Why Frontlines is a bad Gamemode

Hello, this is (hopefully) the only post I make here, but I feel something in particular needs more attention than Sqex has been giving it for years now. Irritatingly, the character limit is 3000 & this whole thing was originally 8000 so I'll be more brief;

Frontlines is supposed to be entry-level PvP instance that players of any skill level can just que into & earn a massive amount of EXP through their daily roulette. As far as the different kinds of maps are concerned (and this is a matter of my opinion), Shatter is the most successful at achieving this, Onsal less so, the other two just suck.

As you may already know if you frequent this mode - it is entirely ruined by Premades running extremely potent tank shells with a significant amount of ranged & bulk support. This is a big problem on the Primal server, though I can't speak for the other data centers aside from Crystal (which is nicer). And the people who engage in running coordinated shells often have alt accounts for the sake of PvP too. Be prepared to lose or suffer if you que solo. Your chance of winning IS NOT 33% if you aren't good. And I say this as someone who does spend time marking problem players so the rest of the team can watch out for them mid-combat.

I want to make this perfectly clear; I'm not talking about commanders who que mostly solo. They help the entire team get a win regardless of their skill lvl. PMs are collectively very good at PvP while engaging in coordinated behavior better than one commander could (while also sometimes being toxic). They're very difficult to break apart even when outnumbered. If you've teammates who don't recognize how to neutralize the threat, they will 100% get steamrolled over and over esp because of their max Battle High. GNB does not take any real damage in these groups, and if they would - PLDs save them for literally free. Have to bust my ass on WAR praying I get a good pull, because that is the only way me and anyone else not part of a sweat clique has even a sliver of a chance at getting a kill on them without instantly exploding.

Here we have a situation where the overall vibe of Frontlines has gotten so sweaty and toxic that literally almost every single match I have qued for in the past weeks on Primal - people effectively stop fighting for the win because they want to dropkick the team that keeps hassling them, more than usual. I've noticed too; I almost never get put on the team with the PMs in solo que, hell - it's happened maybe only once in the past month.

How I know this? There's always that one dude on GNB ONLY on an opposing team who keeps jumping that has massive battle high and is backed by a few people. Probably the same guy who serially jumps when they were playing Monk before the Purify nerf.

And no, I'm not interested in Crystalline Conflict. You're trolling if you're telling me to play CC instead.

how dare people in my mmo pvp play together and coordinate

I don't see any clear solution for what could be done to alleviate the issue. Stuff isn't exactly balanced for FL already since it's primarily designed for CC, but the way the whole mode is thought out still works within the frame of queue syncs full of premades that know how to counter each other and use synergies offered by the system. The new role actions notably, are extremely strong for some (or outright S tier or broken), and only add up on specific job comps and combos used in the mode, which again, is fine when everybody knows how to play with it in the mode. Of course some roles like tanks are completely batshit especially since the addition of role actions, go figure when you have stuff like rampage/rampart and diabrosis while DPS roles have very little in comparison... Anyway, people will use what's meta, some oddballs like MNK/RPR/DNC can counter it here and there somewhat, and that will work out.

This whole paradigm however completely breaks at the seams when dropped into a daily roulette mode that's filled with players that have no idea how to truly capitalize on the tools at hand. Before role actions were added they were already dying to meta comps from premades of players with actual skill, and now with the addition of role actions that allow the latter to kill whole alliances even better, it's no surprise that it leads to seal clubbing. Pvp solo vets can however deal with it somewhat, and I've been in teams full of vets with no coordination that could punch back and even win at times when flanking the problematic team at the right moment, even though you're still obviously at a disadvantage there. But yes, this is essentially a skill gap issue and I don't know what SE could even do. To give a pve analogy, it's like we took the more intricate battle system of HW in daily roulettes of casual content, but had half the enemies suddenly behave like savage+ encounters (that's essentially what a good premade of players is gonna feel like in terms of difficulty to the casual player).

