Is this a statistical anomaly? Or something else?

I've recently started playing this game again and I've been back a few weeks. One of the things I was after before I left was the ADS mount so I went back to the grind for 200 frontlines wins (91/200 as of now, a ways to go).

After some learning curve I got the hang of the new mode and the new PvP skills and setup, and I was winning games 35-40% of the time for the first two weeks or so, the better side of normal given the RNG side I'm put on and the RNG spawn locations with the RNG ice spawns and the RNG teammates I get. Overall enjoying myself pretty well, and feeling okay about the general 33% chance to win. It is way better than when frontlines was restricted by grand company and I was either faced by long queues or being unable to win.

After some fruitful games and a decent win% comes night before last where my winning came to a screeching halt. I won only 3 out of 17 games, and what felt like 90% or more of the time I was placed specifically on the Immortal Flames. Disgusting night, but figured nights like that might happen once in a rare while.

Then comes last night, hoping for the better side of normal I experienced before. Same. Thing. Game after game I was placed on Immortal Flames, and game after game I was losing (won only 3 out of 16 games, so that's 6 wins out of 33 games over two nights). When I felt like this pattern was too much to ignore, I started recording my games (literally, I have full video recordings of each of these games). So here's what happened in my last 13 games, and it is exactly the same as my last 33 games:

Game 1: Placed - IF; Winner - MS
Game 2: Placed - IF; Winner - MS
Game 3: Placed - IF; Winner - MS
Game 4: Placed - TA; Winner - MS
Game 5: Placed - IF; Winner - MS
Game 6: Placed - IF; Winner - MS
Game 7: Placed - TA; Winner - TA
Game 8: Placed - IF; Winner - TA
Game 9: Placed - TA; Winner - TA
Game 10: Placed - IF; Winner - MS
Game 11: Placed - IF; Winner - MS
Game 12: Placed - IF; Winner - TA
Game 13: Placed - IF; Winner - IF (miracle game and it was epicly close across all three sides)

Aside from my very last game, that trend extended to the 20 games that preceded them where my 3 other wins came from TA or MS. And I was on IF in an overwhelming majority of those games as well.

So I don't think this is "random" at all, and that there's part of the system here that I don't understand (and suffered the full disadvantages of for a very frustrating 33 games). So as far as I can tell, I can't find a way to queue into frontlines as a specific grand company - queuing through dungeon finder and queuing specifically for Shatter both will put me on random teams. Is there a way to queue for a specific GC? Was this the result of some PvP free company or linkshell queuing into Maelstrom and enjoying the spoils of cooperative play? How likely is it that a PvP team of a full 24 man raid came together on a single team? Or is this a case of one of the most improbable statistical anomalies ever witnessed?

Switch to maelstrom dont queue freelance.

Okay, I finally figured it out here. In the duty finder window there's a tiny little gear in the upper left hand corner to open settings. In those settings, I can toggle my freelancer status on and off.

So is that my issue? Are that many people really toggling off freelancer status, which is putting me on flames so often?

Flames seem to have a bigger bot population than other gc's.since mealstrom is winning most you're matches you want to change to that gc and uncheck freelance so it drops u into mael everytime.u can always go back to whichever gc u were on after u get the mount.unless it was changed ur previous wins will not count towards the 200 ads mount(red) but the blue ads will count.

@Bigceto - I can't imagine most bots wouldn't be queueing as Freelancer for the quicker queues.

@Geryth - I'd call this just a streak of bad luck. Most people queue freelancer nowadays, so skill difference between GCs has been largely minimized. You can try changing your GC if you really think there's something going on, but any change you notice from it is likely to be placebo. My advice is to just keep on keeping on. We all have days like that once in a while.

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Originally Posted by Bigceto

Switch to maelstrom dont queue freelance.

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Yeah keep promoting it to the point freeloaders starts to flood mael and it wont take long until they are sitting in 10% victory rate after a week... it has happened before and it can still happen. Seeing mael is having 50-70% win rate in chaos at the moment it would be not surprise to see GC hoppers soon, if that happens i will most likely go to adders as they are good second atm and i still need 300 wins for that 1k achievement so i will probably do it at some point anyway.

EDIT: Now that i checked all DC's it seems mael literally dominates in NA/EU servers but in JP servers GC's seems to be rather balanced when it comes to victory rates.

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Originally Posted by Synestra

Yeah keep promoting it to the point freeloaders starts to flood mael and it wont take long until they are sitting in 10% victory rate after a week...

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Im balancing pvp for SE since their not very good at it.

At least on Aether, half of the Flames are bots (no proof, just the feeling I get after watching them in action).

Adders and Mael at least seem to be mostly comprised of actual people.

