Failing to address multiplayer in PVP is a mistake

It's extremely frustrating SE wont allow multiplayer PVP in CC. They go to lengths to imitate games like overwatch and LOL in their pvp offering and yet all the games they take inspiration from lets players actually play with their friends....

Entire communities could form around this gameplay and yet SE insists on making it a solo experience. It's truly baffling.

If they rank, casual including, with the system specifically recognizing teams, to match teams to teams, and also have the player pool to do this, then sure.

Otherwise your fun is another person's garbage fire of an experience, speaking from experience when they allowed this and it was pointless to queue solo.

Not that I'm saying I can't see why you want to play with friends, I can easily imagine that.. just that coordination is a high value for determining wins, and solo queues vs a team queue is like a 99.9% loss before the game has started.

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Originally Posted by Shougun

If they rank, casual including, with the system specifically recognizing teams, to match teams to teams, and also have the player pool to do this, then sure.

Otherwise your fun is another person's garbage fire of an experience, speaking from experience when they allowed this and it was pointless to queue solo.

Not that I'm saying I can't see why you want to play with friends, I can easily imagine that.. just that coordination is a high value for determining wins, and solo queues vs a team queue is like a 99.9% loss before the game has started.

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Well of course. But isn’t that common sense? We all want decently fair matches. However being forced to play solo is not fun. It’s not about gaining a specific advantage, it is about encouraging friends and community in an MMO which ironically severely lacks content worth bonding with others over.

All the games CC could have drawn inspiration from have a balancing system like this in place to specifically enable players to play with friends, as they know that is a major reason gamers enjoy them.

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Originally Posted by Ath192

Well of course. But isn’t that common sense? We all want decently fair matches. However being forced to play solo is not fun. It’s not about gaining a specific advantage, it is about encouraging friends and community in an MMO which ironically severely lacks content worth bonding with others over.

All the games CC could have drawn inspiration from have a balancing system like this in place to specifically enable players to play with friends, as they know that is a major reason gamers enjoy them.

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If they're fair then they're fair and I don't care :p. One thought is if we don't have enough bodies during the weekdays but do during the weekends that the system might address it at that angle.

Also you say common sense but before we had this there were quite a few people who wanted to steamroll and that was specifically why they were teaming up (not because it was the bros night out on the town lol).

From my understanding, this is intentional, rather than one of those "SE just ignored it and didn't notice it was a problem" type things. Because pre-formed parties are significantly better and more coordinated than solo queuers to the point the others probably don't have a chance.

There could be a separate one that is only for partially pre-formed parties to queue for. I don't see a reason for them not to do that. Then it's pre-formed parties vs pre-formed parties. It just would be impossible to match them if the party was 4 so it would have to require either 1-3, or 5, unless a solo person was willing to face lots of organized parties on purpose.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

From my understanding, this is intentional, rather than one of those "SE just ignored it and didn't notice it was a problem" type things. Because pre-formed parties are significantly better and more coordinated than solo queuers to the point the others probably don't have a chance.

There could be a separate one that is only for partially pre-formed parties to queue for. I don't see a reason for them not to do that. Then it's pre-formed parties vs pre-formed parties. It just would be impossible to match them if the party was 4 so it would have to require either 1-3, or 5, unless a solo person was willing to face lots of organized parties on purpose.

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Correct, and that is exactly how league of legends does it, curiously, another game that prominently features 5v5. And a game that is a professional E-Sport, so surely if others games manage to implement it successfully then XIV can too.

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Originally Posted by Ath192

Entire communities could form around this gameplay and yet SE insists on making it a solo experience. It's truly baffling.

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Sometimes it feels like Square likes their solo experience too much..

However, it also makes me wonder if the pool of PVP Players is so low that Square also does that to ensure fast duty pops. Cause if we do end up allowing duo and trio queues, we essentially divide the amount of players available to DF. That's something people will only be able to assume though, I fear.

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Originally Posted by ovIm

Sometimes it feels like Square likes their solo experience too much..

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Oh god, I can already picture it....

"In response to player feedback we will be spending all PvP resources on implementing solo trust PvP with all your favourite scions.
Maps and jobs will be adjusted accordingly, please enjoy it!"

