The Frontlines Premade issue has not been fixed.

[AstreaTrinity]

Ill take getting smashed by a premade once in awhile with people from my GC i meet often in solo Q PVP and the hours long Q over a 77% chance of getting a team with 23 people who wanna run off alone to iraq because they cant look at a map and the guy macro spamming the absolute most basic of PVP rules while were at 0/1000/1200

if they're going to get rid of playing what GC you want make it 1vs1 like Rival Wings so at LEAST when you get a team with a decent chance of winning one of the other teams doesnt decide they're just going to throw the match for both of us and harass us 24/7 out of spite and leave the other team unchallenged

[enderandrew]

I thought there are no more premades, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

While there are individually good PvP players in Flames and Adders, the leaderboards are dominated by Mael players on every server. When I was Flames, I was always on a losing team. I switched to Mael after a few months, and won more than 66% of my matches.

Now we have Forced Freelancer mode. I understand why. There was disparity, and horrible queue times. I spent 60 minutes or longer in queue as Mael.

In theory, everyone should have shorter queue times and splitting everyone randomly should even up the teams more. The problem is that I'm seeing even more lopsided victories, and it doesn't seem random.

I've done over 20 matches, and not matched with Mael once. That is statistically beyond improbable, except everyone I've spoken to has had the exact same thing happen.

Mael should be composed of random members of other GCs, but is still always playing coordinated, while Flames and Adders (with the influx of Mael freelancers helping them) is still playing poorly. Even as people make calls, mark targets, etc. people just don't care.

I've seen so many players clearly go AFK, run away from fights and try to stick to themselves on the map and not engage, fight well away from nodes, stand near an empty node and make zero effort to cap it, etc.

Some people are in queue with the mindset they are content to lose and want to make no effort to play, but want the Wolf Marks, tomes and XP. The problem is that even 4 or 5 of these on your side will tank your chances and destroy the fun for everyone else.

There player commendations, but it seems people primarily just comm healers out of habit, but there is no real reputation or skill system.

If someone is PvP rank 50, wouldn't it make sense to pit them up against and with other players who are skilled? And try to fill one queue with newer players so they can learn without getting rolled over?

Do we need an ELO system or something along those lines?

Waiting in queue for other people to not even try and ruin my chances is frustrating. When this happens 20+ times in a row without an exception, that isn't fun. Why should I pay money for this experience?

[Ishgailah]

The freelancer change does not affect premade groups, right?

[Nedkel]

The freelancer change does not affect premade groups, right?

Premade groups were forced freelancers patch earlier which also decreased max size of premade group, but people abused the system by just queuing in same FC.

[BloodRubyXII]

The freelancer change does not affect premade groups, right?

Premade was already forced Freelancer.

[Ahzuran]

The matches aren't more exciting, nor is it more balanced. My first match of today we won by over 1100 points, it's just random chance now, that isn't a positive change. There isn't an even skill distrubution, it isn't any more "fair", there are still completely one sided matches and the general quality of the matches hasn't improved, there hasn't been a bunch of really close matches with good plays on all sides today. You queue up and either get enough people with a clue to pretty much dominate as before, or you spend a match unable to do anything as people spam alliance chat with "don't chase <se.3>" "fall back <se.1>" "objectives > kills"

Not every game is gonna be an even match. You're still gonna get some one side games from time to time but still better than a single Grand Company winning 100% of the time.

The matches aren't more exciting because PvP in this game is a complete mess due to various fundamental technical issues, lack of serious matchmaking, blatant unbalance, and constant changes to the mode with little to no player feedback. Now add an apathetic player base and you get an aspect of the game that's always gonna be doomed to fail.

[Devils_Lawyer]

Everyone is going to have a different experience both pre change and after the change, some people will notice a increase in wins, some will notice a decrease in wins....its to early to tell and in the end its SE that has all the numbers and will be able to notice if there has been a overall increase in balance or not.

That said from personal experience i was in Adders when the new pvp map launched and alltho i que as freelancer i never ever got into the mael GC, overall my win ratio was about 10%.

I am now in mael gc (changed cause i wanted to see if the grass was greener on the other side ) and since this new change im at 40% win ratio after 25 matches.

Dosnt rly conclude much over such a small number of matches but there it is anyway

edit: thats weekly win % btw.

[myahele]

I've done over 20 matches, and not matched with Mael once. That is statistically beyond improbable, except everyone I've spoken to has had the exact same thing happen.

Yeah, it looks like there was issues with their coding, but the maintenance tonight is supposed to fix it.

■ The following issue has been addressed.
・Higher chance of matchmaking into the Maelstorm when applying as a party to Frontline.

* Regarding this issue
After investigation, we found that there was an issue occurring due to processing that had not been updated since the first release of Frontline in Patch 2.3. Until now, the process had been matchmaking players according to their Grand Company affiliation first, so had coincidentally been working as intended. However, Patch 5.18 changed this so that players are no longer assigned to Frontline campaigns according to their Grand Company membership, and the removal of this condition was the cause of this issue.

Because this particular process deals with rapid matchmaking, it required detailed investigation and testing.

However, in prioritizing changes for patch 5.18, we focused too heavily on the change in programming which assured that Grand Company affiliation is no longer a main factor in the matchmaking process, and neglected to adequately test other parts of the programming which had not been changed. We apologize for not detecting the issue sooner.

https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...d387e29befdbd0

[MajisTek]

Just give me a 72 man free for all then SE let's do it!

[Darker_Midnight]

There are a lot of statistically improbable things going on right now in PVP but I guess it's just one voice drowned out by the ocean. I'm just extremely disappointed that people are still finding ways around the fix and dominating PVP regardless.