What is it with Immortal Flames and being terrible at PvP?

[Tsuole]

If you're responding to today, there seems to be some Maelstrom people who are friends who are actually coordinating.

[Critical-Limit]

Well on Aether I've been winning ALOT more when I'm with flames. After stormblood where just before it I felt like flames gave me a really long losing streak

[ThirdChild_ZKI]

History lesson time:

Before 3.5, you chose a GC, and all your PvP points and level were tied to it. There were optional but very useful PVP skills that you added to your hotbar along with all the other PvE skills, and they could be upgraded with the points you gained. If you transferred, say from the Flames to the Adders but only ever PvPed on the Flames, you could still equip the skills, but without the points and level from the Flames, you couldn't upgrade them. Some achievements like the Black ADS mount were erroneously listed as requiring 200 wins with any GC, but it did not explain that progress is not totaled among them. Simply put: you could get 199/200 wins with the Flames, then switch to Adders, and your next win was 1/200, and the counter wouldn't go up til you matched that same number from before.

Anyways, if all your friends were in a different GC (thanks to the choice they originally made in the story, or a transfer), your choices were to either transfer and join them, or be stuck on opposite teams all the time. If you transferred, you could not transfer back for 15 real world days. Many people would follow their friends, or groups of players that played well together would transfer together, often creating imbalances between the GCs. THIS is what largely slowed down queues. If everyone's predominantly an Adder or Flame, matches are hard to build a Maelstrom team for, thus the long long waits.

Come 3.5, and the Frontline Freelancer option - a major change the PvP community asked and begged for for 2 years. 2 years. Now it didn't matter if your buddy is in Maelstrom and you're a Flame. Select Freelancer, and queue together, and maybe you'll be on the same team. Cross-world party finder? Hey! That guy from [Server] was really good, but he was on the other team, let's invite him to our party! Queue up and get a match; hey look, those other guys who were really good on the other team are in alliance B this time! Alright! We've got a strong team!


. . .GCs Do. Not. Matter. Now. It's all about how good you and your teammates are. They could add the Temple Knights, Garlean Legions and the Ala Mihgan Resistance tomorrow and if all the really good or bad players of one GC went to one of those, it still wouldn't make a difference. Please stop thinking that it does.

[Serilda]

What is it with people thinking that their personal experiences on one data centre make some kind of correlation? ThirdChild has the right of it. I've been mown down by teams from all three GCs and I've been in the position of dominating a match on all three GCs. For all of my loyalty to Maelstrom, freelancer has revolutionised PVP for me as I can actually play more than two matches a week now. I don't give a fig which team I'm on and if Flames/Adders/Maelstrom have a few good games in a row I don't draw any particular conclusions from that, because anyone who actually wants to get short queues is going freelancer. The main things I see in winning teams are having a certain concentration of veterans (premade or just solo) and actually bothering to communicate. As I say to my friends when they're on a losing streak and blaming random circumstances, are you sure you're doing everything you can to help your team win? Or are you just refusing to lead or pick a logical job and contributing to the team's disorganisation yourself?

Of course, if everyone is going in with assumptions like 'Aether Adders suck, it's not my fault' then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy after a while.