Role enforcement in Frontline: Would it help?

[Hyrist]

Just from a fresh perspective in frontline, it seems we have a few problems going on.

First, our queues are not doing to well, half hour queues because of lop-sided team participation.

The second is certain teams are lacking sufficent healers and tanks due to open role participation.

Can these problems resolve each other by addressing one?

If there was role enforcement in frontlines, Tanks and Healers - roles that come at a premium - could potentially become more popular in frontlines and help counter the flood of Black Mages in Slaugher due to them having much longer qeues.

And because the roles are more distributed and encouraged at that point to participate and have a way of circumventing the queue mechanic, SE could also implement "adventurer in need" bonuses for some extra Wolf Marks - which would help fill more games out.

Right now, the open enrolling seems not to help queues. Giving more locked-down roles with incentives for playing the lesser-bandwagon functions could actually help more than potentially harm here.

What are your thoughts on the matter? Could set roles and functions help Frontline?

[Xenosan]

If they don't provide a new Slaughter 72 specific map or alter System Node spawns to spread out the map, they could do this. Think the former should be the first approach.

If the former not ever happening, then I would support this next in line... 3rd option maybe an ilvl requirement...

A lot of i50 average looking for their easy tomes in my GC's datacenter T^T

edit: Thought process being: make a standard tank/healer/melee/ranged party setup actually be ideal through match mechanics before forcing it on players. But if theyre not willing to do that, then yea force it down our throats !_!

[Maxwell]

Role enfocement would ruin queue times even more. That's why it is not currently enforced. The only viable solution imo is boosting teams with sub obtimal setup. Both point gain rate, adrenaline gain rate and other buffs. Too much class stacking could also reduce point gain rate, but penalizing players for others could be annoying.

[Xenosan]

Role enfocement would ruin queue times even more...

On the contrary I'd say the largest clamp on queue times is the ZERO enthusiasm for PVP now with all the one-sideness that's pushed everyone away from it except to cap tomes.

This afternoon/evening I haven't gotten a single queue, how much is it I wonder because people capped tomes for the week and aren't interested in PVP anymore beyond that purpose.

Edit: Tank/Heal roles are my least enjoyed PvP classes, but if I could see queue status and know that by rolling Healer or Tank would get in into a match quickly, I'd eagerly switch.

[Riepah]

Normally I'm against restrictions such as these, but Frontlines currently really is in a sorry state. I'd take it a step further and split DPS into physical and magical DPS - 2 of each per group, no more, no less. The BLM spam is nasty. GC affiliation should be abolished.

[Blubbers]

I'm super against any sort of imposed role restriction at the queue level. It will make the queues worse than they already are and will kill what is left of frontlines.

They need to re-design the rule set in order to make a balanced party more desirable. This was done well in secure, although they could definitely do an even better job.

They could modify the way party buffs works, for example right now you get a VIT bonus for having 1 tank, but there's never any reason to run with 2 tanks. They could give warrirors and paladin's a separate VIT bonus each. This would encourage 1 of each tank, and if you stack 6 BLMs 2 healers, you're going to have ~400 less hp which is fairly significant. They could extend this to DRG/MNK, a double STR bonus would make having a 4 melee group of WAR, MNK, DRG, PLD start to look viable. BRD/NIN would benefit if there's one of each. Even SMN/BLM could give a double INT bonus that encourages further diversification (and this buff could obviously be tweaked and balanced as necessary, ex: maybe the BLM buff gives 1/2 the current INT buff received, so having 1 SMN + 1 BLM would result in the usualy +3% party buff).

The beauty of this is that it won't impact queue times, you can still run whatever janky party setup you want, but there is an incentive to do something more balanced.

They also definitely need to add some extra objectives to slaughter to break up the fighting a bit and encourage 8v8's. One thing they could do is when the side nodes pop at markets/manors/temple, they could make it so that there is a barrier on each side of the node. You need 5 people to stand on the panel and the barrier on your side drops, your team gains +10 points (they can increase the total points needed), and then you can proceed to attack the node. This would encourage groups to actually split for the side nodes and allow some interesting 8v8 battles. Melee would be more useful here as a group with 6 BLMs might do well up top, but wouldn't do as well against an equally skilled more balanced party.

