Do folks actually believe spamming macros is useful in Frontlines?

Had a couple of games this evening wherein one person, usually queued with a couple of lickspittles to support them, spammed sound effect macros throughout the game. We, of course, lost both of those games by a fair margin.

Yet when I asked them to chill out with the sound effect spam, they acted like I'd just taken a dump on their rug and then claimed they had a very high win rate... but since they only had Slaughterhouse and not Hand of Mercy, I'm not sure how relevant their win rate really is.

What's with these people? Do they actually believe that spamming those sound effects macros actually helps the team, or are they just exercising the petty form of power Square-Enix gives players by allowing them to play sound effects on others' devices?

JP sometimes have someone do callout to do burst countdown or pinch warning in Frontline or RW. I myself doing that as well and I know NA people really hate it because of the sound effects, but yeah JP does that :)

EDIT: Also macro for direction and hold position.

Yeah he was definitely using one of those. I don't see the point, though. "Hit the big button when they're all clumped up" is something that any player with more than like five or six games under their belt understands intuitively and they don't need to be told to do it.

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Originally Posted by Gserpent

Yeah he was definitely using one of those. I don't see the point, though. "Hit the big button when they're all clumped up" is something that any player with more than like five or six games under their belt understands intuitively and they don't need to be told to do it.

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It's mostly for coordinating to buffs party then DRK use Salted Earth on packs then DRG use their LBs, something like that :)

"Oh wow, I do no damage and do nothing in large scale fights for my team by not listening to commands, but at least I play the objective because I am smarter than everyone else." Want to know why commanders lose even though they give commands? They will get Frontline matches, where they have 23 people like you on their team who choose not to care and not listen to commands, while not knowing how to do the bare minimum of not pressing buttons. Or you know, they could just be a bad commander, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and take their side for this one.

I think the data center where commanding is the most effective because everyone actually listens is actually Elemental and Mana data center. People actually listen because they understand how important it is to work as a team and sync their burst together to take points and objectives from other teams. Getting kills is really important, and it's a lot more harder to rack up kills if people are not syncing their burst. They will also help you move around the battlefield safely and avoid getting the entire alliance pincered. Their goal is to just get you guys kills and help you avoid dying, because you need battle high (buff that gives you 10-50% damage and healing bonus), that helps you dominate mid to late game, because you're so strong by then with those buffs.

With the changes to balance of Frontlines where people are just stupidly tanky, you need to co-ordinate those burst to make sure you're racking in a wave of kills instead of relying on luck to get you one measly kill. Now to be fair with you, NA players tend to ignore callouts significantly more than JP players. I believe its just a culture problem, where JP are more obedient and NA players are like "F U, American freedom, we do what we want!" It's the reason why when I play on NA data centers, I don't bother doing callouts for them. No one listens, and because no one listens, if we lose, people just immediately blame us for bad shotcalls even though they have no followed a single instruction! Hahahahahaha! So it's best not to do shotcalls in NA, it's almost pointless. But it's very effective if you do it in JP data centers, because players have a more clearer understanding to the game about battle high, teamwork and co-ordination. And they don't have such a massive ego where they don't mind being told what to do, cause they know they have to work as a team.

But yeah, this is generally just a culture difference. Shotcalls in NA are just hopeless, because a good majority of the time, no one listens.

GC with callouts will easily dominate the game even in 2v1 situation. It's broken strong, not just useful.

I don't believe that, though. Frontlines isn't a complicated game mode, and PvP is very, very simple by design. If you have a few hours of play under your belt, you don't need to be told what to do and when to do it. Like, people don't need to be told where to go, when to push or when to fall back, etc if they're actually looking at the map.

It just feels like preaching to the choir. It would make more sense if you could queue as 8+ or something, to the point that you'd have a reliable core of players all working together in VC and the calls are just to help make sure the randoms know what the core group is doing. But 4/24 isn't enough to really form a core around.

It's more like syncing bursts with a timer instead of telling people what to do. If you're a DRK, you'd want people to burst at the same time as you pull, in the window before everyone guards. The timer helps with that so the team knows exactly when the DRK is going to dive. It doesn't matter how high the individual skill of everyone is if they don't know when the fight is starting, so when the dive happens, some people may have already left to a newly spawned node, which leads to an underwhelming burst.

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Originally Posted by Edelgarde

It's the reason why when I play on NA data centers, I don't bother doing callouts for them. No one listens, and because no one listens, if we lose, people just immediately blame us for bad shotcalls even though they have no followed a single instruction! Hahahahahaha! So it's best not to do shotcalls in NA, it's almost pointless.

