Leveling XP + GC Seals alongside the 'Leveling Roulette' would bribe newer and alt players into trying PvP — creating a more casual crowd to draw from and populate the Unrated content with.

Why is bribery and early accessibility important?
Because while some players will simply never have any interest in a competitive/unpredictable environment, other players (like me) are just either oblivious, intimidated, or both. It took my i205 Axe to motivate me to start poking around for Wolf Mark options, and after initially being filled with absolute dread, I realized Eorzean PvP is... actually kind of fun, and not everyone who PvPs is a salt-filled cyclops that hates you (in fact, most of them are fairly nice).

Right now, FFXIV makes the player work for PvP:
"Okay, Warrior of Light. We have hidden PvP somewhere in Eorzea. We won't tell you where. If you discover it, you may have to keep searching to find the other unlocks. Your incentive for doing it is... well, there isn't one, really. Also, most of your queues will never pop — there will be no explanation for this. If you give up after waiting in queue for 3 hours, that just means you're weak!"

"Oh! Also, there a million tiny rules about PvP that are completely different than PvE. There will be no explanation of this anywhere. You must comb Forums and Wikis to learn about odd things like ranged damage scaling on BRD/MCH, and then you must also hope that Wiki was updated to account for patch changes and whether or not these modifications apply to Frontlines, Wolves Den, or both. Also, here's some PvP abilities! (what?) Have fun!"

And then it's not very surprising most players either never learn it exists (me) or give up in short order and forget it exists.

"But FFXIV makes the player work for everything, including PvE!"
Yes, but this is fine for PvE because PvE is relaxing and fun. I'm willing to be filled with mystery and slooooowly unlock things in PvE, because that feels like a standard single-player RPG progression through the world.

This works poorly for PvP, because the matches themselves are the motivation, not the 'discovery' that it exists. It's a different mindset, and a different type of player. If you bury PvP at L50 and behind quest unlocks and other loopy convolutions, you're pushing away the crowd that would be most likely to populate it.

Or, put another unfortunately-blunt way: PvP doesn't care why everyone is killing subduing each other. I care, because I'm a lore/story nerd, but I'm the minority here and I don't think the average PvP audience does. They would much rather jump in with no explanation and start slaughtering Lalafells, than wait 50 levels and half the MSQ just to have better story context.

(This is in direct contrast to PvE, where FFXIV's insistence on plot cohesiveness and world-logic has made it the most satisfying persistent world I've participated in.)

And now we get a brand new mode but it still has GC restrictions...

If I was to tell you what I really think about this decision I would be banned in 5 seconds from this forum, so I will try to say this in the nicest way possible.

This is the most retarded, stubborn, head in the ass and outright dumb decision the dev team could've possibly made. This is pants on head level of stupid. Sorry.

We asked you time and time again, and yet you fail to see the obvious, GC restrictions are what kills pvp the most. Not balance, not lack of fun because it is fun, what kills it is that I play for 4 hrs at night and most days get 3 matches...all because of those silly restrictions.

Only this dev team could possibly think that lore > gameplay. So yeah...keep your lore compliant pvp because I bet the new mode will die just a couple of months after it comes out. This is ridiculous.

There's a reason this post hasn't blown up. All of this has already been said and echo'd for over half a year. This was their chance to remove GC restrictions, ease up the queue times and draw people into PVP. There's 3 Frontlines modes at the moment - all dead. Maybe 10 pops total a day. With this 4th, what do you think will happen to the previous 3? They're not listening to the people playing PVP in this game at all.

They said they want to focus on PVP when they released Feast - but what's actually been done about the two most discussed things in PVP recently?

1. Reporting speedhackers and people throwing matches purposely. Still see them still playing a few weeks later with no consequence. Nothing.
2. New Frontlines Mode. Completely ignored player feedback and have stuck with the route which will make this dead after a few months yet again. Nothing.

I just have one question I would like to have a community rep or developer answer: Why keep it GC restricted? How does that positively influence the PVP community and aspect of your game?

Good luck answering that question.

More restricted game modes = Bigger split in community = Longer Queue times = Less people playing = Less games played = Less PvP activity. It's that easy to sum it up.

Now I'm 100% sure this is just to increase playtime.

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Originally Posted by tehomegaking

That threads is nearly 2 years old

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I had no idea it was like this that long ago, I've only been playing PvP the past 6 months myself.

I don't understand why there's such a gap between the developers and the people playing the game. If these suggestions have been out there for 2 YEARS and they've consistently ignored it, are they just living in their own bubble developing in-house only or is it that the information isn't getting to them?

2 years is ridiculous. It took me a few days of playing Seal Rock to realise GC restrictions were just a problem. idontgetit.

I hate the GC Restriction to be honest. I can't join my neighbor with different GC to compete together, also when current GC screwed up I need to transfer to other GC for the sake of ADS mount but you need to do it again from zero.

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Originally Posted by itsoni

Why keep it GC restricted? How does that positively influence the PVP community and aspect of your game?

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With GC lock you start to see familiar faces in FL and because of that you can kinda know what kind of match you are getting, i kinda like this restriction nowdays or atleast i dont mind it anymore. Also what comes to slow ques just change GC to one that is currently underdog and you should start to see ALOT shorter ques, its also good motivativator to grind all 3 GC's to R50.

The system probably works fine for JP players. I hear mana datacenter has 72-player frontlines battles all day.
For whatever reason, most of the English community shunned pvp almost as much as they shunned the diadem.
Even if queue times were reduced by abolishing GC restrictions, we would keep being matched with the same people over and over due to small community. So I think participation is the biggest problem of all, and I've seen multiple people say they quit pvp after a bad experience of harassment.

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Originally Posted by Rufalus

The system probably works fine for JP players. I hear mana datacenter has 72-player frontlines battles all day.

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We have 24 man fight at daytime even the queue is above 20 mins. But at evening 72 man always popped up.