Ban premades from frontline, fix all issues

[TofuLove]

...
do people think murderblender lead by decent caller + enough people actually listening are "friends"?

I've frequently done this as a solo caller. You literally don't need a premade to "stomp", but just enough people following up pulls. Sure that doesn't happen every time if you don't have a premade, but enough times to make me think that the whole "ban premades" is funny. It literally wouldn't impact me, but will not resolve the issue that people are talking about.

Hypothetical question. At what point should a premade be banned?
2 people? 3 people? 4 people? Removing premades entirely will actually piss off a lot of casual players, who frankly don't care about frontline at all, and just doing roulette with friends. What roulette is there where you can't queue as a group?
I get it that it's to help balancing, but balancing in a casual mode with bad rewards doesn't matter. Because any participation is rewarded equally, the majority of players don't actually care about performance.

If you want a hardcore mode, with only solo performance, it needs additional rewards, and actual matchmaking - because I don't think people would queue for it as much otherwise. "Premade only" mode will be dead on arrival.

[Kuroka]

Its not hardcore if we are sick of gettin literally murdered by just few premades. Premade should not work with rouletts, even if that means i cant play with FC mates or my wife...

[Mawlzy]

If you want a hardcore mode, with only solo performance, it needs additional rewards, and actual matchmaking - because I don't think people would queue for it as much otherwise. "Premade only" mode will be dead on arrival.

Please no more rewards. They simply attract people who don't want to be there.

Matchmaking is the key.

The situation on Aether is deteriorating to the pre-7.1 situation. The individual stats for members of semi-statics are now in the 5/0/80 realm. They haven't reached the 10/0/115 we saw previously, but I imagine they are on their way.

As before, my personal issue is that playing with such a premade is tedious, whereas playing against one at least offers the prospect of a hard-fought upset. But with a significant fraction of all teams just being there for the rewards, we've drifted back into monotonous shooting fish in a barrel territory.

[TofuLove]

Its not hardcore if we are sick of gettin literally murdered by just few premades. Premade should not work with rouletts, even if that means i cant play with FC mates or my wife...

Everyone plays the game, everyone gets rewarded - this is the current system. Achievements are the only outlier, but they almost don't matter because of how few of them are there and how relatively easy they are to get - just play more. Frontline is a super casual mode that rewards breathing. Just because you got stomped, doesn't mean you didn't get rewarded. Somebody needs to win in order for the game to end - and I don't know how much solo gameplay would solve "getting literally murdered" without getting into reviewing the mechanics of getting murdered - AOE, CC skill stacking etc. It might happen less, but it will still happen.

IMHO - ANY barrier of entry into frontline will damage how much it pops. And asking for a mode to be only solo, or only premades is a barrier of entry.
If you want premades & good players to be split up and balanced between the teams - why not go one step further and recognise that you are pushing for balanced games with good players on all sides? Is that what you want? This is fine, but... will these players want to play at all?

My bias - I don't know how much casual roulette players care about winning or even know how to play. At the moment the worst performers don't at all. So I think that by banning premades will put a lot of players off: casuals and regular players, and I think the games would quickly become worse. Because let's face it - premades want to win, they don't want to play with people who don't know how to. I think the only counter to that would be to push for a truly hardcore solo mode that would incentivise winning and have good matchmaking. You might even get "balanced" premade free games, where lethargic players would get kicked and games would be good. Nirvana reached.

You will still get literally murdered if you are bad though, but that's just pvp.

[AmiableApkallu]

Emphasis/bolding mine:

Because let's face it - premades want to win, they don't want to play with people who don't know how to.

I've been in Frontline matches with an obvious pre-made, and instead of making an effort to teach everyone else "some basic competency," all that pre-made did was fill up the chat log with useless macro spam faster than anyone could actually type while still playing the game, and thus taught nothing to anyone who wasn't already in their pre-made or Discord or whatever.