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LMAO basically it happened to me yesterday when I do the callout at Crystal.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen...vc3mSMOCLs.png

Like what even is a good callout? Linking with map??

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Originally Posted by Knot_D

LMAO basically it happened to me yesterday when I do the callout at Crystal.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen...vc3mSMOCLs.png

Like what even is a good callout? Linking with map??

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Linking with maps are not good callouts. They're not even helpful and people on console cannot take the time to look at the coordinates.

Good callouts are successfully guiding the entire alliance in a safe route to avoid them getting pincered or ambushed, while being able to do good timing on full assault burst on enemies, while knowing when to retreat.

edit: Gserpent's case is he ignores any callouts and gets himself killed, losing more points for the team and never ever helping full assault burst, thus doing nothing for his team to secure kills. Commanders who have no one following their order are useless, but commanders are great to have when people choose to listen.

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Originally Posted by Edelgarde

Linking with maps are not good callouts. They're not even helpful and people on console cannot take the time to look at the coordinates.

Good callouts are successfully guiding the entire alliance in a safe route to avoid them getting pincered or ambushed, while being able to do good timing on full assault burst on enemies, while knowing when to retreat.

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Yeah I know, and you're right. That's why I tried to question these people what even is a good callout for them :)

2 and 3 days ago I had some in my frontline team who made calls and lead the group. Most player followed it and we won both matches.

Yesterday no one did that for half the time. We were last with 0 points.
The 2nd half someone started to make calls and we fought back into 2nd place, 20 point's away from first.

Soo, calls and macros are better then silence.

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Originally Posted by Edelgarde

Linking with maps are not good callouts. They're not even helpful and people on console cannot take the time to look at the coordinates.

Good callouts are successfully guiding the entire alliance in a safe route to avoid them getting pincered or ambushed, while being able to do good timing on full assault burst on enemies, while knowing when to retreat.

edit: Gserpent's case is he ignores any callouts and gets himself killed, losing more points for the team and never ever helping full assault burst, thus doing nothing for his team to secure kills. Commanders who have no one following their order are useless, but commanders are great to have when people choose to listen.

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I don't need callouts, because I keep the map open the entire match and... the map tells me literally everything I could possibly need to know. Any enemy player in combat is visible on the map. Objectives are visible on the map, and in many cases the icons even give you additional information about the objective if you hover over them (Seal Rock will tell you how much data is left, for example, so you can determine whether or not it's worth trying to fight over it.) Anyone with the sense god gave a squirrel can figure out how to pinch and avoid being pinched by just looking at the map, and anyone with a dozen games of a given mode under their belt will be able to intuit the most practical things to do based on the state of the map (which nodes to pursue, whether or not you should back off to wait for new nodes, etc.)

Linking map locations is vaguely more useful than saying nothing at all, but it isn't very useful. But then, neither is a macro telling people to go north or south or east or west or AVOID PINCH or PINCH NOW, etc - literally all you need to do is just tell people to open their maps and look at them.

The only macros I've considered using, and which I think are actually useful, are "babby's first frontlines" stuff like how the mode works, reminders to check the map frequently, how to resize/reposition the map and adjust opacity so you can keep it open all the time, etc. Since people can still somehow, inexplicably, manage to enter and queue for PvP without understanding that they have different tools, etc. I actually recently unlocked PvP on my Dynamis alt, and I have no idea how people can get into games in that state other than dedicating themselves to not reading literally anything put in front of them, because getting access to Frontlines is now a multi-step process and the first time you enter Wolves' Den for the initial PvP quest it slaps a gigantic primer on PvP in your face before it does anything else.

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Originally Posted by Curisu

2 and 3 days ago I had some in my frontline team who made calls and lead the group. Most player followed it and we won both matches.

Yesterday no one did that for half the time. We were last with 0 points.
The 2nd half someone started to make calls and we fought back into 2nd place, 20 point's away from first.

Soo, calls and macros are better then silence.

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I can come up with just as many examples of someone spamming macros the entire match and us ending up dead last by a considerable margin. Or games where we started ahead and lost by the end of the game.

I don't think callouts has anything at all to do with performance of the group. It's like trying to take credit for the rain.

Sweetheart, all I see from you is pure confirmation bias. They're coming dead last because of players like you. Did I not mention that?

It's not all about you, champ. It's about the entire team. In Frontlines, the alliance has to move as one with the exception of light parties taking objectives in Shatter. You are a muppet if you think otherwise. A team that does not move together and is constantly spread are just going to get picked off one by one from being outnumbered, and thus losing points for the team. Also, you seem so insecure about yourself and you don't want to give commanders any bit of credit for any sort of success, and anyone who commends a commander's effort gives you less validation in your participation in pvp. I'm so sorry that you feel that way that you feel the need to make an ignorant complaint thread about them. Do you need hug, honey?

