Frontlines: Leechers and Feeders

[Mawlzy]

Rival Wings is the 1v1 style of content they should be focusing on expanding. Frontlines if you asked me is a lost cause for as long as the casuals have zero incentives to put effort into their games.

Battlegrounds is frequently compared to Frontlines, but its more similar to Rival Wings. It forces teams to split into offensive, and defensive roles. The only reason Rival Wings stays dead is there is no rewards for queuing into it. It's missing 2 key elements. #1, Incentive to play it, #2, Incentive to perform well so people don't throw matches for quicker rewards. This goes for pretty much any PvP mode, on any game ever. Fortunately there are many competitors who have trialed and errored many ideas, and when in doubt SE can just simply draw inspiration from them, in the rare occasion they've decided to invest money into adding replayable content to their game.

You can add thresholds to give extra rewards to the top 5 performers on either teams, or you can just reduce the rewards for people who are obviously playing lethargically and didn't press more than 5 of their spells in one match.

So you add rewards, queues pop, and the tiny minority who actually enjoy the mode get massively frustrated by those just there for the rewards. Except it'd be worse than FL because RW is complex, convoluted and... to me just not very good.

Ultimately for a successful PvP mode within 14 which is not played primarily for rewards, you need something genuinely engaging. And as you've pointed out previously, a tutorial that provides sufficient info that players know what they're doing.

[Archeron]

So you add rewards, queues pop, and the tiny minority who actually enjoy the mode get massively frustrated by those just there for the rewards. Except it'd be worse than FL because RW is complex, convoluted and... to me just not very good.

Ultimately for a successful PvP mode within 14 which is not played primarily for rewards, you need something genuinely engaging. As as you've pointed out previously, a tutorial that provides sufficient info that players know what they're doing.

A tutorial is literally a BASELINE expectation that should literally be in every game, and that there isn't one in FF is a prime example of bad game design. You say that Rival Wings is complex, and convuluted. Well you know what, thats because it is. Lets fix that. Say good bye to the mechs, the CE, the bases. Implement something else with the same team sizes. Capture the Flag, Capture/Hold Bases, King of the Hill. Simple objectives, self explanatory what needs to happen. Back it up with a proper reward structure, and I guarantee you Frontlines will die over night. Keep it simple, and keep it fun, and keep the jobs somewhat balanced. Thats all it takes for PvP to thrive. If the majority of players want to suck and get a free prize for doing nothing, they can keep it to Frontlines. The rest of us prefer having engaging, rewarding, and replayable content to engage with.

So long as the community on NA isn't incentivized to put effort in, they will continue to be farmed by (Insert current meta here). Because even with a tutorial it only helps new players, who aren't the majority except on Dynamis (Where Frontline doesn't pop very frequently anyway) these lethargic players do not care about winning or losing. They care about making it to the end of the match even if their team has to carry their dead weight for them. Set a bar, with an abritrary minimal expectation of what a single player should contribute. Those who fall below it should not recieve a full reward. Win, Lose, or 2nd place.

A problem I have is that NA is primarily a reward driven community. You can have engaging content, that is totally dead because there is no reason to participate in it. You can see exactly which modes are popping off, and what quality of matches can be expected if they do pop with a simple check.

Rival Wings; No Rewards, No performance incentive. Result; Completely dead, except w/ Mogtome events giving an incentive over other modes.
Frontlines; Adequate Rewards, No performance Incentive. Result; Queues pop, matches are full of weak gameplay.
CC: Adequate Rewards, Performance Incentive. Result; Queues Pop, matches are often competitive and close.
Ranked CC: Inadequate rewards, Performance Incentive. Result; Queues don't pop, Matches are competitive, but not enough people willing to farm a weak reward.

[Loggos]

Capture the Flag, Capture/Hold Bases, King of the Hill. Simple objectives, self explanatory what needs to happen.

I know you are talking about RW-sized groups but on that note I'd also love to have small scale objective-based pvp modes other than CC. Capture the flag, hold the base or king of the hill but with 5-8 people.