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Originally Posted by ovIm

makes me wonder if the pool of PVP Players is so low that Square also does that to ensure fast duty pops

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It's not so low that they don't provide a separate Ranked queue, which is (meant to be) further divided by the skill level of those ranked players but in practice they all get matched together anyway due to lack of players and sometimes Ranked players give up and join the casual queue like I did.

If they are going to provide that they may as well divide it even more on the off chance it satisfies the players that want to queue as a party.

I think they should allow people to create private 5v5 games at least, outside of casual and ranked queues. PvPers already organise community events on a regular basis and this would make it a lot easier. Like this friend groups could play together, FCs/discord servers could host smaller recurring (like once a week) and/or bigger tournaments etc. Given the community spirit I think such a feature would see frequent use and would be appreciated a lot by different player groups.

- Custom games are already possible to make in Crystalline Conflict right now and that's how people run scrims and LP tournaments. It's Frontline that doesn't have custom game options unfortunately.
- The reason Team Ranked was scrapped a long time ago after only a couple of seasons is because of the rampant win trading everywhere combined with the ridiculously small pool of teams. But this was Feast, a pvp mode notoriously inbred and with a much lower popularity than CC.
- Thinking that allowing a full 5 players premade to queue up freely in any CC mode is not a problem is delusional. If you have played in scrims/LPs or watched tournaments, you'll understand how the result would be a total slaughter not dissimilar to what DRK abusers do in FLs right now. I do however believe that allowing duos to queue up for casual mode only at first, and ensuring that the automatch finds another duo to pit in the opposing team, would probably be a pretty relatively safe first step to try and I find it surprising that SE doesn't seem to be willing to try this out considering that I do agree with the OP: unable to queue with your friend(s) is literally what blocks most of my own social circle from really giving pvp a go...

If you want premade for CC you will have two possibilities which will lead to the same consequence: a decreasing pool of player after a certain amount of time as the public is not the same as MOBA.

1. you choose the same queue for solo and group => solo player will leave with time because of frustration and they will be fewer games
2. you choose to have two separates queues => the small CC player pool will be splitted in two and so fewer games for each group.

SE have all the data to see how much this mode is played. If too few people are playing CC they will diminish dev resources allocated to this feature. With time they will cut it and allocate resources elsewhere. I think that, even if the the current situation is not good, it's the least bad as silver buller does not exist in game dev.

I've always said the Casual mode should allow a 5-stack and queue freely against any combination of team. Ranked can be the mode that requires solo-play only.

You can already tell when some "friends" queue up you get always double team targeted to death or they just ignore their enemy-friend, despite them being low on MP and HP...

A full premade 5 vs another premade 5 can work but even that will lose its appeal really fast. You got to remember that most players are not used to PvP or not comfortatble with it at all so I'm actually impressed that any of the modes actually find moderate usage to begin with

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Originally Posted by Shougun

If they rank, casual including, with the system specifically recognizing teams, to match teams to teams, and also have the player pool to do this, then sure.

Otherwise your fun is another person's garbage fire of an experience, speaking from experience when they allowed this and it was pointless to queue solo.

Not that I'm saying I can't see why you want to play with friends, I can easily imagine that.. just that coordination is a high value for determining wins, and solo queues vs a team queue is like a 99.9% loss before the game has started.

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Yeah, gw2's unranked 5v5 allows 5 stacks queue. I am a solo player, and it is extremely unfun to get farmed by sweaty 5 stacks to a degree where l could not even leave spawn... I think solution is to just have another queue just for team

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Originally Posted by TomsYoungerBro

I've always said the Casual mode should allow a 5-stack and queue freely against any combination of team. Ranked can be the mode that requires solo-play only.

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That would just drive casual solo players out of casual mode.

Something they could have, is a separate queue for teams, but not open all the time. Perhaps it's open in the weekend, and everyone can join it, from solo, duo, trio and up to a 5-man team. And you would still have the normal solo unranked queue.

Keeping it limited in time, would make everyone that wants to play it gather at those times, instead of spreading the players out across the entire week. This could keep the queues go faster and keep the mode active.