Best example - I see this almost every fight. One random Flames just charges into our big group on mount. Like makes a bee line right into us as if they're autoprogrammed to head to our base. When attacked, they just keep moving on their mount like nothing is happening.

Another thing i see all the time on Flames - someone calls out big ice. The real players rush to the ice, the bots literally stand there doing nothing in a group and keep doing nothing until the ice is destroyed.

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Originally Posted by Bigceto

Im balancing pvp for SE since their not very good at it.

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Swapping freeloaders from one GC to another is not really a solution in my book, its just temp fix and one GC starts to dominate after a while. But in the end it does't really matter as i can change GC if i feel the need for that, never really cared fighting under certain banner only thing that mattered was the teammates.

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Originally Posted by Vandril

@Geryth - I'd call this just a streak of bad luck. Most people queue freelancer nowadays, so skill difference between GCs has been largely minimized. You can try changing your GC if you really think there's something going on, but any change you notice from it is likely to be placebo. My advice is to just keep on keeping on. We all have days like that once in a while.

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It is more then a streak of bad luck. Basically this is a further magnification of issues we have always had in frontlines.

Pre freelancer you had the better players queing for the same GC, freeloaders would then follow behind into said GC and the better players move on to the next one

When freelancer hit it was then a pre-made is rolling in blank GC and crushing everyone, leading to some bad luck, but otherwise, you had close to a balance win rate as OP noted.

They changed pre-mades now, that you auto to freelancer, so people have gone back to solo que but the better players in the same GC. This has been made worse then it ever was by Bots and people just farming Xp. You now have min chance on this groups as a result, even if they are not bots, they are generally people who do not care for winning or losing, and you are lucky to get more then 2 healers out of the 24.

You also have the issue that a skilled player has alot less carry potential in frontlines now. It was never large, but a few good players use to make a difference. Now unless that skill is magically making everyone stay together and hit the same target, the skill of those few good players is moot.

I think it definitely more than just a bad streak of luck. Last night was a lot better, but the prevailing theme of getting placed on flames is still very much a thing. Here are my games last night:

Game 1: Placed IF - Winner MS
Game 2: Placed IF - Winner IF
Game 3: Placed MS - MS
Game 4: Placed TA - TA
Game 5: Placed IF - TA
Game 6: Placed IF - TA
Game 7: Placed IF - TA
Game 8: Placed IF - IF
Game 9: Placed MS - TA/IF
Game 10: Placed TA - TA
Game 11: Placed IF - TA
Game 12: Placed IF - MS
Game 13: Placed IF - MS
Game 14: Placed TA - MS (turned freelancer off for this game)
Game 15: Placed IF - MS
Game 16: Placed TA - TA (turned freelancer off for this game)
Game 17: Placed TA - TA (turned freelancer off for this game)

My win % when I freelanced on Flames was 20%. My win % when I freelanced on Adders or Mael was 75% (not counting my non-freelanced adders games).

And when I freelance, my chances of freelancing to flames, over my last 50 games, has been around 75% (it was 71% last night and that was the most diverse night I've had in a while)

So right now on the Aether datacenter, freelancing means a pretty low chance to win. I think I'll put my fate into the Adders for a while and see how that goes.

What you're saying makes a lot of sense, but I'd still guess it was a coincidence. Still, who really knows, maybe there actually is something to this. Just seems to me like things would have balanced themselves out by now given how long the Freelancer system has been in place.

As far as your experience goes, Geryth, if you think it'll help then there's really no reason to not transfer GCs (unless you're particularly loyal to yours). At worst, nothing happens. At best, improvement.

Ok seriously anyone has an answer as to why Maelstrom is so freaking strong in frontline? This is making me want to pull my hair off seriously.

It might be a very, VERY bad streak, but on 9 games today, mael won 8 of them and most of the time by a large margin... (i'm on TA)
They seem to always have a balanced team, always coordinate their attack and move at the split seconds an ice spawn.

It doesn't help that the Flames are a total joke and dont seem to have a brain. Always attacking and preventing TA to do anything while Mael has total control of the ices... Even when mael has the lead with a LOT of points, what do Flames do? the most logical thing to do of course, attack TA spawn...

Wouldn't it be more likely to get placed in a certain team if there's nobody really queueing with that team? If Flames have a reputation for always losing, it stands to reason that people may be avoiding queueing freelancer/joining Flames and PVPing because they don't want to be with the perceived losers. But Flames still needs to have a team the same size as Adders/Mael, so the freelancers are always going to get pulled there.

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Originally Posted by AdamZ

They changed pre-mades now, that you auto to freelancer, so people have gone back to solo que but the better players in the same GC.

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Wut. People don't solo queue into the same GC. We don't care what gc we end up in. When we premades well just carry whoever team we get in. Why would we risk being in separate parties and matches for the sake of being in one GC? Especially when we've been clamouring for freelancer for so long.

