Frontline Kinda Sucks

[ThaCa]

Biggest issue is how badly the game scales for such a large scale conflict. They had to slap massive damage reductions on people to not evaporate immediately in bigger fights, which in turn makes low count brawls drag on forever with nothing happening, which in turn leads to only somewhat viable playstyle being the deathball zerg. DRK/DRG/AST meta is direct result of only big bursty fights mattering, it used to be SMN/SCH/WHM before the damage reductions, but instead of not grouping up and getting wiped by aoe people never learned and kept doing it, they intervened.

The decision to have the system also be 3way fight is baffling, in theory being able to gang up on the leader should make the games less volatile to stuff like premades is rendered moot because 2nd and 3rd place often just end up fighting each other and ignrore the 1st team. While it introduces a level of randomness, it's absolutely horrible to play because the 3rd party will more often than not play to win and just mess with the game. Also result of the roulette giving good rewards for low or no participation.

Randomness wouldn't be so bad if the game would inform people about the next spawns way way earlier so they have time to reposition before the stuff goes active. Maybe ensuring that the spawning nodes have more even split throughout the map would also help.

Don't get me started in some of the older map shapes or past changes. Seal Rock has quite a big of spawn differences and Borderland Secure got butchered to the point where spawn protection makes main bases basically uncappable, reducing it to yoyoing around the side spawns.

Hopefully the 7.0 Remake will completely changes how the mode works, but they probably just do some small tweaks and call it a day.

[Mayhemmer]

Snip...

I don't really have much to say that isn't just basically this. This sums it up better than most breakdowns I've seen. I can only hope the devs actually dedicate to examining and tackling the whole of the issue from top to bottom, and not just continue with the status quo.

[Astralrisk]

Biggest issue is how badly the game scales for such a large scale conflict. They had to slap massive damage reductions on people to not evaporate immediately in bigger fights, which in turn makes low count brawls drag on forever with nothing happening, which in turn leads to only somewhat viable playstyle being the deathball zerg. DRK/DRG/AST meta is direct result of only big bursty fights mattering, it used to be SMN/SCH/WHM before the damage reductions, but instead of not grouping up and getting wiped by aoe people never learned and kept doing it, they intervened.

I think your entire post is really good, but I want to comment on this part since I resonate with the bit on the damage reduction aspect the most. Before the DR changes in 6.1, I thought that FL was a lot more fun since it felt my individual contribution was much more important. If I went in a small group/by myself to take a point from a small group/one person in a game of Seal Rock, I can actually conceivably do it. Which felt nice that in a team of 24 people, I as an individual could contribute if I was good enough. Now it feels like if I don't have enough people to overwhelm anyone I am fighting, I can't actually beat them. Especially if the person I am in a fight with is playing tank/melee, which does not feel fun at all. I know that FL is a big team battle mode, but I felt like there was some form of individuality that was taken away.