Remove EXP from Frontline

[IvoryBadge]

I honestly am a bit tired of the "less skilled player" excuse..

To me it seems:
-Or ppl dont care to win or lose (for now, so this is why losers should not get points, tomes, etc)
-Or ppl dont know how to read points and what the winning conditions are (and so they should get personal help and/or get back to school)

One of the 2


Edit for an example: I just finished a match in Seal Rock, while my team was winning (we were red if i recall correctly). In the end we let Adders win cause (even if me and another person was gently calling in chat) everybody just completely ignore some tomeliths and adders gaining points little by little with theirs.

Right? Like I don’t understand why SE is trying to babysit people who aren’t even interested in PvP in the first place? It’s PLAYER VS PLAYER you’re supposed to compete and coordinate with teammates. You shouldn’t get rewarded for doing nothing at all. You don’t like it? Don’t queue for it. How is that hard to get?

2nd getting half and 3rd gets no rewards will make it much better than this everyone is a winner BS. Either that or remove daily roulette frontline.

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

2nd getting half and 3rd gets no rewards will make it much better than this everyone is a winner BS. Either that or remove daily roulette frontline.

The issue with your suggestion is that rather than incentivizing playing better and striving for not being last place, you are cutting out EXP for NOT being 1st place. This still very much means "if you want reward then play better" but you are punishing for ending up in 3rd place rather than incentivizing becoming 1st place, like how I suggested in your thread's first comment.

If you'd want to implement a "remove ALL exp from 3rd place" you'd then need to make the rewards for 1st place astronomically high to make up for the risk of "3rd place gets nothing". If you do not, you only introduced punishment, which by every game design standard is a completely unreasonable implementation and generally met with negative feedback by a significant chunk of your playerbase.

The reason why I suggested amping the rewards for 1st + 2nd place rather than cutting/removing them from 2nd and 3rd is because you can't alienate players who aren't as good and might take time to improve by cutting off "everything" from them and say "you only get dinner if you get an A, you get a slice of bread if you get a B"; that will not improve the morale to be better. You want to keep what is already there and incentivize winning, not punish losing.

Furthermore, another reason why making 3rd place get nothing or close to nothing is a bad idea is because Frontlines has to compete with every other type of content for player participation providing EXP, tomes and even PvP currency. Why on earth would I want to spend 10-20 minutes on a duty I might have a 33.3% chance of getting no rewards at all from when I could do 3x Crystalline Conflict OR 1x Levelling Roulette + 1x Trial Roulette OR be on a hunt train for tomes?

IvoryBadge, let me be absolutely clear here - no sane game developer will punish the existing player base over incentivizing them because a small sub group of players is mad at not everyone being 100% interested in giving it their all in PvP all the time.

[Toutatis]

The issue with your suggestion is that rather than incentivizing playing better and striving for not being last place, you are cutting out EXP for NOT being 1st place. This still very much means "if you want reward then play better" but you are punishing for ending up in 3rd place rather than incentivizing becoming 1st place, like how I suggested in your thread's first comment.

Absolutely agree with this and everything you said in that post. The punishment would be too harsh and would drive people away.

You can solo queue and end up in a bad group that has no chance of winning. Why should the unlucky players who ended up in such groups be punished despite the fact that they put the effort?

You can also have 2-3 good groups that keep the score very tight and the outcome is decided at the very end.

It’s 20 minutes and people should get something. They’d just kill the queue if they remove rewards for 2nd and 3rd and it would become more toxic.

[Jettinson]

I solo que all the time and past week has been mostly 3rd place despite trying my damnest to help the team and some matches, despite being close, still end up last.

Imagine wasting a whole week of no rewards, I'll be sure to not even bother playing Frontlines or even be more toxic toward others

[IvoryBadge]

no sane game developer will punish the existing player base over incentivizing them because a small sub group of players is mad at not everyone being 100% interested in giving it their all in PvP all the time.

I’m new to the forums and idk how to quote every part, so pardon me for this wall of text.

Allow me to explain my main point which is getting rid of sleepers/ people who don’t like PvP:
1-the most important thing is FUN. when your alliance get held back by people who aren’t here for PvP, it’s not fun running away constantly because most of your alliance are semi AFK and aren’t there to back you up, it’s not fun getting steamrolled over and over because you’re one of few who are trying to get big node/ice (that are literally the closest to your base), it’s not fun calling out for strategies and objectives and get shut down by the IDC people and you can’t do anything about it. If that wasn’t the case even if i lose despite the whole alliance playing decently I’d be happy and say “gg team we did great, the enemy earned their win”.

2-the reward shouldn’t always be EXP, that would be great when there’s a growth system but there isn’t, it’s just a one and done thing (Series EXP) so as I’ve said before, make [UNIQUE] rewards both short and long term for Frontline to incentivise people who’re after rewards. Current achievements are cool but they aren’t enough imo, Wolf marks rewards are just outdated (let alone glams which are very bad textured), most titles are lame GC related titles. giving rewards for randoms who aren’t even PVPing? That’s just beyond me.
As for the 3rd not getting anything, one thing that can make up for it is maybe changing how some achievement point accumulates? That’s all i can get out of my head rn so idk good luck next time ig? Like …
Also by having less grievers the chances of always getting 3rd place gets lowered by a large margin, because it’s way more competitive when everyone is actually playing the thing they queued for.