- Remove role actions that offer synergies to play around? Sure, but at the cost of mechanical and teamplay depth.
- Remove premades? Yeah right, forbid people to play together and have a good time in a MMO.
- Nerf supports? That'd probably be a start. They're also problematic in CC, so that's something both modes have in common. But will that be enough? Probably not.

Somewhere not only FL would really need its own balance beyond simple tweaks on innate DR and LB gen, but perhaps it could benefit from a simplified mode specifically designed for the casual experience (notably on AoE cleave abuse), but that would require to enable a custom or ranked mode for more tryhard players. How would the latter would even pop queues? Idk, probably at the mercy of queue syncing.

Let's also not forget that seal clubbing is not a new problem in FL. In every rework of pvp in XIV, it's been riddled with seal clubbing situations coming from many parameters (no freelance queue at first, full 8 man premades, etc).

I play on aether, where premades are not the problem, stupidity is.

I have seen teams ignore callouts, lose because of it, and equate callouts with spam.
I have seen peeps ignore pinch warnings, drop 100 points in mass death in 10 seconds, then lose the match by less than 50 points in the end.
I have seen teams full of BH5 lose because they weren't paying attention and focused the wrong team.
I have seen people go all in against the 3rd place team over a B rank node whilst giving the lead team an S rank unchallenged.

But the worst is when teams not only blow it, they attempt to argue or talk back.

I could write multiple, lengthy posts about this, but the bottom line is that the stupidity problem is WAY bigger than the premade problem.

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Originally Posted by HeliosDemi

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It's not a great proposal, but what I would usually do if I want to chill is to visit another data centre and try the FL queue over there to see if the environment is less competitive or filled with more randoms. It's either that or skipping some queues if you happen to know the name of the person/people that seem to be tilting your games. I am not sure if you run many queues in a row, but it may be worth a shot at least.

It's a difficult situation on how to adjust frontlines, since it is easy to get into - but like Valence says, it isn't exactly a spotlight for balancing since it all seems to be Crystalline Conflict based, also the skill gap between roulette queuers and regular PvPers is a bit wide which often leads to a few key players being able to heavily influence the outcome of games. I think things may be better if the entry skill level was improved a bit by guiding players through something like the halls of novice but specifically for PvP where they can learn how to use Crowd Controls, potions and the general way PvP's battle foundations work since it mostly seems to be a 'keep dying over and over' until it clicks. Of course, such a wish would require investment from SE and I'm a bit doubtful they would be willing to go that far for frontlines at the moment...

Regarding PrEmAdEs:
Bravery needs a nerf. You shouldn't be able to cast it on other players.
Gunbbreaker, viper etc stacking is working because of bravery.

On the other hand, i've said it before - we need more premades, to be able to have good "balanced" games... Rather than 1 team dominating the queue.
Saying that - SE sometimes, hilariously, puts all the good players in 1 alliance and it's a stomp fest...

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Originally Posted by HeliosDemi

Your chance of winning IS NOT 33% if you aren't good.

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This to me does not sound like a flaw at all, its how it should be. Skill needs to be rewarded.

Other than that, premades are an issue, but thats not the fault of the game. There have been many pvp games that suffered from friends going to a single side and dominating a server. Nearly any pvp game with a high player count in a match in it can suffer from this. Any shooter, rts, or basicly any game that allows people to team up suffers here.

The real problem is that premades arent compensated for in any way. There is absolutely no skill matching going on that tries to compensate. You first of all do need 3 equaly skilled groups of premades in order to be able to get a fair battle, or its going to cause a severe imbalance. Individuals rarely have this problem since they are randomly assigned, and then it realy comes down to how quickly they can organize themselves as a team, which is just a direct skill measurement again.

It just dumps each premade in a separate team, but the strongest one is still having equal allies. Which does give them a significant advantages as they have on average 3 good players more than the rest.

Now inventing a complete ELO system might be a bit excessive for this. But measuring performance acros the last 4 months in winrates can be used here. If the group of 4 has all high winrates, they can decide to force 3 lower winrates into their team, and after that randomly assign the remainders to a team. Can it negatively impact it for them, probably... but if they are that dedicated to winning, they should be focussing on CC for that instead.

