Frontlines sucks Ultra megathread

[AriannaStormwake]

well to me lowscore third is not so fun id rather leave wait out the debuff do something else until it expires and try again
just not fond of third place thats all
those with lowscore third place in particular

[Infindox]

well to me lowscore third is not so fun id rather leave wait out the debuff do something else until it expires and try again
just not fond of third place thats all
those with lowscore third place in particular

I do not understand this mentality and why I don't understand when people leave.
If your team is losing that badly you cannot make a comeback, the match will probably be over soon. You can then just requeue for another one.
Being low score third also doesn't mean you're done for immediately. Had a match that we were, someone went "alright not good at leading but we gotta try", and we ended up winning.
For the people that do this to inflate their win ratio... Anyone with a win ratio higher then 40% isn't to be trusted, tbh. You're meant to have a 33% 3 way split on average.

[Mawlzy]

I do not understand this mentality and why I don't understand when people leave.
If your team is losing that badly you cannot make a comeback, the match will probably be over soon. You can then just requeue for another one.
Being low score third also doesn't mean you're done for immediately. Had a match that we were, someone went "alright not good at leading but we gotta try", and we ended up winning.
For the people that do this to inflate their win ratio... Anyone with a win ratio higher then 40% isn't to be trusted, tbh. You're meant to have a 33% 3 way split on average.

That doesn't boost the win% quoted on your PvP profile. The 1st/2nd/3rd %s are all based on number of times finished in each place divided by the total number of matches entered. Thus if you have connection issues or, like me leave immediately I find myself on the same team as an overbearing commander, you'll find the three percentages for each place will sum to less than 100%. Thus leaving a match lowers your win% as reported in your profile.

It would be an effective method of boosting the raw totals of 1st, 2nd and 3rd, but I suspect anyone who cares enough about stats like that simply forms a premade.

[BoneAppleTea]

Skimming the thread has been a little relieving to see some are having common issues with frontlines. In particular salted earth...
Admittedly I'm still pretty new to FF14 PvP, but feels like the design of Dark Knights heavily impacts the game mode way more than it should. I'm having a fun time, overall though.

Regardless I guess it can't heard to dump my own thoughts too so far...

Generally feels like some things in front lines and pvp overall could use some adjusting. Salted earth on its own and as a concept isn't too bad, it's quite similar to what I remember dealing with in some other MMOs like Warhammer's Choppa/Slayer. However I feel like if DRKs can do a draw in AoE action, they

1. shouldn't be able to do it with so little to no risk(their LB in particular)
2. the radius should be trimmed down since they can leap to a target(I think it's silly that you can be yanked back in after a repel shot/leap back)

Although I started off as a BLM and main as Pictomancer, I've been queuing more as bard in FL because the silence/bind helps A LOT when/if it works. That unfortunately isn't always reliable and can be pretty difficult if the team has more than one DRK or uses their LB. Almost feel obligated to do it now since that feels like the best way to generally have a better experience solo.I can't catch them all, but it helps...

One thing I did notice is that there also isn't much of a form of diminishing returns/immunity after being having an affect placed on you. Sometimes it's just wild to me how many times I've been yanked around and I'm unsure if its the server being weird or that there just is no cap or diminishing of CC actions. Highest I've counted so far is 5 times(DRK leaped at me, I repel shot out of their salted earth and got SEed several times by other DRKs in the team).

I don't take FL very seriously and enjoy the chaos of the mode, but it'd be nice to have some things looked into.

[AriannaStormwake]

I do not understand this mentality and why I don't understand when people leave.
If your team is losing that badly you cannot make a comeback, the match will probably be over soon. You can then just requeue for another one.
Being low score third also doesn't mean you're done for immediately. Had a match that we were, someone went "alright not good at leading but we gotta try", and we ended up winning.
For the people that do this to inflate their win ratio... Anyone with a win ratio higher then 40% isn't to be trusted, tbh. You're meant to have a 33% 3 way split on average.

i am not trying to argue with you about that but i will answer with one word Effort
if your team doesnt put any effort to try to win is it really worth staying until the end if you want/need the exp/tomes or otherwise?
or is it a waste of time you can use to do something else? (crafting/gathering/buying something from MB or doing fates)
its just not fun
lowscore third can happen if enemy team has premade
or people from your group overextend and push yellow when they are getting chased by red(when they tried to attack red after red got a big ice destroyed then ran away)

CC is more fun regardless of wins/losses
ok got my oppressor mount thank you to the random CC pugs for having me
and i owe a special thanks to the sch and ast in two of the games we won because of you the MVPs

[Commander_Justitia]

Why is salted earth a thing to begin with? Because you can't kill anyone anymore, without being in a group of at least 3+ people, or you would take 5-10min to kill a single player. That is the reality of passive frontline mitigation/damage adjustments and excessive healing and cc abilities for every player.
So you are forced to unleash all your few damage abilities in a single moment, to actually get a kill before people can press their healing and invulnerability buttons.

