Why Frontlines is a bad Gamemode

[Aidorouge]

I started to take Frontlines less seriously myself when I realized I had no agency in fights and it came down to which team had the stronger premade. Every match was either my team getting stomped by an enemy premade, or being spoon-fed by an ally premade. By all accounts I could have stood in the spawn dancing with the rest of the team for all the difference we would have made as the 4-man and 8-man stacks pretty much played without us needing to be present at all.

It truly is better to treat it like the meme/mini-game it is and do the bare minimum unless you've got a premade of your own that you're part of, otherwise you just end up feeling stressed and frustrated.

[YumieYumiki]

I play on aether, where premades are not the problem, stupidity is.

I have seen teams ignore callouts, lose because of it, and equate callouts with spam.
I have seen peeps ignore pinch warnings, drop 100 points in mass death in 10 seconds, then lose the match by less than 50 points in the end.
I have seen teams full of BH5 lose because they weren't paying attention and focused the wrong team.
I have seen people go all in against the 3rd place team over a B rank node whilst giving the lead team an S rank unchallenged.

But the worst is when teams not only blow it, they attempt to argue or talk back.

I could write multiple, lengthy posts about this, but the bottom line is that the stupidity problem is WAY bigger than the premade problem.

That's not stupidity. Personally I am routinely guilty of all of these, and the reason is I simply cannot care at all about the outcome of a battle in a game mode that has never brought me even one second of fun (when I do it it's just because I need the exp or tomestones)

I don't like zerging, and frontline is all about zerging.
I don't like slippery slope game mechanics, hello battle high
I don't like that initiative is always punished. Stray from the zerg = die. More enemies around than friendlies = die. People spreading all over the place = there is nothing you can don to influence anything.

You have zero personal agency in frontline, and I hate that. (Compare with wow where in most BGs a single rogue can often turn a BG around by sneaking away to cap something poorly defended)

It's a bad game mode, built on top of a bad PvP combat design, built on top of awful netcode. It's bad all the way down. I absolutely don't care about the score, other than "is this thing over soon"

[Valence]

We need more players in CC, which arguable doesn't suffer from most of those problems?

[Aidorouge]

We need more players in CC, which arguable doesn't suffer from most of those problems?

Didn't they start letting premades into Crystalline Conflict though? Because that would just make me treat the mode as no better than Frontlines.

Actually, wait no, CC would be worst because at least FL has a roulette bonus to soothe the ache after its over.

[TofuLove]

If you don't like the mode, just don't queue for it. Life is too short.

[Burmecia]

I dont much like secure and shatter, so i dont queue on their days usually
but onsal and seal rock? wont miss them if i can help it.
yeah i agree seal rock is stupidly asymetrical map. when they give it shatter treatment, maybe, i shall miss it.

[TofuLove]

Low key misunderstanding of the game mechanics.

1) I see so many people fighting on the point on seal rock/onsal, but those modes are kind of like territory defense, and best positions for attack are usually not on the point. I think a lot of people just don't know the map well enough to set up decent attacks and deny territory to the enemy.
If you can control most of the map -> you increase chances that the point spawns in your territory. This makes mid an insanely important point because you can pinch from it into any direction and holding it is critical. Sadly most rouletters shout "mid is a trap" and completely ignore it at the start. In 95% it shouldn't be ignored due to positional advantage.

2) Point gain per kill in comparison to the overall score.
Seal rock 5/700=0.7%
Onsal 8/1400=0.6%
Shatter 8/1600=0.5%
Secure 10/2400=0.4%

You can kind of see that maps with more RNG have higher proportion of the score attributed to kills. Which means you can basically farm the team that was "lucky" to get the S rank in their base and happen to be in the lead through RNG.
Seal rock is larger map so more difficult to adequately control the map - makes sense there is more points from kills, whilst Onsal is very fast and you can travel across the map with relative ease.

So basically asymmetry is countered with higher % from kills.

[NevaehQuest]

Fl is like a unbalanced messy fun gamemode. If you try to just enjoy the fight, you will have fun. If you try to play to win, you will drive yourself crazy. Because the game mode is super unbalance super rng. Sometimes you just have zero capture point on your side the entire game. Sometimes you get double team hitting you just cause they have beef with your teammate, when that happened you lost 100%. It is fun to lose yourself in a large scale battle. (also I love the dev, the dev is god plz don't ban me again, As you can see im like super friendly right now, whoever reading this I love you, pvp 10 out of 10)

[Themarvin]

I stated before and I will state again... there is no easy to go learning curve in PvP, if you want to be good at it and your favorite job ( that does not mean meta ) then you need to dig into it, there is no freebees in PvP... if your first time you will meet people that has been at it for years and that is how it is, suck it up and learn from it... a bard can murder any job if in need be, but so can a blm... or mnk or whatever job in this game.

Just stop yourself... if you want learning curves you need to join the PvE game, where it is possible to script like that, you can't script another players behavior.