This stands in stark contrast to being the random PF fill or two for some FC or static prog'ing a fight, where someone in the FC/static has the courtesy to summarize what's being said in the Discord that you haven't been invited to.

[Kuroka]

Id be all up for no rewards on 2-3rd place or a lot lower ones. but there are some mechanics that finally need change. Like today we lost our match due flames feeding on gridania while we dealt with both, gettin so much battle high we had no chance later on. Actually it was close, we won almost ever fight but had no way to win the battle.

The very least i wished for 1 vs. 1 like with CC...

I might not be top tier, but you see me use my heal, kill stuff and do damage, unlike some where you literally see 90k damage or stuff like that. CC is the worst there where sometimes you literally win in like one minute lol ...you just see the lazy players way better there...

[OliviaLugria]

Emphasis/bolding mine:



I've been in Frontline matches with an obvious pre-made, and instead of making an effort to teach everyone else "some basic competency," all that pre-made did was fill up the chat log with useless macro spam faster than anyone could actually type while still playing the game, and thus taught nothing to anyone who wasn't already in their pre-made or Discord or whatever.

This stands in stark contrast to being the random PF fill or two for some FC or static prog'ing a fight, where someone in the FC/static has the courtesy to summarize what's being said in the Discord that you haven't been invited to.

What? Do they need to spell out and justify every decision that they make? Are people unable to gather information and analyze why a commander made a decision after if not during a game? Is there no learning while experiencing the process?

I mean, I guess that many don’t bother trying to make sense of what’s going on, but there is nothing a pre-made or any teacher for that matter could do about that.

For those that do want to learn. They’ll find a plethora of public discords, guides, and streamers who want to help.

Just a closing thought, aren’t macros and waymarkers in chat “summarizing what’s being said in discord?”

[Mawlzy]

What? Do they need to spell out and justify every decision that they make? Are people unable to gather information and analyze why a commander made a decision after if not during a game? Is there no learning while experiencing the process?

I mean, I guess that many don’t bother trying to make sense of what’s going on, but there is nothing a pre-made or any teacher for that matter could do about that.

For those that do want to learn. They’ll find a plethora of public discords, guides, and streamers who want to help.

Just a closing thought, aren’t macros and waymarkers in chat “summarizing what’s being said in discord?”

I wonder if video guides on YT would help. It's the default for PvE, maybe it'd produce some crossover.

[Eastwall]

Idk If banning premade solves any problem. If l see a dk putting a marker on himself and spamming comms, l would switch to whm. Very easy to follow up with the salted Earth and l get to max battle high in no time. I say just suck it up, or learn to dreamwalk, So You get the roulette bonus and get out of there before you know it.

[TofuLove]

Just a closing thought, aren’t macros and waymarkers in chat “summarizing what’s being said in discord?”

Thanks Olivia, couldn't have summarised it better.
I think macros are relatively self explanatory, and are the only communication needed (and sometimes if the players are good enough - not needed at all). Any decision making and explanations are difficult to sum up during the game because of how on the fly some decisions are, and how quickly you must react to things. Also, the match isn't the time for debate on what to do, you can message the shot caller after if you want to debate - but during the game it's only going to have a negative effect.

Anecdotally from my experience to "teach": it took me over half a year spamming every shatter game for people NOT to jump down the enemy cliff, without a huge effect. Roulette players in EU still do it sometimes, and it's been some time since shatter got reworked. Those that want to learn - will find all the resources. There are plenty of videos, written guides etc available on discords and youtube. Feel free to come to Revival discord and ask things in the Frontline section - there are a lot of knowledgeable people who will help if you have questions on mechanics of any job, or detailed mechanics of any map.

Those that do want to learn are already a minority - and probably fall in the top 10% of good players on any server. Hell, if you are here - you probably care more about frontline than 99% of the server population. The problem is that there is no incentive to get better at the mode - why try, when rewards are good no matter your performance?