Their "hold my hands, I don't want to die and don't know how to play and make constant mistakes" emergency buttons, no matter how much you were caught off guard, no matter how skilled your opponent was, high chance you get out alive anyway with them. Unless there are too many opponents at once.

I think going away from the trinity roles tank-healer-damagedealer was a mistake. Why was that done? To improve queue times for the arena mode - Crystal Conflict, as previous The Feast iteration had very slow queue times during some periods. Did frontline have slow queue times? No, not really.
Which makes it clear, you will need a more complex system.
You can't make changes for Crystal Conflict that are good for frontline and vice versa.

What can be done? Customization. Make a tab for frontline skills loadout and another for the arena mode. PvP has dozens of skills that are unused and removed now, bring some back.

Reduce self heal for frontline, it is too much, make it 2-3 charges instead, or give it a regen effect. Make sprint cost 500 MP per tick. Make purify resist draw in effects.
Give tanks aoe mitigation and utility in frontline that are on a higher cooldown. Like Paladins Limit Break 33% mitigation buff would be great if it could be used without using Limit Break. Like so many other skills that have double or triple effects. You want to bind someone as redmage? Well, you gotta use one of your highest hitting damage ability for that. It makes no sense.
You are on samurai and need a defensive ability, great, let us use Chiten - but oh wait, it inflicts a vulnerability debuff of massive 25% on your enemy, so it is actually an offensive skill, one that is very important for when you need to burst. Well, you can't now, be useless instead.

It is a hot mess of numbers floating around that can't really be used smartly. Let us play smart...

Stop being afraid of your playerbase being too newbie to click 2-3 more skills, while you bring out PvE content or casual minigames that are way more difficult to play than PvP in its current iteration.

Also add something like teleport tickets or dyes for wolfmarks. Consumables. Or let me buy Timeworn Artifacts for the lvl80 relic for 1000 Crystal Trophys, because that step is still cancer.(We used to be able to grind relic light in frontline, so it wouldn't be a new concept)
Or let us invest trophy crystal to upgrade the abandoned PvP rank further past 50, enabling you to buy past series rewards or PvP themed mounts. So you reach rank 75 or 100, you get a PvP wolf mount or some commander general glam or even skills or traits for those ranks. Or even a special icon next to your name indicating your rank tier. You can even create a matchmaking system depending on peoples tier then.
Frontline is not competitive after all. It doesn't have a ranked mode. It can be allowed to be more creative. If you ONLY would split it from the arena mode of PvP in this game.

[Apowowo]

Even better, just make a "Ranked" Frontlines so we can see how many of the premades and cheaters chicken out and avoid it because none of them ever actually wanted competition, lol.
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That wouldn't improve the experience, it would just kill the mode entirely because barely anyone would show up that wasn't a premade or cheater, and as mentioned, they *loathe* being forced to fight each other because they want stomps, not competition.
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I... don't know how or where you get the idea everyone would avoid fighting against each others? There are nights where every regulars and even with people who aren't in pvp discords all queue together to be against each others and/or play together. If anything, everyone is pretty helpful and give advice to each others after a game if someone has questions. (On top of the mandatory shitposts and beating the shit out of each others, but hey, that's part the fun )
And you'd be surprised by the amount of regulars who also solo queue... (but hey, blaming premade man is easier...)
I'm very curious on where you got that from lol so please, provide some infos on what made you think that.

As for a ranked mode, this is probably one of the worst idea in that thread yet; Not because people will "chicken" out like you said, but because it would never really pop. It's already extremely hard for someone below diamond who wants to climb up the ranks in CC (mind you, a 5v5 mode) after a few weeks because everybody got their crystal ranks and never touch it till they get the reward. OR, get in a proper CC team and actually scrims and do proper competitions.
And it's the same on every DC.
So if a 5v5 ranked mode is more than painful to pop, what about a 72 players mode? No, that will not work.

The irony is that I used to be one of those who tried, but the premades turned me into a 1-spammer starring at my shoes because they made it loud and clear that I was not allowed to play, with or against them, and I can no longer take my own wins or kills seriously because I can not prove I earned any of them now, that I wasn't just being spoon-fed the whole time I thought I was contributing. I'd rather not being spending the match meandering waiting for the unavoidable outcome now, but they haven't given me any other choice when they insist I'm not allowed to be a participant and anything I do or don't do is irrelevant in their grand scheme, so they're not allowed to come back around and complain when their own actions just create more and more trynots, whether they're disillusioned former players or new players who were warned in advance that trying was optional when there's a premade or outright cheaters in your pocket.
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????????????????????????????????????????????????