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Originally Posted by TomsYoungerBro

I've always said the Casual mode should allow a 5-stack and queue freely against any combination of team. Ranked can be the mode that requires solo-play only.

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I’ve always thought it should be the other way around… why have your rank depend on whether you get randomly matched with a good enough team? What exactly is the achievement measured there? Persistence? I’ll give you that one!

But having the ranking based on RNG team comp, rather than your performance by damage done or KOs, kills it for me. I spent the first two series trying to get out of bronze and would get a loss (or string of them) literally every single time I got one star away. Only thing in the game I ever rage quit… I only do casual mode CC now.

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Originally Posted by Fawkes

That would just drive casual solo players out of casual mode.

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If there is a reason to farm solo players as a five stack in casual, then de-incentivize it. Queueing up in a group doesn't reward as much towards the PvP series for instance. I also don't remember off the top of my head if there are achievements similar to like a Seal Rock win count for glam. That could be changed to solo-queue only count if their spaghetti code can handle it.

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Originally Posted by TomsYoungerBro

If there is a reason to farm solo players as a five stack in casual, then de-incentivize it. Queueing up in a group doesn't reward as much towards the PvP series for instance.

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Would anyone care? The trophy crystal shop's been getting the bare minimum for a while now and patches are so long that you can get all the FOMO rewards by just doing a daily frontline.

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Originally Posted by Ath192

It's extremely frustrating SE wont allow multiplayer PVP in CC. They go to lengths to imitate games like overwatch and LOL in their pvp offering and yet all the games they take inspiration from lets players actually play with their friends....

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I think this is fine as long as you only match pairs with pairs, light parties with light parties.

As it is I think they should make frontlines participation like Crystal, solo entry only.

You just can't compete with if a coordinated pair.

When you then add that some Modder will (if they haven't already) come up with a mod that backchannel coordinates auto targeting and attacks between two or more players, it would be unworkably devastating.

That said I see no cost to them allowing it. A league for solo entries, a league for pairs, a league for light parties.

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Originally Posted by Ath192

It's extremely frustrating SE wont allow multiplayer PVP in CC. They go to lengths to imitate games like overwatch and LOL in their pvp offering and yet all the games they take inspiration from lets players actually play with their friends....

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This was by design. If you haven't caught on yet there are quite a few people that don't like to deal with premades (see various frontline threads). It would have been nice if there was 2 separate queues for this. However, we're literally left with either playing on your own or finding 9 other people on the spot to play with you. Like getting a group of 7 for raiding is easy...adding fuel to the fire, despite the previous competitive mode being more restrictive than your pve counterpart they did allow duo queue.

I do agree with you though. If this is how things are going to be for the foreseeable future I would at least like better options for our custom games at minimum.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

It's not so low that they don't provide a separate Ranked queue, which is (meant to be) further divided by the skill level of those ranked players but in practice they all get matched together anyway due to lack of players and sometimes Ranked players give up and join the casual queue like I did.

If they are going to provide that they may as well divide it even more on the off chance it satisfies the players that want to queue as a party.

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This is a chicken or egg situation, we don't know if the pop is lower because they intentionally hold back modes that would get more people into PVP, such as playing with friends.... or because PVP was never going to be popular to begin with. Either way, I stand by my opinion no other popular PVP game straight up prohibits queuing with friends.

Private matches requires the intense workload of being a human duty finder for 9 others. So this is not a viable solution except for well organized tournaments, not quick fun. All that needs to happen is for the duty finder to mirror pre-made team headcounts.

Posit the following scenario:

What is more likely to get a shy new person into PVP?

A) A friend getting you into it and queuing with you and showing you the ropes, and you guys make it a habit to play the PVP mode co-op.

B) Queuing solo for the first time and getting absolutely wrecked while strangers spam sarcastic good match! and giving you hate commendations

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It's this mentality that holds Square back, the notion that they are protecting you by limiting your options, but that doesn't protect you, as highlighted in option B, which totally happens, and it only isolates you and makes it less fun.

People dont really care. They have not said anything about trophy crystal rewards from old series rewards.

