Light Party Restriction In Frontlines

[SuperZay]

That is also why Rival Wings is not popular on EU and NA because once the game is one sided you will immediately hearing "Let them win so I can get out of here"
You won't hear this in Frontline because there is always a chance your GC can take over the lead from a successful flank.

It's not popular but for another reason entirely: it's not part of a daily map rotation and doesn't have roulette bonus. When there are incentives to que for it directly, like moogle tomestone events, there are 2, and sometimes 3 matches going on at the same time. Regardless, you have a 50% chance to win in a faster RW match than 33% chance in slower Frontline matches so it's much less annoying and doesn't leave a sense of a time wasted.

[Rinku421]

That is also why Rival Wings is not popular on EU and NA because once the game is one sided you will immediately hearing "Let them win so I can get out of here"
You won't hear this in Frontline because there is always a chance your GC can take over the lead from a successful flank.

I don't know what kind of Frontline matches you've played but majority of teams give up once they fall behind like 700 points and beyond. "Letting them win" isn't exclusive to Rival Wings at all, if anything its less prevalent because there isn't a third faction to interfere with the possibility of making a come back.

[Atreus]

8-man groups were only ever an issue in 24-player games and they were removed in the same update. There used to be several 8-man groups queued up for 72-man with the hopes of going against each other. Now that freelancer is forced even on the solo player, every person has the same chance of being with an 8-stack as well as being against.

The light party restriction is stupid and needs to go.

[Mistress_Irika]

There's a point that's being missed for 72 man. Any sort of premade, whether it's with 8, 4, or even 2 people, can determine how matches goes. However, a premade is only as powerful as the support it gets. Premades can be beaten by numbers or by sandwiches.

Sure, you can have a premade have the highest performance for a game, but they can simply place last at the end of the game due to the lack of support they may receive. Premades can carry. They just can't do all the work.

I'm just putting that out there. It's not changing my thoughts with bringing back 8 man groups.

[Cidel]

For me, the short answer is removing full/near full-party premades was necessary. The longer answer is that it was a bit of a 'scorched earth' solution that highlighted some of the inherent flaws of their matchmaking system and Frontlines modes.

Premades absolutely could and did ruin the 24-man modes for the other 16 players. Whether it was just a party with a plan of attack/balanced party comp created beforehand (some roulette parties struggle to even get 1 healer or more), a group communicating through VC or discord, or just a group of vets looking to stack their party to steamroll everyone to farm battle highs; it was an advantage over everybody else who solo queued. There's a reason why solo queue Feast and light party Feast are separate and have 2 different rankings. A premade's influence arguably is diluted in 72 man modes, but people underestimate and downplay the benefit of having even one party full of battle highs/fevers marking/mowing down targets and leading the charge into contested areas or objectives. In my opinion, the devs should have had a separate queue just for premade parties, where they would have to be matched against other premade parties for the match to pop. I've seen the argument against that method being along the lines of "then they wouldn't get matches for long periods of time, if ever-" then that's on them to disband and queue up normally like everybody else. The other, extreme option was to prevent premades from queuing up at all- but instead they just decided to cut them in half, somewhat effectively limiting their influence.

What made this decision less-palatable was that it came at the same time of them removing 24-man matches- the one place larger premades absolutely dominated. I'm not quite sure what their reasoning was (they never told us), but it might have had to do with the maps being basically largely unchanged in terms of size and objectives (aside from only 3 flags in Secure, sometimes no big ice (or only big ice) in Shatter, and like 1 less tomelith in Seize). Maybe it was because more people disliked the small matches than those who liked them? I know I avoided Secure 24-man modes like the plague at all costs.

But with the removal of the ability to make anything over a 4-person premade, what cemented my belief that most people who did so were just looking for any advantage by stacking parties beforehand came with Onsal Hakair a week or two later. This was the other problem with frontlines: Grand Company allegiance. People looking to stack their parties with experienced players got around the new restriction by all swapping to one Grand Company (Adders on primal) and proceed to win what I would say nearly 75% or more of the matches. The devs tried to hold on to their flawed little GC lore and keep it relevant for as long as they could, but how it blew-up in Onsal Hakair was all the confirmation they needed that anything that could let players choose who they played with in any significant number versus those who solo queue needed to go. And hence why we have forced freelancer and GC is little more than what color team you're on now.

[Newmanxeno]

Why do people who play an MMO want to play it alone so much?

[BloodRubyXII]

Nah, 4mans are enough, I'd like to play with as many friends as I want, but from a non selfish standpoint 4-mans are enough. Because teams wind up with multiple of them anyway atm and it's a nightmare.

a full team coordinating around known map exploits and what-not?

This is utter shite.

[Guesswhat]

Premades DID have an effect in 72. A well organized premade could absolutely create a snowball effect to steamroll the other teams.

Of course, in 24 they were more dominant for sure.

I'm fine with light party restrictions, but still miss 24 mode.

[Jinglybell]

Whats funny is people are bring up onsal, but forget that the reason that one group was steamrolling so hard was BECAUSE they made the 4 people pre-made max. People were using an actual exploit (you know instead of that reading a map and being able to push the buttons to do the things exploit lol) of joining the same gc and que-syncing in order to end up in the same alliance and other people who would be able to make a premade to combat them either had to do the same or were out of luck.

[OskarXCI]

I have to disagree.

A premade full of Feast veterans or good players in general can still have a huge impact in 72 Frontline and it would only get worse if they allowed 8 man parties. Them forcing Freelancer means they don't want one team to completely dominate, to the point where the outcome of the match have already been decided less than 5 min into the match.

If people want to dominate in a premade, go and participate in the next LP Feast season or join a tournament hosted by the PvPaissa discord.