Frontlines is ok, but

[Novani]

I doubt it.

Frontlines is a mess, but it's also a mess that allows people with some classes to shine where they wouldn't be able to when everyone on the opposing team is focusing on them exclusively, it encourages teamwork rather than just rushing to burst down a singular person as fast as possible, and no one class is a potentially invincible juggernaut - which cannot be said to be true in Feast, which with the right support, some classes just quite simply won't die. You can focus all your efforts on them and it'd be for naught if your team setup isn't strong enough to counter it, unless you get really lucky.

So basically the idea is that in Frontline, know when to pick your fights. It's frustrating, particularly when your team abandons you to chase one person across the galaxy, but the core of it allows combat to be team-centric rather than showing off how easily say: a samurai can chew through a Black Mage's Manaward and nearly kill em in one combo for all to see. I know some people will likely rage at me for pointing this out, but Feast is not balanced. At all.

Doesn't matter which season you look at, when it's a 4v4 with tightly restricted role dynamics, someone, somewhere, is going to suffer for it. Is that a call for them to raise the numbers a little in hopes of maybe balancing it a little better? Possibly. Never knew it in its larger team state, so I'll leave that question to someone with more experience with the mode, can only comment about how it is now.

I do hope there is some future for it, but yeah, every time something's balanced, something somewhere else just becomes suffering. Feast highlights that more than any other mode, which isn't exactly gonna attract newcomers to it, unless they're dying of curiosity.

[Esmoire]

I agree that Feast should have gotten some kind of daily bonus.

That said, I think even if Feast had a daily bonus, or Rival Wings had a daily bonus, I think FL would grossly dwarf them in participation. Like, even when RW had moogle tomestone rewards, it had no major impact on FL queues, and FL queues remained fierce (during usual FL queue hours) while RW rapidly dried up. To me this is indicative that, love it or hate it, FL is the most popular PvP mode by a landslide even without extrinsic rewards.

I think Feast and Rival Wings are a write-off; with the former I can see a small dedicated community keeping it going in arranged matches, while the latter is struggling even with a dedicated community trying to arrange it. I do think RW could survive if it had a daily bonus and way better maps that are easier to digest rather than trying to cram a dozen maps into one.

Feast though... might be drowned out with the new PvP mode coming with Endwalker. I think FFXIV has a gaping hole in its PvP repertoire of small-scale activities. It needs something not as volatile as Frontline, not as confined as Feast, and not as indigestible as Rival Wings. Which, crazy enough, every MMO but this one has had. I think sometimes the FFXIV dev team overdesigns things when people would love something like capture the flag or deathmatches with a few dozen players on a map that isn\\'t basically the MMO equivalent of Final Destination.

[Ransu]

I know some people will likely rage at me for pointing this out, but Feast is not balanced. At all.

To be blunt....I care very little about balance as I don't expect it to be balanced. This goes for any form of class based pvp. Obviously if you scale things to higher numbers and add objectives (which I'm all in favor of) class balance becomes easier, but it is what it is. Frontlines is just too chaotic for me. I'd happily deal with the balance issues of 4v4 jsut for the fact that I enjoy that more focused style pvp.

I think sometimes the FFXIV dev team overdesigns things when people would love something like capture the flag or deathmatches with a few dozen players on a map that isn\\'t basically the MMO equivalent of Final Destination.

I would LOVE if they added something similar to swtor's 8v8 warzones. Its the perfect ratio of of player count and having objective play.