What's going on Frontlines?

[Sinstrel]

I cannot agree more, Frontline roulette needs to be solo queue only

What would you suggest the folks who have 1 or 2 friends they'd like to PvP with do?

[Valence]

Haha, people are still thinking that you need a 4 man premade of DRK/DRG to stomp a game? You can do that solo too with the same jobs.

Are you solo-queueing?
Cuz I can tell you, only people who queue together in a party ever get wins. It's a sad reality of Frontline and it's a main contributor of why it's the worst game mode in FFXIV.

Done exclusively solo (jobs played: MNK, DRG, some SCH).

In before "b-but you just got lucky and paired with the premades!!1!"

[Valence]

The out of control crowd-control

Use guard and purify. It's not that worse than in CC. If you're out of both, don't go in, that's simple. People blame CC chains when they've been caught pants down by a 20 player blob dunking on them. If you get targeted, zoom out immediately after purifying.

I'm ready to admit that the DRK pull in is annoying, but again, if you have guard and purify ready, you should be fine. If it's a case where you're fleeing, then you probably fucked up way before for being left behind and caught pants down. No matter the CC you eat, you have a 20 man blob on your ass and no way to outrun them (they can mount, you can't).

Emphases on AoE bursting

Definitely more of a problem than in the old pvp model. AoE should be capped with heavy fallofs in FLs imo. PvE has them, so why not wide scale PvP (not crystal conflict pls, it's fine in small scale pvp)?

Overtuned personal shielding

???

The CRIMINAL abundance of "get out of jail free" abilities that allow individuals to get away with making insanely dumb decisions (elusive jump, sky high, phalanx, Eventide, etc.)

It's fortunate that those are here. A DRG without elusive and barrier after LB is a dead DRG. Even with both of those, it can be a dead DRG anyway. People are just not very good at catching them and ganking them out of the sky.

Tanks invulns don't bother me. They don't make tanks invulnerable to crowd control anyway, and a chain CCed tank after their purify is over is a dead tank.

The damage reduction bandaids slapped onto the gamemode that further facilitate insane aggressive zerging

Amusingly enough, with good players, they're not a lot of reduction. You can gank almost anything very easily. On the other hand, it's clear that it's way too much for the average playerbase, and generates jobs that seem impossible to kill when competently played.

Like everything in the complaints about this mode, it's mostly tied to a skill scale problem. It's like putting first league football players with elementary schoolers. Ofc the former will stand out as unbeatable, but people prefer blaming premades and unfair combos.

Tick-rate that can't keep up with 72 people clustering together

Yeah it's pretty bad. They should scale it down to the old 8v8v8 and see how it runs, with damage reductions cut by half or more obviously, accordingly.

Rather than addressing these, tons of people would rather the source of their immediate aggravation be taken away, but that doesn't fix the issues.

If only it was the source of their immediate aggravation to begin with...

[VictorSpoils]

What a weird thing to say.

[VictorSpoils]

Haha, people are still thinking that you need a 4 man premade of DRK/DRG to stomp a game? You can do that solo too with the same jobs.





Done exclusively solo (jobs played: MNK, DRG, some SCH).

In before "b-but you just got lucky and paired with the premades!!1!"

• Counterpoint: This is a team game, you have 23 teammates, you have zero control over how competent they are unless you're queue syncing (and even then, barely), and you're facing two opponent teams instead of one. It's pretty clear there's a luck factor involved.
• Countercounterpoint: Queueing solo right now and getting a 55% win rate over 27 games without queue syncing isn't lucky. It's reality-defying.
• Countercountercounterpoint: Player competence almost certainly varies between data centers. In a brief excursion to Primal, I could win more times in a few games than I would across two dozen in Crystal. Even though every game is guaranteed to have a winner, you can consistently find yourself on the losing team. Plenty of leeway when there are two losing teams instead of one.

[Mayhemmer]

Snip...

Cutting up each and every problem and examining them in isolation doesn't mean anything, because you'll never encounter these things in isolation in a match. Offering cookie-cutter advice to dealing with them doesn't mean anything, because Frontlines isn't a vacuum. That's just the way it is.

You can try these, and should, because there's good advice to be had, but if they were just fix-all's and worked every time, I don't think we'd be here right now.

[Xylira]

Haha, people are still thinking that you need a 4 man premade of DRK/DRG to stomp a game? You can do that solo too with the same jobs.

Done exclusively solo (jobs played: MNK, DRG, some SCH).

In before "b-but you just got lucky and paired with the premades!!1!"

You literally did mostly just get lucky if that's from purely solo queueing. You're 1 player in a 72 players match; 1 person on a 24 person team, you make up only 4% of your team. So either you're some amazing player that is able to carry the random teams you end up on to sway that drastic of a win rate, or much more likely, you're above average and you got lucky with the matchmaking system.

And I say this having achieved a much higher win rate solo-queuing the past week on one of my alts, over 40 matches. I'm not going to pretend I'm some amazing PvPer, I know I'm decent enough at it, but I also know full well that a huge part of it was getting really lucky with matchmaking and ending up on teams with competent team mates that knew how to work together. And yes, more than a few of those matches I ended up on the same team as premade groups.

[Valence]

• Counterpoint: This is a team game, you have 23 teammates, you have zero control over how competent they are unless you're queue syncing (and even then, barely), and you're facing two opponent teams instead of one. It's pretty clear there's a luck factor involved.
• Countercounterpoint: Queueing solo right now and getting a 55% win rate over 27 games without queue syncing isn't lucky. It's reality-defying.
• Countercountercounterpoint: Player competence almost certainly varies between data centers. In a brief excursion to Primal, I could win more times in a few games than I would across two dozen in Crystal. Even though every game is guaranteed to have a winner, you can consistently find yourself on the losing team. Plenty of leeway when there are two losing teams instead of one.