3-let’s not pretend as if it’s a game breaker removing Frontline from daily roulette, ask anyone about FL and they’ll just down talk that mode like there’s no tomorrow. recently i found out through a friend who i met through Frontline, that there’s a ranking page in the lodestone (first ranks mostly dominated by premades) The ranking doesn’t provide any specific data but it’s nice seeing how many FL enjoyers there are per server/DC. So the concern of the mode being dead is thrown away.

4-which is relevant to the first one, PVP is for PVPers first, again I’m not trying to gatekeep, all i want is having a good experience with players on different levels of skills, good or bad. getting rid of grievers will make it a lot better for the long term, and the devs can improve a lot by giving more attention to this game mode when the players are genuine about it.


My brain is fried up now because English is kinda rough ngl

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

I’m new to the forums and idk how to quote every part, so pardon me for this wall of text.

Copy the "QUOTE=name" in brackets before each part you quote and end it with a /QUOTE, that's how you can split up a quote.

1-

Again, we are on the same page with the existence of sleepers being bad, you are just going at it with a really bad method. Removing / cutting down incentives for weak participation will simply reduce the player pool because players who aren't good enough will say "why bother". Congratulations, you filtered out people who aren't good at PvP or maybe have no drive to become better, increasing the queue times for everyone involved for absolutely zero benefit.

The reason why it is better to amp rewards for strong participation and achieving 2nd and 1st place is because it doesn't filter out people who aren't good at the game, but rather incentivizes them to become better. And even if not, you still have matches forming at the same or better pace because you used incentive rather than punishment.

Carrot on a stick instead of whip.

2-

There is no point re-inventing the wheel in what rewards should and shouldn't be given to players. Before the addition of job EXP, Frontlines actually had far less participation for obvious reasons. It essentially hinged on everything else incentivizing players to play, which back then wasn't great. The reason why the reward pool for PvP is so inflated (EXP, Wolfmarks, GC EXP, Series EXP -> Trophy Crystals, Tomestones of all types) is so people of all facettes of the game can come into PvP and not feel like they wasted their time having fun when they gained a sizeable amount of resources. It's the same reason why roulettes had their payouts increased over the years to keep players running those to facilitate queues for players who need certain duties.

Simply don't punish 3rd and instead incentivize 2nd and 1st further.

3-

This is 100% a gamebreaker and it is not even funny how much it is. I played when roulettes of various kinds did not exist yet, including Daily Challenge Frontlines and it was a nightmare to get instances to pop with the good will and hope of the community. The main thing that held people reward wise was GARO glamour and even then it was far from enough. Right now we are having the exact same issue with Rival Wings right now because the mode is large-scale just like Frontlines but holds zero additional benefits over playing Frontlines - so it is currently at the mercy of noble parts of the community trying their hardest to organize events to ensure it pops or Moogle Tomestone events doing the trick.

The Frontlines rankings page is nice to look at but compared to Feast / Crystalline Conflict Ranked leaderboards they simply hold no meaning and don't create player drive.

4-

People will do minimal things if you let them get away with doing minimal things. As long as there is no game system that grades performance (specifically player activity throughout the match) and lets you leech off driving around the map and suiciding into the enemy, there will be no way to deal with griefers or leeches. The more realistic thing you can do is to incentivize them to stop leeching by amping the rewards for winning because it will suddenly make it worth their time if they could get 3 x rewards for winning for example.

Closing words - you need people to join your game even if there are potential leeches and griefers among them, because the only thing worse than those for someone who enjoys PvP is them not being able to play PvP at all or with extreme queue times. i know this one extremely well because I played The Feast back with 30-300min queue times for one match, I know what suffering in a queue is.

[IvoryBadge]

I solo que all the time and past week has been mostly 3rd place despite trying my damnest to help the team and some matches, despite being close, still end up last.

Imagine wasting a whole week of no rewards, I'll be sure to not even bother playing Frontlines or even be more toxic toward others

Again, it’s all because of these grievers, which is why i started this thread.

As for the close matches, not every day is a win, give and take. most of us here give it our all and we aren’t always winning

[Lorentz]

Frontlines aren't a competitive mode, and a 24v24v24 mode shouldn't be, competitive anyway, there could be a case for an 8v8v8 but even then, the maps simply aren't designed for such. Removing the experience reward would kill Frontlines as they are.

[Bonoki]

Frontlines aren't a competitive mode, and a 24v24v24 mode shouldn't be, competitive anyway, there could be a case for an 8v8v8 but even then, the maps simply aren't designed for such. Removing the experience reward would kill Frontlines as they are.

Frontlines USE to be a competitive mode but that was until Feast and Crystalline Conflict took over.

[Yeti851]

I really do feel that, as of right now, there is no great solution for this:

1) You can remove XP entirely. This would keep it filled mostly with active PvPers. The issue is, there is not much incentive outside the Season rewards and the limited currency rewards. This solution would make queues longer, but lead to better quality matches. It also wouldn't really work well unless PvP rewards were greatly expanded.

2) You can tier XP based on performance. Make it like... (based on current XP yield for a win) 70% for 3rd, 140% for 2nd, and 210% for 1st. While this might incentivize people to participate more, you will still get people who join and do the bare minimum.

The game also needs to make Vote Kicking a bit more accessible. It's kinda hidden in the UI. There's plenty of matches where I'd vote to kick very inactive players if it wasn't a waste of time to try and find where it is (since I don't do it very often anyways). It should be an option under right clicking a player in your party.

I do hope this gets fixed. I'd rather wait 15 minutes for a good and competitive FL match than 2-3 minutes and risk getting on extremely passive teams.