My experience on Chaos:
Freelance = flames 8-9/10 times.
Mael wins the majority of the matches.

It's not coincidence, unless it's been a coincidence for over a month now.

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Originally Posted by Geryth

I'll put my fate into the Adders for a while and see how that goes.

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In case anyone has been wondering how it's been going with queuing only for adders:

https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/oG...hkc=w1600-h770

It's been a great week. Last week I was somewhere around 38-40% win, and it's 50% this week. I might get that red ADS mount sometime this century. Having a 22% win rate over 60-70 games was torture.

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Originally Posted by Guesswhat

My experience on Chaos:
Freelance = flames 8-9/10 times.
Mael wins the majority of the matches.

It's not coincidence, unless it's been a coincidence for over a month now.

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i seriously dont know what happenned since stormblood release but maelstrom is steamrolling on everygames, flames always attack adders for some reasons and its nearly impossible to win. I had less than 15% win rate previous week. won 4 games out of 28 i think...

I'm at 50 wins away from the black ADS mount (most of it was prior to stormblood) and it might be impossible to get it before frontlines is deserted at this rate. Truly kills my motivation to play this mode anymore.

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Originally Posted by Brownondorf

i seriously dont know what happenned since stormblood release but maelstrom is steamrolling on everygames, flames always attack adders for some reasons and its nearly impossible to win. I had less than 15% win rate previous week. won 4 games out of 28 i think...

I'm at 50 wins away from the black ADS mount (most of it was prior to stormblood) and it might be impossible to get it before frontlines is deserted at this rate. Truly kills my motivation to play this mode anymore.

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Change grand company! Seriously, if you want to win and never get in Mael with freelance on, just change (on Chaos freelance rarely puts you in mael). Once you got the mount just chanage back if you want to. You'll need 50k gil pr transfer though.

I just play for fun mostly, but I must admin being in Meal, getting all those wins helps on the fun factor.

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Originally Posted by Synestra

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There will be no balancing among the GCs as long as the bot problem is still in place. Frankly, I don't know why everyone doesn't switch to MS in protest. My last match was 30 minutes or so ago. One enemy team was entirely bots and the other had a majority of bots. I only saw one or two on that second team that acted like they weren't bots. And I felt badly for those two people who were obviously stuck on a shitty team. They tried to work around it (stealing bases, getting the smaller ices) but there really wasn't much they could do.

And we all know PVP isn't SE's priority in this game. It's more of an afterthought. Perhaps a big demonstration of protest is what will be needed to deal with this situation.

The more i play frontlines the more maelstrom are driving me insane omg. Just had the quickest game ever, one of those game where all the small ice pops then its a deathmatch. Well mael just came to our base and totally Roflstomped us, game was less than 7 minutes... and flames actually pretty much did nothing at all. They patiently waited for the game to end lol.

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Originally Posted by Korihu

Wut. People don't solo queue into the same GC. We don't care what gc we end up in. When we premades well just carry whoever team we get in. Why would we risk being in separate parties and matches for the sake of being in one GC? Especially when we've been clamouring for freelancer for so long.

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It is likely a primal thing. But they are doing it to ensure one of the other parties is not a bot party. Most of the good players where Mael on primal, shortly before freelancer came out. Given how GC did not matter, most then are still Mael now. So we are back to a pre freelancer state where the better players que to Mael. The bots que flames/adders, and it just further feeds the issue we had before.

If they where doing what you say on primal, you would get these pre-mades in the other GC's (like you did after the start of freelancer), but you do not get that anymore.

Again, Primal thing, we likely have more bots, cause primal...

On chaos mael wins mostly because they are opportunist and have no fear of doing some actual pvp, i did some freelancer pvp with few ex-static members last weekend and this was really obvious when going against mael. Both adders and immortal on chaos is filled with cowards compared to mael so that is the main reason they lose/gets roflstomped, so if that doesn't get "fixed" mael will keep dominating. Mael gets its share of crappy matches but it is way more rare compared to adders and immortal, adders are good second but oh boy immortal is kinda lost cause already.

Actually the worse thing is that mael wins a lot because flames have absolutely 0 tactical awarness and 0 clue how to play this mode it seems.

Lets say mael is leading with 1200 point, adders second with like 1000 and flames are third, who are flames going to attack? ADDERS OBVIOUSLY.

ALL. THE. TIME.

They always focus adders for some reasons, bacisally allowing mael a free win.

At times it feels like they are teaming up on purpose with the intend of making adders lose.

I've seen both team raid adders spawn at the same time on multiple occasion while i can count on one hand the amount of time it happenned on someone elses spawn.

The game would be more balanced if flames weren't so dedicated to attack adders all the time for some reason.