Frontlines: There should not be ANY rewards for 2nd or 3rd place

[TofuLove]

I think your discussions, Archeron & Mawlzy, were both quite interesting and I sort of wanted to reply to them both.

The reward structure then needs to be changed. There needs to be more weight to winning/losing. Add a special currency or something that gives access to special rewards only for winning matches. Add incentives for people to perform. Top 5 performers on each team recieving additional rewards. People who underperform or just AFK the whole match and do less than 200k dps, or just die excessively get a reduced reward (Just give them rewards equal to third place since they contributed nothing to their teams 1st or 2nd place victory.) ect.

I spoke to a friend about this, and they suggested adding a mechanic that is similar to Khloe’s Wonders Tails, which incentivises to win, and reward is not based on the amount of wins, but is RNG and might reap rewards that aren’t otherwise accessible.

Though as you said rewarding good performance is an obvious thing to do, and the fact that SE hasn’t done ANYTHING to address it is quite telling.

Fair. I'm very much in favor of matchmaking and auto-kick, and the other options you list all make sense.

As you've pointed out in other threads, the key is making FL in particular an attractive mode to play. I don't think the player base needs to be much bigger such that people stop countering changes (particularly such as reducing rewards for losing teams) by "but Q times!"

And obviously smaller teams addresses that directly and has other gameplay advantages.

If you ever tried to play Frontline on Oceania, their pops only really last few hours even if the regulars keep playing - it’s quite depressing. I think I saw someone who I think plays in Oceania in another thread about regulars leaving for 7.1, so it's even more applicable to them.

From memory about another conversation with a friend, who used to play during 8v8v8 Frontline era, the change to 24v24v24 was exactly to reduce personal responsibility… which is a shame really, as I think that would work, and still have healthy amount of pops. And addresses the problem with huge amount AOE and crowd control in the current pvp kit. Basically reducing frontline team size to make it CC on steroids.

Whilst I am still in favour of nerfing losing team rewards, I think this would combat the problem with less people in the queue.

[Mawlzy]

From memory about another conversation with a friend, who used to play during 8v8v8 Frontline era, the change to 24v24v24 was exactly to reduce personal responsibility… which is a shame really, as I think that would work, and still have healthy amount of pops.

Maybe a better way of putting it is that 24-person teams make it less intimidating for PvP rookies to get involved, but in practice that translates into a subset of so-called participants who don't actually participate. (They go beyond dumping personal responsibility and celebrate the fact they're mocking the mode.)

This reflects a larger problem with FL. It is the only active large-scale PvP in the game. As such, it tries to be accessible to new players, but equally there's a hardcore element who prize having a high win-rate and who attempt to develop advanced, premade-based strategies that have the potential to absolutely shred less-experienced players.

The players who announce at the off "just here for the glam" apparently feel safe to do so because so many treat FL as a joke.

This is why I ultimately concluded matchmaking is the best solution, since serious players and inexperienced/griefers will naturally tend to be separated. Reducing team size would then help queues, and cross-DC queues would hopefully solve the problem altogether.

The bottom line is throwing players with vastly different expectations, skill levels, and goals all in the same pool inevitably leads to the current unsatisfactory situation.