[Buff_Archer]

Right now the one thing more than any other that the cause of the persistent imbalance is the GC alignment. For the first time, Frontlines gave us content that we could have been able to go right into without waiting on a certain distribution of classes to fill- potential that was squandered as a result of the GC requirement. Changing that restriction (rather than adding another layer of restrictions on top of it) is all it would take to do away with the one-sidedess that so many are talking about. This imbalance is something that was present all along, but teams could overcome it with strategy and skill. However, what Slaughter does is take any imbalance between teams and amplifies it by 1000x, with bonuses to power and survivability being awarded to the whichever team proves to already have the most power and survivability at the various DPS race encounters against nodes.

If you take the player base for any game, and arbitrarily segregate them into three groups, naturally the average amount of skill and dedication will not be exactly the same in each of those three groups. At the time most people made the decision what GC to join, there was no relation to PVP. And someone making the choice now as to which side they want to be on would most likely choose the stronger, more coordinated group if they care about PVP wins, even if it means waiting longer for a match... and someone who doesn't care at all about winning and just wants to quickly reap the abundance of PVE rewards as fast as possible so they can upgrade their relics to raid with and buy crafting mats can join a weaker group, and make it even weaker.

Why would a player who actually cares about succeeding at PVP mode choose to continue to queue up alongside the same group of players, and against the same opposition, in a situation where they lose match after match due to being tied to a weaker alliance. What's that quote about how the definition of idiocy is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results? Many of the people I know who played the Frontlines mode (the 72 person Secure mode that was effectively removed from the game) before and enjoyed it have quit out of disgust. What FL has become, if you're not in the dominant GC on your server, is a place for a lot of people who don't care about PVP to come get quick PVE rewards at the expense of a few people who try really hard to overcome that but can't. Here's how much they don't care in my GC, a lot of them don't even bother to commence! Whenever the counter is x players short of 24 or 72, I know that's how many players Twin Adders will be short when the match starts because maybe they didn't want to stop crafting or they preferred to chase another S-rank.

[Cidolfas86]

On the contrary I'd say the largest clamp on queue times is the ZERO enthusiasm for PVP now with all the one-sideness that's pushed everyone away from it except to cap tomes.

I hate to say it but I've nearly moved into this camp. I tried queing for Secure, but unless its during peak hours, and right after the weekly reset, you'll be waiting for 35+ mins for it to fill. The only time I do it now is for the roulette when I need it, and to complete the challenge log for rank. Once I reach max rank (Currently 41) I'll probably be doing it less than I do it now. It's a shame because I used to spend days at a time just queing for Wolves Den and Frontline, but not anymore.

I've pretty much given up on PvP in this game until I see some major changes. Slaughter is an unbalanced mess that's destroyed Frontline, and Wolves den is all but dead save for the 30 cap.

I wouldn't mind role enforcement, but with the current scheme of player separation via grand companies I don't think it'd work for certain grand companies. The immortal flames on Aether for instance wind up with 4+ tanks a lot of the time and under current system. You have to get rid of the GC restrictions for players to make this work, which is something I'd be very much for.

[Red_Wolf]

I think a conservative estimate is that Q times would double with role enforcement.

You have to get rid of the GC restrictions for players to make this work, which is something I'd be very much for.

GC restrictions have to go. I shouldn't have to keep swapping GC's to find decent Q times. Removing the restriction might help the balance of roles because now the side heavy on healers will be divided equally. Assuming the DF logic references what class the player was in when they Q'd.

[Synestra]

Many of the people I know who played the Frontlines mode (the 72 person Secure mode that was effectively removed from the game) before and enjoyed it have quit out of disgust.

Yeah alot of familiar faces from FL has disappeared shortly after Slaughter came the thing, and same kinda applies to myself aswell just capping tomes in there now and then i que only for secure or not at all because 24man secure can be kinda dull depending on your team.