Frontlines: Leechers and Feeders

[Mawlzy]

I would not even be questioning this at all only if this was used in a smaller setting like the 8v8v8 that was snatched away. Right now you're lucky if you can even get 2 games going at once. Doesn't help that there are chances that you can join an uncompleted game (depending on settings). Also, how would you rate those that only chooses to regularly play once a day? There's not exactly much information you can go off on about playstyle and other things...

All fair points. It's not a perfect solution by any means. And I agree smaller team size would help a lot, for this and many other reasons. I also tend to forget that not all DCs enjoy the rapid queue times of Aether, which is one reason I'm hopeful full region queues are implemented at some point.

[AllenThyl]

1.) You would have to rework how penalties operate. If you get banned from PvP you can't do majority, if not all things PvE instanced.

Frankly, I see no issues even outright banning people from the whole game for their lethargy in PvP. You don't get to make disparaging comments and troll people in PvE content, or in general chat. I don't see why the same restrictions and penalties should not apply to PvP. If people can't be bothered to engage in the duty they queue for, what's the point of having them in any other type of content? In fact, this is what irks me so much about the "just here for xp" crowd. What do they even need the xp for? To afk in Limsa? They aren't interested in applying themselves in the completely optional PvP, what's the point of having access to other activities gated by high level? Savage raiding? I doubt the same kind of people that are completely fine with just trolling in PvP have what it takes to actually do savage.

[Archeron]

I don't think the problem with leeches, or even dead weight players is exclusive to Frontlines. These people are in Savage, EX, all the other PvE roulettes. Being dead weight, and wanting to be carried through content without putting in the effort. They've no interest in improving themselves, I don't lump sprouts in with said Dead weight. I wish it were easier to just kick these defeatist losers out on grounds of deliberate griefing, but unfortunately you have to convince a team full of these people to do it.

[AllenThyl]

Oi... the current and ever growing lethargy is a symptom of how Frontlines is dictated by a self-chosen few who believe everyone else is just a captive audience who gets to watch them play.

What are you even trying to argue? This thread is about people who actively queue for a competitive, objective based war game (3 teams a 24 players), and then either feed the enemy team (against ToS) or basically don't do anything except move from time to time to circumvent the auto-afk kick mechanism present (also against ToS). No one is forced to queue for Frontline. Absolutely no one. If someone does not enjoy participating in a competitive, objective based war game, they simply should not queue for it. The whole point of a game, any game (video, board, social, sports), is to engage withing the rules of the game itself.

When I wrote that the enabler community is a plague upon this game, posts like yours were exactly what I meant. You have some weird obsession with premade groups, thinking that somehow 4 random people who queue together have discovered some arcane secret of the game that enables them to dominate 40 other players. They don't. The reason they dominate is because these other 40 players are absolutely terrible at the game they are queueing for. The DRK meta has now been alive for nearly 2 years, and despite there being effective counter strategies, the community by and large knows none of them, cares for none of them, and doesn't want to improve their game in any way anyway. That's not a reasonable way to go about a game, that's just video game addiction. And your pointless contrarianism only reflects back on you.

But that behavior is very much representative of the community at large. Even obvious feeders and afkers are simply ignored, often protected from vote kick due to laziness and a false sense of tolerance / inclusion, but point the griefers out in chat or demand they should be kicked for their antisocial and toxic (yes, it's toxic) behavior, and suddenly all these previously unenthusiastic people rediscover their inner Spanish Inquisition and will spent a ridiculous amount of time to type the most inane garbage to excuse behavior literally prohibited by the ToS everyone agreed to. If the community would spent even half of that zeal on actually playing the game (that they spent unhealthy amounts of both time and money on) and improving themselves, hell, Frontline might not even be in that sorry state in the first place.

[Genz]

I don't trust the devs much for imposing expectations on players, but they really needs to do something (as it's been said, it's slowly plaguing PvE too)

Even Ocean Fishing requires 1200 pts during the mogtome events, to get the mogtomes (nothing outstanding, but at least it requires the player to push buttons for a couple of minutes)

For Frontline, it should expect players to deal 100-200k damage (~10k per minute), and not get killed 7-8+ times... Again, nothing incredible, just pushing buttons and have some basic survival instinct.

(another "solution" would be to just delete the roulette, or lower drastically the rewards, so the leeches aren't interested any more. It would be fine by me. Anything to keep them away...)

