Ideas for frontline replacement.

[Amh_Wilzuun]

It is my opinion that frontline should just be replaced altogether with a different large scale PVP mode just like CC replaced The Feast.

I don’t hate frontline or anything, it’s nice casual roulette content to me, but it’s undeniable than the current PVP system is designed primarily for smaller scale skirmishes rather than huge groups of players squishing into each other (you could say this about old frontline too tbh, the mode has always had issues) The LBs and job design lead to cheesy synergy and strategies in large scale settings. The team that is able to group up the best and target one enemy at a time the best generally wins. If you are the one unlucky enough to be targeted in a bit team fight it’s over for you usually as you get melted in two seconds. This leads to cautious play where good players learn to never overextend as getting to close any enemies is basically instant deaths. That’s why melee jobs had to get ridiculous buffs in frontline in order to even be viable which leads to another problem where they are annoyingly tanky in more normal circumstances, and that only leads to ranged classes being further targeted by groups as the easy and squishy players for kills/points. There are also other issues with objectives like spawn RNG/etc that have already been discussed many times before.

With that rant out of the way, I think you can still have a large scale PVP game mode but focus it more on smaller skirmishes somehow since that is clearly what the current system is designed around. Doing this is a large open map would be tricky, but my proposal is an elimination/battle royale like system where you have multiple teams battling at the same time. Rather than the chaos and jank of 40 players in one area, you have smaller teams fighting each other concurrently. If your team wins a quick objective or even just wipes the other team, they move on to the next battle. This can also give the devs space to experiment with other objective types other than push the crystal and make this mode have more variety than CC. I am almost thinking of fall guys, but more like a tournament bracket. You could also do 10v10 or something instead of 5v5, which is still bigger than CC but not the craziness of frontline mosh pits.

It would need more fleshing out but I hope people can get the general idea of this. Maybe it could be something like this in practice: You get assigned to a team and get matched with another team and it’s a team death match setup where the first team to wipe is eliminated (or maybe there’s a limited res pool). Then you move on to the next round and now it’s a capture the point thing where you have like one to three points the teams are fighting to get the most uptime holding/downloading/etc. You move on and now there’s a challenge where you you have to gather coins/crystals/etc and you drop them upon death or etc (wasn’t the feast kind of like this?). Eventually you reach a final round which could be its own special challenge or maybe this could be a good spot for the classic TDM format.

[Amh_Wilzuun]

There’s a lot you could do. It might not have the big battle feel of frontline but I think the upsides of a change like this could be worth it, and they could figure out a way to still have the sense of scale without the jank of frontline mosh pits. What’s also really great about this is you have more control over you winning or not. In frontline it often feels like pure luck on whether you end up on the “winning team”. This would make farming frontline mounts a lot less frustrating. It would still be hard to make it to the end but you have more agency and it would be a similar excitement near the end as making it to the final round of fall guys or the top 10 in a battle royale

[Amh_Wilzuun]

Oh and I’d still want you to be able to queue with friends since I don’t envision this as being a ranked mode

[Taliriah]

As long as the battle high mechanic exists (a straightforward implementation of a slippery slope (aka positive feedback) mechanic which is a typical pvp game design mistake: https://www.sirlin.net/articles/slip...etual-comeback), frontline can't be considered anything than a joke, even beyond class balance.

[Yeti851]

I envision a game mode that literally could still be called Frontlines. It would more or less be a combination of Rival Wings and something like Star Wars Battlefront or Battlefield. It would also incorporate the ranking system from WoW Classic. I'll get to that in a bit.

The whole gimmick of the Grand Companies in three big teams fighting it out would completely end. It's unrealistic, annoying and, quite frankly, kind of broken. It would be like Rival Wings. Two teams with six parties of four, no repeating jobs in your party. You can queue with up to four players.

There would be a few maps, but they would all more or less be symmetrical, but spread out. You would have to split up initially to take all points (ideally, with your squad) but teams could maneuver around in smaller or larger groups. You'd have to play both offense and defense, since if you moved as a full squad of 24, the other team could spread out and take all your points. I think it'd also be neat to have a point close to each team's base that generates more points than the other ones. This would sort of make battle lines, preventing teams from just running all around the map.

This game mode would facilitate squad combat, but also larger scale combat with your team, letting people make callouts to help take points and overwhelm enemy attacks and defenses.

One cool thing would be to use the unused Grand Company ranks. Right now, we are all capped at Captain. How this would work is your weekly participation would determine your rank. Let's say you are a Storm Commander. If one week you play a lot of games, you would retain your rank of Commander, or even get up to Storm Marshal. If you slack another week, you might fall back down to Storm Captain. Your performance (win ratio) would also be factored in. Storm Champion would be one per server, and they would have to fight to keep their max rank. This would add a level of prestige to players who really dedicate a lot of time to Frontlines.

Let me know what you guys think!

[Aizuh]

I feel like they were planning to implement some sort of battle royal with the current play but layed into outdated maps. If they were going this route they'd need to remove 24/24/24 and set it as 4/4/4/4/4/4/4/4/4. things would probably be alot smoother this way

[Nikoto]

Replace it with Rival Wings.