Man, do you actually talk like that in real life, or do you only pull off this hilariously condescending tone when you know you won't get slapped for it? Good lord, man. I can't even read that without wincing in embarrassment for you...

You can feel however you like, but at the end of the day I strongly doubt that people who are incapable or unwilling to check the map are going to be any more likely to read chat, sound effects or no.

Most player who do PvP are lemmings.
They don't think and just follow someone.

So they don't look on the map, don't think about strat and don't know why they are winning/losing.
They jdon't try hard and want to be over with it to get the daily exp.

So you have to give these player's a direction. Tell them to go A and you will have 20% that see and follow the call. Then 70% of the lemmings will see that people run to A and they just follow and fight there.

The remaining 10% is you, who ignores everything and dies alone against 5 others.

You'd be surprised how few people know what the m button does in frontline, doing callouts at least gets a few of those people to react to objectives.

Try it out, go do a frontline and do no callouts, watch how many of the dots aren't moving towards where the new point spawn is, then docallouts and you get a big difference, especially in borderlands, so many people don't know the approx timers for mid.

https://files.catbox.moe/3zom8j.jpg
There's a reason this rarely if ever happens on JP when someone is commanding and it's because EVERYONE actually follows macro play.

I really appreciate how there's all this talk about Japanese players being so amazing at frontline because they follow macros, meanwhile the real problem on NA is that our frontliner 'Commanders' come in two flavors. Those would be Information shared for the support of intelligent play, and 'Look at me I'm important listen to me <se.11>!!!'. The post is really about the second person here. The ego monster is a big issue in our side of the community. There was a CC post a while back about the desire for txt chat, but the reasoning was "So I can command my teammates." and that is why we can't have nice things. Not only is it unhelpful to spam the exact same text macro 20 times as quick as you can but it causes large amounts of people to ignore or blacklist you which then divides the group even more. Imagine trying to talk over people IRL and punctuating this with an air horn. enough said.

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Originally Posted by Kathleen_

https://files.catbox.moe/3zom8j.jpg
There's a reason this rarely if ever happens on JP when someone is commanding and it's because EVERYONE actually follows macro play.

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Mhm. This is a good example what happens when you don't have a commander because they actually get you into proper position. With a commander, it will be
'Gather together on way mark' They'll be almost right behind Maelstorm while Maelstorm has their attention on Adders still.
'Burst shot, get ready!'
'Focus Maelstorm'
'Countdown 3,2,1'
'Full assault!'

Half of Maelstorm would be dead since they cannot retreat, and then that's when they immediately retreat after stealing points and ramping up more battle high.

As much as I usually agree with op in secret this here is a bad take. Callouts are vital, despite how annoying spamming is.

Not everyone opens their map or reads chat. Therefore, callouts are needed, so that those that do read both can help to lead other folks to where they need to be. It's just easier following the crowd than reading for some reason lol. If everyone is waiting for someone to lead them things can get messy very quickly.

Some people lead by solely getting kills. Some players will naturally follow those that are fed. A macro is required regardless whether it be for setting up burst or just simply telling folks to back away from the opponent's base. I can't say that I don't rely on callouts, because I still mainly operate over the countdown macro. It's just easier acquiring kills that way.

Also, I'm not entirely sure exactly where you're getting the idea that a premade of 4 is not enough for a crowd to follow.

People complain when no one does callouts, then people complain about the macros. You just can't win (in both senses).

As much as I wished a commander wasn't needed and everyone just knows what to do, the observed behavior and the amount of misinformation and lack of strategy I've seen (on NA servers) shows that people need a lot of guidance. Even with something like "pinch alliance," a lot of people won't know what that means, and they become the tasty meat of the sandwich for the other two teams, like in that image from a few posts ago.

However, that's not to say all callouts are good. Like I mentioned before, some commands are too general and there's a lot of misinformation/misinterpretation. In one of the worst callouts I've seen in a while but happened twice yesterday with two different commanders, they said we should ignore the team pinching us because it'd mean we're not "going for" the node. Suffice to say, anyone who didn't reposition died (nearly everyone).

Also a pet peeve, but I hate map links. I'm constantly moving and pushing buttons and have my map set so I can see it all at once. I generally don't have the luxury of clicking the links, and if I did, it messes up the way I set up my map. I've gotten better at just knowing what coordinate corresponds to where, but cardinal directions are much easier to understand. I'm sure other people feel the same.