[Mawlzy]

I don't trust the devs much for imposing expectations on players, but they really needs to do something (as it's been said, it's slowly plaguing PvE too)

Even Ocean Fishing requires 1200 pts during the mogtome events, to get the mogtomes (nothing outstanding, but at least it requires the player to push buttons for a couple of minutes)

For Frontline, it should expect players to deal 100-200k damage (~10k per minute), and not get killed 7-8+ times... Again, nothing incredible, just pushing buttons and have some basic survival instinct.

(another "solution" would be to just delete the roulette, or lower drastically the rewards, so the leeches aren't interested any more. It would be fine by me. Anything to keep them away...)

Yeah, we have this conundrum atm. I've suggested deleting the roulette or massively reducing XP, but the problem raised by others is that this would kill the mode through long queues.

I don't think this would be the case, at least not on Aether. That said:

I really like the idea of some reasonable threshold for players that you make. Avoid dying a large number of times, inflict some damage, you get the XP. The suggestion by Namazu and others of giving XP for each K/A (and possibly a subtraction of each D?) is very much in the spirit of gaming, but once one starts worrying about cross-job balancing it becomes far too complex that SQEX would consider it IMO. Plus the bulk of the players who are solo are not going to be thrilled watching meta stacks farming 10/0/115 when it's way beyond the reach of strong solo players.

Fundamentally it's just difficult to use normal gaming philosophy to motivate people who regard the mode as a miserable chore rather than enjoyable content. Providing minimum requirements as you suggest is the best idea I've heard so far.

[LibitIncarne]

I'm positive it would kill queues on Dynamis at least, given the bulk of people playing the mode are in fact doing it for the XP (while hopefully trying to learn the mode), especially with Road to 90 being a thing where even coming in 3rd with the roulette bonus is practically an instant level up, and even without the bonus, it just takes maybe... 3 matches per level? If that goes away, yeah, all the leechers would likely bail, but then at that point, the only ones showing up are the premades wanting to farm newbies, and if those newbies aren't there to gobble up...

I mean, yeah, it would make the blighters from Aether/Prima/Crystal finally leave I guess, but then it also means anyone wanting to do Frontlines on Dynamis is right back to begging in shout for people to queue (as the case often was before Dawntrail, and it rarely worked), or data center hopping to A/P/C again (which I've already been doing again anyway). So even without removing the XP bonus at all, I'm not confident Dynamis Frontlines is going to stay sustainable by the end of the year anyway.

If we had 24man frontlines back, this wouldn't be as much of a problem.
The general opinion from people who have played both is that discounting the 8man premades that ran rampant, 24man was a much more balanced experience and there was naturally more communication because each person's actions individually meant more to the game.
It also popped a hell of a lot more, especially during non-peak hours.

[Mawlzy]

If we had 24man frontlines back, this wouldn't be as much of a problem.
The general opinion from people who have played both is that discounting the 8man premades that ran rampant, 24man was a much more balanced experience and there was naturally more communication because each person's actions individually meant more to the game.
It also popped a hell of a lot more, especially during non-peak hours.

This is fundamental to any good game content. Players have to feel that what they do influences the outcome of the game. And that should include both positive and negative contributions. If you make a mistake and there is no impact on the outcome, it's an uninteresting mode. If you AFK and there is no impact on the outcome (or repercussions for you), there's something seriously wrong with the mode.

[Enjuden]

I hate them too, but how do you propose they fix it? Adjusting the rewards just screws players who join for things like tomes but still try their best. Making it easier for you to report them (though it’s important to note that they technically aren’t doing anything wrong—there’s no rule against being a feeder) sounds like something that would be ripe for abuse instead of being used for the purpose you propose.

Frankly, you just ban everyone who does less than X amount of damage from playing the mode.

Anything under 100k is an obvious leech. Under 500k you're basically trolling unless it's the crystal map or you just hard lost, where it likely still is griefing if it's the crystal map.

The mode is all about damage, and hitting over 100k is extremely braindead to do with how much aoe barf jobs have.

If they want to play so badly that they'll grief, they should just specifically lock out all pvp content from the account. They'll grief in other ways, but if they play like that in pve they'll get banned. Just the GMs do not care whatsoever about PvP, so they might as well just automate it and give out permanent content bans.

Before the 'smart' comments about how 100k is too easy, it's an arbitrary number. If it were me, it'd be 500k at minimum since it will force even the worst player to participate, but better to not tell the number.

[Gaiinahat]

Under 500k you're basically trolling unless it's the crystal map or you just hard lost, where it likely still is griefing if it's the crystal map.

I call BS. I've struggled to get over 500k damage on any class other than Scholar. I may not have been very good at PvP, but that doesn't mean I wasn't trying, or being a troll or griefing.