Well to be fair... you can put the 'entry' level pvp thing entirely away, there IS no entry level PvP in any game at all unless you add a ranking system to front lines... entry level content is PvE based because you can adjust the NPC enemies to whatever, when you get to player vs player in any shape and form, you reach an entire different level.

There is no entry level PvP about front lines nor CC.. or any other PvP mode.... experience and learning curve the much harder way and with front line there is one rule over them all, split out group in all directions and you will get served from both of the other teams on two front lines being heavy outnumbered... second... if you encounter the flank king scenario... take a sharp look at the DRK's they go more to the the sides being alone... take advantage of that and you will see some funny things as it will fall apart.

EDIT:
There is no chance of winning, unless you put in an effort, in PvP only first place matters... and anyone who has played their favorite PvP job and keeping on doing such, will become quite good at it, there IS no meta.

EDIT 2:
You can queue in as the Job you want experience on, and switch to your favorite job inside, you will get experience for the job you queued in as in Front Lines.

its a meme gamemobe, super rng, just have fun. I don't wanna say things bad about the dev, the the dev is the god you hear me? I love the dev, I love you, please don't ban me again.

I mostly run solo queue. In 259 matches this patch I have won 117 (45.17%), gotten second 80 times (30.89%) and third 62 times (23.94%). Yes, some times I get the team of rouletters and we get smoked. But if you are a good player you should be able to influence close games and have a win rate above 33%, even as a solo queue player.

Premades aren't unstoppable if your team is willing to try. Mark the dark knight commander. Mark the dancer. Tell your team to watch out for them and to purify (guard is useless when that dancer is about to LB) and run away when the they see the DRK diving in. Recognize who the GNB that just wants to damage pad is. Wait for their defensive buffs to be a second away from ending and stun lock them. I've seen a GNB do 3mil+ damage one game, I marked them the next game and kept them to a max of BH2 because I kept CCing them over and over as their buffs dropped off.

Play the map and make correct callouts. Its easy to make a giant comeback on onsal or to make a comeback on shatter because the premade ignores ice completely and only wants to kill. Pay attention to what nodes spawn on onsal or seal rock. Sometimes its better to attack the team in second or third place at the end of games on onsal and seal rock because you can see they are about to get an S rank node for free. Near the end of a game on shatter you have to be willing to pinch through an enemy team's spawn on shatter (or jump from the cliff) if it prevents them from winning with big ice (do not just job with the other team at the normal entrance to their ice, this lets them break the big ice for free).

Again, some games will simply be unwinnable because your team is all rouletters and are just that bad. But most games will be relatively close and you can help influence those outcomes by playing well.

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Originally Posted by jesseleewelch

I play on aether, where premades are not the problem, stupidity is.

I have seen teams ignore callouts, lose because of it, and equate callouts with spam.
I have seen peeps ignore pinch warnings, drop 100 points in mass death in 10 seconds, then lose the match by less than 50 points in the end.
I have seen teams full of BH5 lose because they weren't paying attention and focused the wrong team.
I have seen people go all in against the 3rd place team over a B rank node whilst giving the lead team an S rank unchallenged.

But the worst is when teams not only blow it, they attempt to argue or talk back.

I could write multiple, lengthy posts about this, but the bottom line is that the stupidity problem is WAY bigger than the premade problem.

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That's not stupidity. Personally I am routinely guilty of all of these, and the reason is I simply cannot care at all about the outcome of a battle in a game mode that has never brought me even one second of fun (when I do it it's just because I need the exp or tomestones)

I don't like zerging, and frontline is all about zerging.
I don't like slippery slope game mechanics, hello battle high
I don't like that initiative is always punished. Stray from the zerg = die. More enemies around than friendlies = die. People spreading all over the place = there is nothing you can don to influence anything.

