Frontlines: Leechers and Feeders

[Menriq]

You're still correlating gearing up with effort and participation in a duty. Even if a player is too lazy to upgrade their artifact gear with dungeon/tome gear, if they are still doing their dps rotation and making an attempt to respect the mechanics in a fight, then they are doing their job and it doesn't matter if its artifact gear because they are still making an honest effort to participate inside the duty. Not to mention the fights were designed by SE to be cleared with said item level which the artifact gear has +5 item levels on.

Also, someone with upgraded/tome gear can do jack all in a fight, so all that "effort" they put into gearing up means literally squat if they make zero effort in the duty.

So again, it boils down to subjectivity. This is the crux of the issue. You feel they are not putting effort in and should not be rewarded. Someone might think you coming in with improper gear is not putting effort in. In both cases, there are no objective thresholds that determine a standard.

Now, if this were ranked CC, or if they ever implemented ranked FL, then I would absolutely agree with you that the performance is extremely poor and they should stick to casual mode until they get better experienced. However, since this is FL, there is nothing you can really do about it. I would be all for what has been mentioned before about having MMR that would pit people of equal skill together, but just like a duty in PvE, you get what you get in a queued environment.

Weird thing about PvE content, if I chose barely participate by only pressing a single dps skill on my keyboard, decide not to heal the tank, not use my mitigations as a tank, or repeatedly die to the same avoidable mechanics. High chance I'm not clearing the content and won't receive any rewards because I refused to participate and a hindrance to my party.

Only reason its a high chance and not a 100% chance because too many people keep making excuses and refuse to hold anyone accountable for when players are purposely making no effort and are griefing the party.

This is the thing. People are carried in PvE casual content all the time doing exactly what you said. You have DPS not doing AoE on trash packs, healers either spamming cure 1 or doing no damage, and tanks not doing mitigation all the time. The content is still cleared.

I highlighted the bold part because this is 100% on SE. They have made so many people afraid to say anything with their ToS, and you can be reported for the smallest slight, so people just don't say anything. There have been many examples of people trying to hold others accountable and getting account actions. Absent of that, I think you would have more people calling people out for their play, both in PvE and PvP. I can't tell you how many times in PvP you have the group focusing on the team not in 1st and just want to call people out, but can't.