The Frontlines Premade issue has not been fixed.

[Newmanxeno]

Now people in PvP crossworld linkshells are solo queuing into one grand company to try to play together. Which I do not want to do. Instead of being restricted to eight people.
I queued premade most of the time, playing with friends in an MMO crazy right? We didn't win all of the time. Most of the time we got put on teams with people who didn't even try, which is most of the player base that is being catered to.

[Wyvernheart]

When friends want to play together and are skillful in their campaigns, it aught be commended. Not punished. Maybe start a duty finder with like players who want to counter them? Also can we please have Full Party questions again?

[Araxes]

This is false. They absolutely are on VC using discord. I'm apart of the same discord and have even been in VC with them. The discord even encourages other GCs to join and do the same.

I mean, i dont pvp as often as i did in HW, but when i do i usually hop in with people from our pvp-CWLS and we NEVER go into VC

[Fang_]

You can play with friends without having to Grand Company stack with 24 people. You do NOT have to be on the same team to play with people. Just like playing a board game, card game, fighting game, racing game or whatever. If the goal is to have good competition as I'm reading it would be better matches to separate teams and go Premade vs Premade. If people are willing to Q sync together, why are people not willing to Q sync against each other?

So, let's not twist it. We know the majority goal is to use a loophole, have 90% win rates and eat people for dinner. This was not a necessity to people when 8 man premades were possible. Yes, they dominated but not to that level. I could join in on the fun of doing that too...but its pretty grey area and not healthy for PvP overall. Bring back 8 man premades or yeah just rework grand company system perhaps to all freelancers. 4 Man premades is not the best situation, but it's not totally "omg I can't play with friends"

It's funny you say "let's not twist it" yet you'll begin this with hyperbole. I have yet to see this 24 man stack you speak of and i've been playing Frontlines since Heavensward. I started as a solo player who never once thought of giving up due to people playing together, it drove me to improve. Comparing this game to a "card game" is another funny twist, this is an mmo, one where you will encounter multiple people who you would want to play with and a lot of us have made friends through this mode and enjoy playing together. The majority of people complaining here about premades dont even know the real problems of players who will literally afk to get their xp/tomes. Those are the issues that have driven most of the players who actually enjoy this mode to seek others to play with.

[chris4]

You can play with friends without having to Grand Company stack with 24 people. You do NOT have to be on the same team to play with people. Just like playing a board game, card game, fighting game, racing game or whatever. If the goal is to have good competition as I'm reading it would be better matches to separate teams and go Premade vs Premade. If people are willing to Q sync together, why are people not willing to Q sync against each other?

So, let's not twist it. We know the majority goal is to use a loophole, have 90% win rates and eat people for dinner. This was not a necessity to people when 8 man premades were possible. Yes, they dominated but not to that level. I could join in on the fun of doing that too...but its pretty grey area and not healthy for PvP overall. Bring back 8 man premades or yeah just rework grand company system perhaps to all freelancers. 4 Man premades is not the best situation, but it's not totally "omg I can't play with friends"

When they release a FFXIV Battle Royale mode, I'll play it. But Frontlines is not that, almost all games coming out today allow you to pick your preferred side/team/faction/race so your other game argument is invalid. The only reason people are complaining is because the people that are choosing to play with each other are skilled, if they were losing no one would be complaining, maybe not even know they are queued together lol. It's rather silly that in a casual pvp mode, people should be split up because teaming up is unfair, if its casual, its about fun, and playing with friends is fun. If it was about competition, which since it is casual pvp as you have said before, no one should be thinking about competition of players, its supposed to be relaxed, and chill which is exactly what spending time with friends is, if I wanted to test my skill/competition to other players in pvp in a fair setting, I would queue ranked feast, where people are matched based off their rating to create fair teams.

[Saintly]

Love the meltdowns of those who played only in premade and lost the spoon.
Also love how they claim that they are "skilled" but not once proposed or supported the idea of a pre vs pre only mode. :3

[BloodRubyXII]

Don't you bring the epeen measuring stick to this thread. Especially when the game is focused on teamwork gameplay. Ranking boards in Aether nowadays is irrelevant thanks to win traders and those who sell wins. You probably don't immerse yourself in Aether PvP community enough to know that.