You have zero personal agency in frontline, and I hate that. (Compare with wow where in most BGs a single rogue can often turn a BG around by sneaking away to cap something poorly defended)

It's a bad game mode, built on top of a bad PvP combat design, built on top of awful netcode. It's bad all the way down. I absolutely don't care about the score, other than "is this thing over soon"

We need more players in CC, which arguable doesn't suffer from most of those problems?

If you don't like the mode, just don't queue for it. Life is too short.

I dont much like secure and shatter, so i dont queue on their days usually
but onsal and seal rock? wont miss them if i can help it.
yeah i agree seal rock is stupidly asymetrical map. when they give it shatter treatment, maybe, i shall miss it.

Low key misunderstanding of the game mechanics.

1) I see so many people fighting on the point on seal rock/onsal, but those modes are kind of like territory defense, and best positions for attack are usually not on the point. I think a lot of people just don't know the map well enough to set up decent attacks and deny territory to the enemy.
If you can control most of the map -> you increase chances that the point spawns in your territory. This makes mid an insanely important point because you can pinch from it into any direction and holding it is critical. Sadly most rouletters shout "mid is a trap" and completely ignore it at the start. In 95% it shouldn't be ignored due to positional advantage.

2) Point gain per kill in comparison to the overall score.
Seal rock 5/700=0.7%
Onsal 8/1400=0.6%
Shatter 8/1600=0.5%
Secure 10/2400=0.4%

You can kind of see that maps with more RNG have higher proportion of the score attributed to kills. Which means you can basically farm the team that was "lucky" to get the S rank in their base and happen to be in the lead through RNG.
Seal rock is larger map so more difficult to adequately control the map - makes sense there is more points from kills, whilst Onsal is very fast and you can travel across the map with relative ease.

So basically asymmetry is countered with higher % from kills.

Fl is like a unbalanced messy fun gamemode. If you try to just enjoy the fight, you will have fun. If you try to play to win, you will drive yourself crazy. Because the game mode is super unbalance super rng. Sometimes you just have zero capture point on your side the entire game. Sometimes you get double team hitting you just cause they have beef with your teammate, when that happened you lost 100%. It is fun to lose yourself in a large scale battle. (also I love the dev, the dev is god plz don't ban me again, As you can see im like super friendly right now, whoever reading this I love you, pvp 10 out of 10)

I stated before and I will state again... there is no easy to go learning curve in PvP, if you want to be good at it and your favorite job ( that does not mean meta ) then you need to dig into it, there is no freebees in PvP... if your first time you will meet people that has been at it for years and that is how it is, suck it up and learn from it... a bard can murder any job if in need be, but so can a blm... or mnk or whatever job in this game.

Just stop yourself... if you want learning curves you need to join the PvE game, where it is possible to script like that, you can't script another players behavior.

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Originally Posted by YumieYumiki

That's not stupidity. Personally I am routinely guilty of all of these, and the reason is I simply cannot care at all about the outcome of a battle in a game mode that has never brought me even one second of fun (when I do it it's just because I need the exp or tomestones)

I don't like zerging, and frontline is all about zerging.
I don't like slippery slope game mechanics, hello battle high
I don't like that initiative is always punished. Stray from the zerg = die. More enemies around than friendlies = die. People spreading all over the place = there is nothing you can don to influence anything.

You have zero personal agency in frontline, and I hate that. (Compare with wow where in most BGs a single rogue can often turn a BG around by sneaking away to cap something poorly defended)

It's a bad game mode, built on top of a bad PvP combat design, built on top of awful netcode. It's bad all the way down. I absolutely don't care about the score, other than "is this thing over soon"

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Sounds like you're part of the problem i was talking about...

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Originally Posted by Aidorouge

Didn't they start letting premades into Crystalline Conflict though? Because that would just make me treat the mode as no better than Frontlines.

Actually, wait no, CC would be worst because at least FL has a roulette bonus to soothe the ache after its over.

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I haven't played a lot of casual since the addition. But unlike for FL, CC has a matchmaking system in place. We can criticize it for a lot of things and I don't know how well it holds with duos, but there is one that supposedly should alleviate issues?