All I can say to that is: what the fuck are you on about

[Mawlzy]

As for a ranked mode, this is probably one of the worst idea in that thread yet; Not because people will "chicken" out like you said, but because it would never really pop. It's already extremely hard for someone below diamond who wants to climb up the ranks in CC (mind you, a 5v5 mode) after a few weeks because everybody got their crystal ranks and never touch it till they get the reward. OR, get in a proper CC team and actually scrims and do proper competitions.
And it's the same on every DC.
So if a 5v5 ranked mode is more than painful to pop, what about a 72 players mode? No, that will not work.

Isn't that more a reflection of the dumb way CC assigns rewards, and the fact so much of the playerbase is rewards-driven rather than engaging in content because it's enjoyable? It could be fixed simply by introducing rank decay if players stop playing in a season, but honestly de-emphasizing rewards in general strikes me as a better approach, particularly if the goal is to encourage players who actually enjoy PvP to make up the bulk of the playerbase.

An MMR leading to a three-tier system as I've suggested would act similarly to a ranked mode from a competitive point of view, at least in the sense committed players would be striving to be in the top tier. On Aether queues would pop just fine, but if that is a concern, reduce team size which would solve other problems too. (Or wait for full-region queues - surely they're coming?)

I don't know why more premade members aren't getting behind the MMR suggestion, since it must be preferable to them getting banned? Moreover it gives them what they claim to want. The top tier in which they'd find themselves would produce those high-quality matches they crave.

[Apowowo]

Isn't that more a reflection of the dumb way CC assigns rewards, and the fact so much of the playerbase is rewards-driven rather than engaging in content because it's enjoyable? It could be fixed simply by introducing rank decay if players stop playing in a season, but honestly de-emphasizing rewards in general strikes me as a better approach, particularly if the goal is to encourage players who actually enjoy PvP to make up the bulk of the playerbase.

An MMR leading to a three-tier system as I've suggested would act similarly to a ranked mode from a competitive point of view, at least in the sense committed players would be striving to be in the top tier. On Aether queues would pop just fine, but if that is a concern, reduce team size which would solve other problems too. (Or wait for full-region queues - surely they're coming?)

I don't know why more premade members aren't getting behind the MMR suggestion, since it must be preferable to them getting banned? Moreover it gives them what they claim to want. The top tier in which they'd find themselves would produce those high-quality matches they crave.

Adding some rank decay could be a solution for CC, yes, so long it doesn't take only one match to reset the decay timer.

As for the MMR, I don't think you realize how complex implementing a fair elo system is. And beyond that, for the small percentage of people actually doing frontlines and pvp in NA and EU dc (since it's vastly more popular in JP for example), the system will just ignore the rating (looking at you Mahjong. I wouldn't be able to tell you how many times the games matched up with sprouts or people who aren't really playing it and the match ended up with a 2139 rating, 2019 rating and two non rated players). Not only that, but do you not think that will create EVEN more arguments?
I'm going to ask you, how would you come up with an elo system then? Taking 72 players into consideration, eventual placement matches.

And again, why implement a system that will inevitably fail when we can gather a huge number of people in a server's wolf's den and all queue up together for some fun games.

[Mawlzy]

Adding some rank decay could be a solution for CC, yes, so long it doesn't take only one match to reset the decay timer.

As for the MMR, I don't think you realize how complex implementing a fair elo system is. And beyond that, for the small percentage of people actually doing frontlines and pvp in NA and EU dc (since it's vastly more popular in JP for example), the system will just ignore the rating (looking at you Mahjong. I wouldn't be able to tell you how many times the games matched up with sprouts or people who aren't really playing it and the match ended up with a 2139 rating, 2019 rating and two non rated players). Not only that, but do you not think that will create EVEN more arguments?
I'm going to ask you, how would you come up with an elo system then? Taking 72 players into consideration, eventual placement matches.

And again, why implement a system that will inevitably fail when we can gather a huge number of people in a server's wolf's den and all queue up together for some fun games.

Well there you go again making assumptions about what I "realize."

I am not suggesting an Elo system. I do in fact realize that such systems are incredibly hard to implement for multiplayer games. This is why I suggested something much cruder, as you would have "realized" had you bothered to read my posts. Base the three tiers on our win-rates.

It is not intended as a granular ranking. It is intended to solve a problem.

The only form of Q-syncing that does not disrupt the mode for everyone else for these "fun games" is to use an off-DC language filter. Not filtering is griefing (at least for these ghastly "let's all play WAR" events) and should lead to a suspension. The better solution is to have custom matches, which in addition to indulging groups like the Princesses, would allow playtesting of strategies and other "fun" experiments that are currently impossible.

In an attempt to preempt any additional misconceptions of what I do or do not realize on your part, I do realize that the convergence speed of win-rate to a player's intrinsic performance level, along with migration of that win-rate assuming an alteration in that performance level, is anti-correlated with the number of players in each team.