You might not need callouts and you might play with the map open, but there are a majority of people who aren't as smart as you.

I have won way more matches with a commander than without because most people are just there for the daily frontline EXP bonus and don't care if they win or lose and most people don't want to fight because its scary or whatever. I play on controller so I appreciate it more when people say GO EAST, GO NORTH, etc but that's just me. So if you have the map open as you say then the vague callouts shouldn't be so vague.

Most people who carry the Slaughterhouse title will have experience in frontline to step up and play commander, so it's not anything I think you should scoff at simply because they don't have the 5k title which takes time to get if you aren't in a premade just farming kills. I think getting kills is a lot harder now too since FL has evolved to what it is now where it's way easier to get Battle Fever status.

Also if you don't need the callouts, why not just turn off alliance chat if it's that annoying?

In general call outs with <se.x> are a good way to help people who are totally focused on killing rather than looking at the map, doesn't matter if you are an skilled pvper but alone against 10 people you are not going to do anything by yourself.

Of course there are a lot of people who give horrible bad advices that leads to bad teamfights. The worst thing you can do in any frontline mode its to immediately run to a node/banner as soon it spawns rather than wait a little and see how the other alliances are moving around the map.

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Originally Posted by Edelgarde

Mhm. This is a good example what happens when you don't have a commander because they actually get you into proper position. With a commander, it will be
'Gather together on way mark' They'll be almost right behind Maelstorm while Maelstorm has their attention on Adders still.
'Burst shot, get ready!'
'Focus Maelstorm'
'Countdown 3,2,1'
'Full assault!'

Half of Maelstorm would be dead since they cannot retreat, and then that's when they immediately retreat after stealing points and ramping up more battle high.

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I mean, no? The reason the above happens is because people don't understand what pinching/sandwiching/whatevering means. Or they don't care. If you understand how Frontlines works, and are pressing M every now and then to scan the map, then you do not need any of those calls, because you recognize that red is the team that needs to be focused, and they are in a position such that they can be pinched.

Like I said, it's like trying to take credit for the rain. If you want to claim credit every time things go right while you're pretending to be a Battlefield commander, then you also have to take credit every time things go wrong. I think people would find they are much less effective as Commander(tm) if they were honest.

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Originally Posted by Mistress_Irika

As much as I usually agree with op in secret this here is a bad take. Callouts are vital, despite how annoying spamming is.

Not everyone opens their map or reads chat. Therefore, callouts are needed, so that those that do read both can help to lead other folks to where they need to be. It's just easier following the crowd than reading for some reason lol. If everyone is waiting for someone to lead them things can get messy very quickly.

Some people lead by solely getting kills. Some players will naturally follow those that are fed. A macro is required regardless whether it be for setting up burst or just simply telling folks to back away from the opponent's base. I can't say that I don't rely on callouts, because I still mainly operate over the countdown macro. It's just easier acquiring kills that way.

Also, I'm not entirely sure exactly where you're getting the idea that a premade of 4 is not enough for a crowd to follow.

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If people don't read chat, then who are the callouts for? If people read chat, wouldn't it just be more effective to use macros to teach them the importance of the map and how to interpret the information on it? Teach a man to fish, and all that.

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Originally Posted by Elfidan

I really appreciate how there's all this talk about Japanese players being so amazing at frontline because they follow macros, meanwhile the real problem on NA is that our frontliner 'Commanders' come in two flavors. Those would be Information shared for the support of intelligent play, and 'Look at me I'm important listen to me <se.11>!!!'. The post is really about the second person here. The ego monster is a big issue in our side of the community. There was a CC post a while back about the desire for txt chat, but the reasoning was "So I can command my teammates." and that is why we can't have nice things. Not only is it unhelpful to spam the exact same text macro 20 times as quick as you can but it causes large amounts of people to ignore or blacklist you which then divides the group even more. Imagine trying to talk over people IRL and punctuating this with an air horn. enough said.

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Very much this. Even if sometimes they're questionable, the effort that that person /those people are making is appreciated and I won't debate them, I will follow them, even though I always have the map open, since we should act as a team.
However- for someone who is repeatedly spamming alliance chat with macros and with <se.> sounds for callouts? It is going to get me distracted and will get ignored at some point. I'll just look at the map at that point.

Whenever I'm on an Alliance with no one doing call outs there is plenty of fun brawling happening around mid which is what I play PvP for. I dislike having call outs because they tend to pull lemmings away from the PvP and towards some random clickable in bumf*ck nowhere while you just get overwhelmed by numbers. Man I wish there was a simple TDM mode. PvObjective is so lame.