They could create a party only queue option for ranked gameplay where you would only go against another premade party. But that would require too much effort and cut a portion of the pvp playerbase. I think that is the biggest thing. They do not want to cut the already small pvp playerbase by allowing people to queue as a pre made party.

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Originally Posted by Derio

People dont really care. They have not said anything about trophy crystal rewards from old series rewards.

They could create a party only queue option for ranked gameplay where you would only go against another premade party. But that would require too much effort and cut a portion of the pvp playerbase. I think that is the biggest thing. They do not want to cut the already small pvp playerbase by allowing people to queue as a pre made party.

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They are already merging all ranked gameplay into one datacenter as of last PLL, so if they implement NA global/region PVP the numbers wouldn't be an issue.

Premade vs premade would be the only option, otherwise good luck ever queueing solo. A group of coordinated players vs your average casual players queueing on their own would make for the most one sided fights you've ever seen. Fun.

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Originally Posted by Derio

People dont really care. They have not said anything about trophy crystal rewards from old series rewards.

They could create a party only queue option for ranked gameplay where you would only go against another premade party. But that would require too much effort and cut a portion of the pvp playerbase. I think that is the biggest thing. They do not want to cut the already small pvp playerbase by allowing people to queue as a pre made party.

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There's already not that many premades to begin with. The only thing that will happen if there's not enough groups for the other queue is that group queue will die, and folks will most likely be forced to solo. Those in the solo queue should really see much of a change if any.

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Originally Posted by Ath192

Correct, and that is exactly how league of legends does it, curiously, another game that prominently features 5v5. And a game that is a professional E-Sport, so surely if others games manage to implement it successfully then XIV can too.

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That should provide a hint- we're no where close to that genre.

This is legit such a frustration of mine. I have 3 friends who would instantly resub if we could duo queue even.

Every competitive esport allows duo q and group play. These are social games. Nobody thinks LoL, DotA, Fortnite, Apex Legends, etc. etc. are not competitive because this whole 'premade instawin' argument is pure garbage.

If a match has a duo pair in, there must be a duo pair in the other team. It is literally that simple! Suddenly, no more balance issues. No need to split queues, the community can't handle it in ranked, just ensure any duo pairs have an equal number on the opposing team. Job done.

It is a 100% player-driven mode that hilariously is the most solo and lonely experience in the game, is that not just maddeningly stupid?

And as a final point regarding competitive integrity. There is already rampant wintrading, hacking, and people jumping into discord to coordinate when matches start anyway. SE don't seem to care about that hurting the competitive environment. They just care about letting you play with your mates.

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Originally Posted by IDontPetLalas

That should provide a hint- we're no where close to that genre.

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No we're not. We're in the genre that is designed around playing cooperatively with your friends. Oh...

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Originally Posted by TomsYoungerBro

If there is a reason to farm solo players as a five stack in casual, then de-incentivize it. Queueing up in a group doesn't reward as much towards the PvP series for instance. I also don't remember off the top of my head if there are achievements similar to like a Seal Rock win count for glam. That could be changed to solo-queue only count if their spaghetti code can handle it.

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People don't need to gain anything out of it if they enjoy the content. DRK abusers in FL aren't farming anything, they're just having fun. Not necessarily because they steamroll everything, perhaps some do, perhaps some don't, they just enjoy playing this way with their friends.

MMO players are always way too quick to always reduce everything to rewards.

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Originally Posted by Daralii

Would anyone care? The trophy crystal shop's been getting the bare minimum for a while now and patches are so long that you can get all the FOMO rewards by just doing a daily frontline.

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You could just do a daily frontline and get it eventually, but as per any form of content, people will do it at their pace if the game allows it. If they want to get the Series Level 25 reward fast, they wouldn't queue CC with a stack if they didn't get any XP right?

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Originally Posted by Valence

People don't need to gain anything out of it if they enjoy the content. DRK abusers in FL aren't farming anything, they're just having fun. Not necessarily because they steamroll everything, perhaps some do, perhaps some don't, they just enjoy playing this way with their friends.

MMO players are always way too quick to always reduce everything to rewards.

