PVP in this game isnt fun

[Cidel]

In terms of game mode balance, SE has to alternate between catering to 5v5 CC, 24v24 RW and 24v24v24 FL. The issue is, your abilities are consistent throughout all three of them. A great example of this is AST's Macrocosmos. It's somewhat powerful in CC, but FL lets you stack jobs on a team, and combined with DRK, which can snare teams, you can get hit by 3 or 4 very coordinated Macrocosmos, which can tear teams apart. Because SE caters primarily to CC, this makes FL extremely unbalanced.

This is a very important factor. PvP is absolutely designed around their small-scale, sterile and controlled modes first and foremost; Feast and CC. There's no job-stacking or overlapping; no threat of being hit by 3+ coordinated Skyshatters or Bahamut bombs or accumulating more than 1 SCH DoT. You can never be focused on by more than 5 enemies. In Frontlines and Rival Wings, you have the potential to be mobbed by over twenty. They are clearly only interested in balance and function in CC over the largescale modes, which is reasonable, given how difficult to impossible it is to balance one mode without affecting the other outside of (what I imagine is) the logistical nightmare of creating two entirely separate skillsets.

This is also reflected in the PLD Guardian oversight where the ability made the tethered player basically uninterruptable on interactable objectives. No such system existed in CC, so it obviously either wasn't a pressing issue to the PvP person team, or they didn't immediately know how to fix it; we had to wait half a year for it to be addressed. Frontlines and Rival Wings are absolutely afterthoughts and the seemingly flippant memes about stop expecting balance in Frontlines are actually warranted.

This isn't even addressing getting "pinched" by two teams. Quite frankly, having three teams doesn't even make sense. Basically all battles in warfare are between two sides. If this is trying to make the player feel like these are wargames, they've failed miserably.

I disagree. As I've said many times, the three teams system is supposed to be the "catch-up mechanic;" expecting the two losing teams to keep any leading team in check while still looking out for their own interests. Getting pinched sucks, but in most situations they are self-inflicted and avoidable, if not at least with ways to mitigate your losses. Having a third team to keep an eye on actually adds depth and potential strategy, not to mention opportunities to create comebacks. The best shot-callers are the ones watching the movement of both enemy teams and warning them of incoming pinches well before they actually happen.

However, yes, it absolutely can happen where the third team griefs your team so hard to drag you both down, whether it be out of malice or (in most cases) ignorance. But I notice that most of the time, that is self-inflicted. Did your team "bully" them early on? Do you have a particularly dense subset of teammates constantly harassing theirs or constantly playing cat and mouse with them? Did your team have a proclivity of picking fights with them over objectives simply due to how much closer they spawn? Part of the nuance of the three-way match is smartly goading one or both enemy teams into responding a favorable way. People have a negative bias about all the times a third team worked against them, but never acknowledge when having a third team benefitted them.

The "I hate the three team system" complaint is one of those "you think you want it, but you don't," scenarios. Rival Wings are almost always 1-sided stomps, where the match is obviously decided in the first 3 minutes based just by how people handle the 1st middle skirmish, how the lanes are being pushed, and how fast mechs are spawned. You either get to be on the team getting stomped at every corner, or on the team that is basically seal-clubbing; outside of uncommon equally-matched scenarios.

RNG is very often a factor in winning, which is not fun.

The biggest RNG that actually impacts most matches is who you get on your team. Rarely is RNG objective spawning a certain way a deciding factor; there is usually a way to turn most scenarios in your favor- and sometimes it's not so straightforward. Sometimes the "right" answer is to retreat or circle-around, or even wait to see if the other two teams engage each other first. The problem is most people queueing FL just blindly run to the closest objectives- even if its tactical suicide, and cry "foul" when they inevitably get pushed out.

I keep seeing people mention some kind of Frontlines rework in Dawntrail; I'm not holding my breath that whatever it is will improve things much, let alone if it's more than more sweeping defense modifiers or LB timers.