There is premade advantages, you're right about that. It's a team of people that want to win where PUGs you have a mixed bag of people that do want to win / don't care. I played in different Data Centers where PUGs actually can fight back against premades. Just because Aether PUGs are trash, why do everyone else has to suffer for their incompetence?

Literally this argument: https://youtu.be/rG_DvlFJ-YQ?t=9

[melonpatch]

It's funny you say "let's not twist it" yet you'll begin this with hyperbole. I have yet to see this 24 man stack you speak of and i've been playing Frontlines since Heavensward. I started as a solo player who never once thought of giving up due to people playing together, it drove me to improve. Comparing this game to a "card game" is another funny twist, this is an mmo, one where you will encounter multiple people who you would want to play with and a lot of us have made friends through this mode and enjoy playing together. The majority of people complaining here about premades dont even know the real problems of players who will literally afk to get their xp/tomes. Those are the issues that have driven most of the players who actually enjoy this mode to seek others to play with.

I think the 24-man stack is largely an Aether DC thing, they have a FL Discord they coordinate on and the VC channels are active every time I look in there.

That said I'm all in favour of premade vs premade since those are always the most fun games. You know when that was possible? When we had 8-man premades and the queue throws you into different GCs without you needing to do anything. At the moment, of course people are just going to flock to the same GC in order to play with their friends, especially when realistically speaking most people are still going to be on the 15-day GC transfer cooldown. And even when that ends, who's going to be the first one to switch grand companies and hope other people follow them? And if you switch GCs, then you're locking yourself out of queue-syncing with friends who are in different GCs.

Some things are always going to be constant in FL. People are going to want to play with friends. Even people who don't want to premade still want to have skilled teams, so they do things like switching to Maelstrom, because another unfortunate reality of FL is the prevalence of bots/afkers -- just look at the healing and damage scoreboards at the end of the game, there's always going to be DPS that do less damage than healers, healers healing less than 100k, etc. Implementing mandatory freelancer for solo-queuers like some people are suggesting are just gonna irritate another subset of players who play the game legitimately and work hard to improve their play.

Just bring back 8-man premades, especially given the arbitrary and unnecessary decision to take away 24-man modes. An 8-man premade can have a huge influence on a 72-man match but never to the point where it's grossly unfair, given that there are usually multiple premades in different GCs in one match and accounting for the variance in PUG quality. Because at the moment, yeah, if 24-man stomps are happening on Aether, that's probably going to be bad for the health of the gamemode in the long run, whether it's by driving off newbies/solo-queuers or prompting a mass switch to Adder in hopes of riding on the premades' coattails.

[BubblyBoar]

No it's literally not, a premade is a party formed before queueing. Anyone referring to premade parties is talking about people forming a party before queueing and then queueing as a party, hence the pre prefix, as in making the party before queueing. You can't guarantee everyone will get in the same instance or be in the same party syncing queue times, you can't preform the party that way, it's literally not the definition of premade.

I mean, sync solo queuing is planned and prepared before hand, hence the "pre" suffix. You can argue semantics all you want, but you understand exactly what we mean and the understand how it is abusing thee queue system. And like I said in the freest post, this is all contingent on if this was what SE was trying to do by breaking down 8 man parties and enforcing freelancer on "real" premades in the first place. If not, this entire topic can be ignored.

[chris4]

Love the meltdowns of those who played only in premade and lost the spoon.
Also love how they claim that they are "skilled" but not once proposed or supported the idea of a pre vs pre only mode. :3

I am going to reply to your obvious bait post (when I really shouldn't) and just leave you with this. being from the rank 1 pvp team in ranked team feast on primal last season, this is my experience with a premade vs premade pvp mode in FFXIV. Over 5 hours in queue during primetime during a season (date/time of screenshot is 6/26/19 at 10:49pm) and yeah you guessed it, people dodged rather than grind against each other to get better. They would rather the effortless win or maybe even just a chance of winning against other teams instead of grinding away vs the top premade to get better. Unfortunately for me, this supports Brian's point about people just wanting a 90% wr and easy games, but I never argued against that, there will always be people like that, there will always be people afking in frontlines for the tomes, there will always be people afking in alliance raids, main story roulettes, and other duties because they want things effortlessly handed too them, this isnt a pvp problem, this is a FFXIV player problem. I would rather they don't just add another dead mode because people refuse to grind against people better than them to get better, which again, is a problem that extends further than just FFXIV pvp.