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Originally Posted by Azuri

Whenever I'm on an Alliance with no one doing call outs there is plenty of fun brawling happening around mid which is what I play PvP for. I dislike having call outs because they tend to pull lemmings away from the PvP and towards some random clickable in bumf*ck nowhere while you just get overwhelmed by numbers. Man I wish there was a simple TDM mode. PvObjective is so lame.

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id love some TDM

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Originally Posted by Gserpent

If people read chat, wouldn't it just be more effective to use macros to teach them the importance of the map and how to interpret the information on it? Teach a man to fish, and all that.

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So while I agree people should learn pvp just like they learn pve instead of praying for or expecting a carry I decline to put the teaching on the shoulders of the player base in the actual match. I put that right where it belongs. Namely on the dev team who really didn't think it mattered to teach anything about pvp. Instead of hoping people learn or randomly get inspired to go find Brian or other top pvp players who made guides they should at least put a crash course of sorts in to highlight the basics. Imagine walking into EX and expecting people to teach as you go... wait ... mentor roulette. Damn you SE!

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Originally Posted by IDontPetLalas

Very much this. Even if sometimes they're questionable, the effort that that person /those people are making is appreciated and I won't debate them, I will follow them, even though I always have the map open, since we should act as a team.
However- for someone who is repeatedly spamming alliance chat with macros and with <se.> sounds for callouts? It is going to get me distracted and will get ignored at some point. I'll just look at the map at that point.

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The sound effect spam is what chaps my ass, not the macros themselves. Even "turning off" alliance chat doesn't stop the sound effects from being played, since what you're doing is just *hiding* alliance chat, not actually leaving it (you can't leave default channels like that.) Moreover, spamming sound effects results in it just turning into background noise instead of sound cues to help people associate things with the sounds. Danger bongos is probably the only one that's bred bone-deep into the average player, but even the bongos stop meaning anything substantial if they're constantly being used (and you are frequently "in danger" in FL anyway.) Less is more, in the case of adding sound effects to macros, but the ones spamming them don't seem to appreciate or understand it.

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Originally Posted by Elfidan

So while I agree people should learn pvp just like they learn pve instead of praying for or expecting a carry I decline to put the teaching on the shoulders of the player base in the actual match. I put that right where it belongs. Namely on the dev team who really didn't think it mattered to teach anything about pvp.

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That's always been a pet peeve of mine with respect to PvP in this game. We can't form premades, so there's no point in using Party Finder. No one sticks around after the game to chat, so there's no opportunity for confused or new players to ask questions about things they didn't understand and didn't have time to ask about during the match. Respawn timers are extremely short, so there's no time for a quick question or planning session between spawns.

It's kind of like Ex or Savage raiding with a random assortment of players and instead of having time to share macros and make plans before the pull, you're forced to pull immediately every single time, with no breaks or delays. That would be a pretty unpleasant way to raid, at least if you wanted to accomplish something.

I still think preventing players from forming full premades was a big mistake. I understand people didn't have fun getting rolled by 24 coordinated people on voice chat, but... if they could use discord servers and Party Finder to assemble a group of 24, why couldn't you?

I think the problem wasn't could you. It's that there isn't a big enough player pool to segregate the solo queue players from premade parties. Sometimes you just want to roll in no prep and have some fun. I wish we had more people in the pool, but I still hear people say, 'I hear that games pvp is bad.' when I mention it in conversation. Stigma is a powerful adversary.

I wouldn't mind having premade queues for things with a bit of increased wait time, but most people would lose their mind if they had to wait more than five to ten minutes.

Voice chat is a weird thing, loads of people don't use it when it's available in games and it opens the door to all sorts of headaches for the game company.

Let them fight

No. I tried it a few time and no one really listens. It's a waste. 1/3 chance, roll the dice. That's frontline.

You know, sometimes no one will listen, and that's just going to happen. However it also takes some practise to do callouts. For example, "don't split" is a good theory, but a better callout is " head to location_name".

People who see "don't split" (which I have seen) are going to randomly pick a target, or a base and often not the one that you think that they logically think they should pick, either because you have a strategy in mind, are looking at the score, are looking at the map- or hopefully all three. Whereas some of them are lost or just want to make the minimum investment and need very specific guidance.

I do call outs. People tend to listen to them. I have a pretty high win %. So....yes?

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Originally Posted by Kathleen_

https://files.catbox.moe/3zom8j.jpg
There's a reason this rarely if ever happens on JP when someone is commanding and it's because EVERYONE actually follows macro play.

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This is literally what i was thinking.. also often there are times when YOU HAVE TO IGNORE OBJECTIVES, but ppl still go like moths to flame