What's going on Frontlines?

[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]

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.

[Xylira]

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.

I never said it was all luck, but luck definitely plays a huge part when you're solo queuing. You could be the best PvPer in the game, and it means nothing if you end up matched with a team of people who are terrible at PvP, or otherwise don't care and just want to face roll their way through the roulette bonus, moogle tomes, and/or series XP. Especially so if you're matched against enemy teams who actually care about trying to win and coordinate, which is doubly so when they have one or more premade groups that are queuing together to do exactly that.

As per my own personal win ratio, I have a good bit more more wins than losses. Some weeks I have amazing runs and consistently end up on good teams, other weeks it feels like the matchmaking system is going out of it's way to punish me by dumping me on terrible teams. I don't try-hard in FL and run in premades, I only ever solo queue, and because of that my win ratio trends more toward average than the outlier week I had on my alt. Though ironically, this past week I played AST almost exclusively on my alt, which I'm kind of seeing an argument that AST could probably do with being nerfed a bit.