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To say a certain group entirely isn't "farming anything" is pure conjecture. In frontline you can get XP for other classes and/or Tomestones, Wolf Marks, and progression on the PVP series to gain crystals at whatever pace you like. There are also achievements for winning a certain set of each type of frontline mode. While I'm sure there are a certain subset of those players that are queueing the mode just because they like it, I promise you that it is not 100% of those players. They are there for other reasons.

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Originally Posted by TomsYoungerBro

To say a certain group entirely isn't "farming anything" is pure conjecture. In frontline you can get XP for other classes and/or Tomestones, Wolf Marks, and progression on the PVP series to gain crystals at whatever pace you like. There are also achievements for winning a certain set of each type of frontline mode. While I'm sure there are a certain subset of those players that are queueing the mode just because they like it, I promise you that it is not 100% of those players. They are there for other reasons.

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You reason like a casual player leveling their jobs with their daily, not like a hardcore FL player with sweaty DRK comps. Most of those have most of the rewards already.

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Originally Posted by Valence

You reason like a casual player leveling their jobs with their daily, not like a hardcore FL player with sweaty DRK comps. Most of those have most of the rewards already.

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Im not sure what you are getting at here. I clearly agreed that there are a subset of those players that are doing it just because. I am saying your claim that "most" are that is pure conjecture. You should not build your game around a subset of a subset.

We had team ranked back in the day for Feast and it ended for reasons described already on this thread. That being said, if they intend to consolidate the ranked queues together per datacenter, I could see an argument for it coming back. They would need to implement designated queue windows, though, and not allow 24/7 queuing.

Ranked CC should obviously stay solo. Casual CC could do with at least a duo queue.

Frontline is the real victim of this disease. Taking away 8-mans was a gross overkill solution to a problem that involved the 8v8v8 games that happened because there weren't enough of a Grand Company. All they needed to do was implement forced freelancer for everyone (which they did) and abolish anything that isn't 24v24v24 (which they also did).

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Originally Posted by Ritsugamesh

This is legit such a frustration of mine. I have 3 friends who would instantly resub if we could duo queue even.

Every competitive esport allows duo q and group play. These are social games. Nobody thinks LoL, DotA, Fortnite, Apex Legends, etc. etc. are not competitive because this whole 'premade instawin' argument is pure garbage.

If a match has a duo pair in, there must be a duo pair in the other team. It is literally that simple! Suddenly, no more balance issues. No need to split queues, the community can't handle it in ranked, just ensure any duo pairs have an equal number on the opposing team. Job done.

It is a 100% player-driven mode that hilariously is the most solo and lonely experience in the game, is that not just maddeningly stupid?

And as a final point regarding competitive integrity. There is already rampant wintrading, hacking, and people jumping into discord to coordinate when matches start anyway. SE don't seem to care about that hurting the competitive environment. They just care about letting you play with your mates.

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Yep, exactly this. and it's not like teams don't coordinate already without needing to even talk... It doesn't take a genius to figure out if you're a DRG with LB and the DNC on your team has his up to wait for them to pop it so you can kill a group of people. People are here pretending talking is going to make that much of difference.

We already have people focus firing others in PVP by simply marking them a "1". Coordination already exists.

The only viable middle-ground solution I can see is allowing friends to queue up together, but with a reduction in the rewards earned based on the number of players in the premade group. For each additional friend in the group, rewards like Wolf Marks, PvP XP, Series XP, and leveling XP could be reduced by 10%.

I feel it's a little disingenuous to compare PvP that is part of a much larger MMO game to another game whose sole purpose is the PvP experience.

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Originally Posted by SieyaM

I feel it's a little disingenuous to compare PvP that is part of a much larger MMO game to another game whose sole purpose is the PvP experience.

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Is it? Can you elaborate on what is disingenuous about asking for a feature other pure PVP games have in this game? It's not like damage, abilities, or any other system in use in PVP is shared with the PVE side of the game. Literally PVP systems and abilities do not affect anything outside of its own sphere.

We can also see clear influences of pure PVP games in the PVP mode in this game, so it makes for a compelling argument to draw from those very games the multiplayer feature of "playing with friends" to an MMO, a game that is supposed to be the most social genre of games in the gaming industry.