1) Who said there is no luck factor involved? Of course luck is and has always been a significant part of pvp teamgames. Why are you bringing luck into this? Unless you're trying to imply that there is legitimately absolutely no impact that an individual player (or a group of 4, since that was the original point made) can have upon a game and the odds are a flat 33% to win no matter what on averages. Which would imply that people that have better results, be it in FLs or even CC ranked, are here out of sheer luck with no skill involved whatsoever. I just said that one individual alone can have a significant impact on even a FL game, especially when playing the obvious culprits like DRG, etc.
2) It's probably in the higher bracket of the results I've gotten. I used that screen earlier because it was specifically conducted with my tryharding at field commanding during a week, which I do believe flat out can beat any premade or DRG/DRK combo or whatever. Won't always work ofc, because it is still reliant on luck and your team actually being amenable to follow commands and know what to do, but it eliminates a lot of the skill issue from the equation when it works, and actually coordinates 20+ people at once instead of just 4. For reference, my total ratio hovers around 39-40% on 1st place, with over 1500+ games as sample, least I be accused of using too low sample sizes and a luck streak. And it does seem the ratio you find defying reality is actually found on the screen just above that you conveniently ignored, with a sample of a way higher size, so if that's just about luck as you say, then what is reality defying again here?
3) Again, nobody argues that luck is not part of the equation, or at least I don't. You're building strawmen here. If your DC is worse as you say, I only played FLs on Crystal in Stormblood (for a lot of games though), and Crystal back then used to be one of the best if not the best pvp DC on the western side. Perhaps it's not the case anymore. You need to teach people by showing and leading, that's as simple. Make macros, show them how to lead instead of complaining, and work hard to it for weeks, months, until people start understanding how it works, what tactics to employ, and how to react organically to the battlefield. You'll soon see them re using your macros or making their own variants, and while at first you'll just pull your hair out, later on, maybe you'll see results.

[Valence]

You literally did mostly just get lucky if that's from purely solo queueing. You're 1 player in a 72 players match; 1 person on a 24 person team, you make up only 4% of your team. So either you're some amazing player that is able to carry the random teams you end up on to sway that drastic of a win rate, or much more likely, you're above average and you got lucky with the matchmaking system.

And I say this having achieved a much higher win rate solo-queuing the past week on one of my alts, over 40 matches. I'm not going to pretend I'm some amazing PvPer, I know I'm decent enough at it, but I also know full well that a huge part of it was getting really lucky with matchmaking and ending up on teams with competent team mates that knew how to work together. And yes, more than a few of those matches I ended up on the same team as premade groups.

I'm by no means at the top of FL tryhards and honestly, I could probably do a lot better if I cared and practiced. I'm mostly a CC player and I don't play FLs that much. I just chill here if I need to, and I'm as you say, at best above average. I can however consistently get to BH3-4 on DRG after barely 2 LBs, or even before, because that's how potent DRG is in FLs. 3 LBs should bring you at BH5. Now then, using the power of napkin math as well, if you manage on your own, solo, no premade, to get consistently 2-3 kills on average per LB during team engagements, you essentially remove 10% of the enemy's numbers (on top of the AoE splash that didn't kill other players), and that alone can make a game swing in your favor. Now then, it also depends of what the other team is fielding, yes, and if they're doing the same thing, how effectively, etc. 1 player doing this will be hard pressed to even match a premade doing this because there is 4 of them, but 4 players even solo, doing this, definitely can. The premades aren't a problem, because as soon as you remove them from the picture, you'll still end up with the same whining about DRGs good players murdering everybody.

With that said, let's just ask then, what is your global ratio, with a good sample amount then? Can you honestly tell me in the eyes that past thousands of games, it's just sheer luck? Yeah i'm sure CC players at the top are all there by sheer luck as well. B-but they have much more weight! Yeah and you wanna bet how much higher their ratio will be if we just take their casual games? Unfortunately harder to track, but I have little doubt about it.

[Valence]

Cutting up each and every problem and examining them in isolation doesn't mean anything, because you'll never encounter these things in isolation in a match. Offering cookie-cutter advice to dealing with them doesn't mean anything, because Frontlines isn't a vacuum. That's just the way it is.

You can try these, and should, because there's good advice to be had, but if they were just fix-all's and worked every time, I don't think we'd be here right now.

See, I'd agree with that statement, because it's the same in CC, and I'm sick of people using the same cookiee cutter, perfect scenario replies. However, the problem I have right now, is that I can't relate at all.

Like, I agreed with some points actually, but some like shields? I never had any issue with shields? Shields are inconsequential, what matters in FLs is crowd control and catching people so they're screwed in the middle of your blob, or out of position (with your blob pouncing on them). That's pretty much all there is to it. I'm honestly curious how you find shields a problem, how you find tank invulns even a problem either. Tank pops invuln, yeah, so what? Kill another target. Why are they getting away with it could be the better question to ask. Getting caught by salted earth? Just guard. How hard is even just pressing a guard button? What other point does even intersect with this to make this invalid somehow? I'm genuinely trying to think of situations that would compound otherwise, but I can't.

Now, if the actual point is "i can't punish the stupid BH5 DRG everytime I try to stun them once they're back down", then yeah, fortunately, you can't truly hope having a 100% success rate at this, and if you had, then nobody would use DRG like that anymore (or perhaps they still would if it allows them to kill multiples each time... but harder to pull without BH).