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Originally Posted by Aidorouge

Matchmaking? I wasn't aware of that. How does it work exactly?

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SE never communicated on it so people can only speculate, especially when it comes to casual, but it would seem that the matchmaking tries to keep your winrate always around 50% in casual games.

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Originally Posted by HeliosDemi

Hello, this is (hopefully) the only post I make here, but I feel something in particular needs more attention than Sqex has been giving it for years now. Irritatingly, the character limit is 3000 & this whole thing was originally 8000 so I'll be more brief;

Frontlines is supposed to be entry-level PvP instance that players of any skill level can blablabla random gibberish

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The title was bad rage bait troll quality already, but the content follows suit lol. Entry pvp game mode ? Full of premades ?

Truly you have no clue what you're talking about, this is just random gibberish.

I can tell you loud and clear already: skill issue. I can tell apart the solo GNBs and PLDs that look like they're in premades but they're not. They're just extremely efficient and know the pacing of the mode perfectly.

As a whole, Frontlines is extremely chill, and I'm 100% a solo player (sometimes my brother will join me). You can neutralize top performers easily too.

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Originally Posted by NevaehQuest

Fl is like a unbalanced messy fun gamemode. If you try to just enjoy the fight, you will have fun. If you try to play to win, you will drive yourself crazy. Because the game mode is super unbalance super rng. Sometimes you just have zero capture point on your side the entire game. Sometimes you get double team hitting you just cause they have beef with your teammate, when that happened you lost 100%. It is fun to lose yourself in a large scale battle. (also I love the dev, the dev is god plz don't ban me again, As you can see im like super friendly right now, whoever reading this I love you, pvp 10 out of 10)

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This has nothing to do with the game mode.
NA and EU players tend to approach every Frontline mode as Onsal Hakair
They are moving together as a massive horde and overwhelming the opposition.
That’s the main reason you believe Frontline is vulnerable to RNG.

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Originally Posted by echo78

Premades aren't unstoppable if your team is willing to try.

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Hard to beat when two teams of premades are working together to farm the non-premade team without touching each other until all 48 have BH5.

To add insult to injury, if you say something your own team attacks you with "play better". At that point, you're not playing PvP, you're just feeding the other teams.

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Originally Posted by theunhappypotato

how dare people in my mmo pvp play together and coordinate

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If you don't want anything to get better and for PVP to continue being a meme, please keep spreading this mentality.

I feel like the PVP is bad stems from the person being bad or just realizing people who play pvp sometimes dont care..... Look im sorry but idk i have over 130+ victories in first place and i cant get behind people going pvp is bad....that sounds like skill issues or you dont know how to coordinate with your groups. People need to learn to keep map open, how to focus people, and how to pick fights and retreat from them and coordination is important.

There's coordination and then there's coordination.

Frontline absolutely does - and should - reward being cohesive and coordinating as a team. Generally whoever does the best at that wins. But there's a level of coordination you can reasonably expect people who were randomly assigned together to pull off, and occasionally you see the type of coordination that's clearly implausible without having a prearranged group setting it up in advance and communicating through methods outside the game. The matches where one team repeatedly rips through crowds using a precisely timed sequence of actions executed by an extremely specific combination of jobs. The matches where two teams sit around at the third team's camp to farm battle high for the first half of the match.

I'm sure that this level of play is fun and rewarding to pull off, and I'd even argue that there should be a place for people to do this. The problem is with the range of players involved in a match like that. Having a premade, ultra-coordinated team go up against a bunch of people who are just running their roulettes produces results that are so lopsided that it leaves a bad taste in people's mouths.

I'm not sure what the solution is for this. The best idea I've thought of would be to split out the queue like they do with CC, where the "normal" queue can't be joined by premade parties and there's a separate "teams" queue that can be. I know there are pros and cons to that - the regular FL queue would likely take longer to fill and it might be hard to find enough people for the teams mode.