Frontlines sucks Ultra megathread

[Archeron]

"Avoid" is defintely what people are doing when premades are in queue. It's baffling how they can't see this, but I guess the walls around the premade clique are opaque.

[IDontPetLalas]

"Avoid" is defintely what people are doing when premades are in queue. It's baffling how they can't see this, but I guess the walls around the premade clique are opaque.

You know, I would agree that if a pre-made ( a competent one) in not in your alliance, it is more difficult to win, however some people seem to basically throw in the towel as soon as they encounter one.

The term "avoid", seems inaccurate to me, since some of them remain in the match but basically give up - "avoiding" would meaning leaving or avoiding FL, which they don't seem to do - but, they don't seem to want to improve, either. So I wonder why they queue, since how much fun can that be for them- and that definitely doesn't make things fun for some other people in their alliance.

[Mawlzy]

You know, I would agree that if a pre-made ( a competent one) in not in your alliance, it is more difficult to win, however some people seem to basically throw in the towel as soon as they encounter one.

The term "avoid", seems inaccurate to me, since some of them remain in the match but basically give up - "avoiding" would meaning leaving or avoiding FL, which they don't seem to do - but, they don't seem to want to improve, either. So I wonder why they queue, since how much fun can that be for them- and that definitely doesn't make things fun for some other people in their alliance.

Perhaps they have concluded that, even if they improved, they'd never reach the point where they could overcome the baked-in advantage enjoyed by premades?

Do you think when you find one of 'em tucked behind a rock or camped at the spawn point that repeated use of "/slap" on them would violate ToS?

[IDontPetLalas]

Perhaps they have concluded that, even if they improved, they'd never reach the point where they could overcome the baked-in advantage enjoyed by premades?

Do you think when you find one of 'em tucked behind a rock or camped at the spawn point that repeated use of "/slap" on them would violate ToS?

They could join up with some friend themselves, or other people. By the way pre-mades don't necessarily have some enormous "bake-in" advantage, it depends upon a number of factors. However if they are so discouraged, it goes to the "are you going fun?" question- if someone isn't, then why are they there, and even worse why would you potentially make other people's experience worse? I don't understand that.

Personally, I don't "/slap" I have been known however to resort to "/facepalm", though not repeatedly.

[JuicyHeals]

Yeah I have to say FL has become much less fun as a solo player, even when I'm on the team with the DRK and 5 Astros it's just not fun being so one sided.

But I suppose nothing will change until SE starts giving a shit about FL and not balancing everything around CC

[Aravell]

Olivia, I'm sure nobody has accused you of lacking self-confidence, but the entire evolution of FL has been to further restrict parties/premades. If these bloody "events" and Discord-based shenanigans get worse, as you seem to hope, that evolution may well get pushed to its logical conclusion.

While I'm not certain how NA will react to an increase in commanders and premades (probably negatively, if current sentiment continues). JP actually reacted positively to the very same thing. They have, I think, 8-10 famous commanders running around, dodging a premade is basically impossible, the players adapted by filing in behind the premade on their team and doing everything they can to support them.

As a purely solo player myself, I personally view the increase of commander types and premades as a good thing. If people are sick of dying all the time, it forces them to learn map awareness and positioning. It's also fun to get matches where everyone on the scoreboard has died at least once, I'd prefer that over one-sided stomps.

[Mawlzy]

While I'm not certain how NA will react to an increase in commanders and premades (probably negatively, if current sentiment continues). JP actually reacted positively to the very same thing. They have, I think, 8-10 famous commanders running around, dodging a premade is basically impossible, the players adapted by filing in behind the premade on their team and doing everything they can to support them.

As a purely solo player myself, I personally view the increase of commander types and premades as a good thing. If people are sick of dying all the time, it forces them to learn map awareness and positioning. It's also fun to get matches where everyone on the scoreboard has died at least once, I'd prefer that over one-sided stomps.

One-sided stomps are definitely a possible negative outcome of premades that make the match dull for nearly everyone. But I think it's inaccurate to conflate the positives of a commander with a commander of a premade. Some direction helps, and the weaker the team, the more useful a forceful commander becomes. But a solo commander produces a very different match from a premade leader who is also shot-calling.

Some of the most enjoyable matches I've had feature very little chat at all. I guess there's some selection bias in there, in the sense that if the match is competitive without commands, the players are more competent than usual.

I do worry that, with a new generation of mini-Olivias taking the helm, the times they end up on the same team will just magnify the current problems. I guess I can hope they'll self-destruct through infighting.

[Aravell]

What I was trying to express is that a lot of the defeatism and non-engagement by causal players is, IMO, being driven by the fact many such players regard mixed queues as unfair. I base this on chat in Aether FL matches. One can sometimes exploit this sense of injustice to rally the troops. And while it can indeed be fun, it seems a rather roundabout way of generating interesting matches when other structural solutions are available.

While mixed queues may be unfair because premades may have a communication advantage, you also can't really argue that FL would be fair in any way if they did remove premades.

As long as there's no matchmaking rating, matches will never be fair. Instead of the team with the premade winning, it will be the team with 2-3 people that have less than 10k damage done and have more than 5 deaths that will lose.

If you remove the upper portion of contribution by removing premades, you'll end up with the lower end of contributors having that much bigger of an impact on the outcome of a match. Those people will feed, regardless of there being premades or not.

[Mawlzy]

While mixed queues may be unfair because premades may have a communication advantage, you also can't really argue that FL would be fair in any way if they did remove premades.

As long as there's no matchmaking rating, matches will never be fair. Instead of the team with the premade winning, it will be the team with 2-3 people that have less than 10k damage done and have more than 5 deaths that will lose.

If you remove the upper portion of contribution by removing premades, you'll end up with the lower end of contributors having that much bigger of an impact on the outcome of a match. Those people will feed, regardless of there being premades or not.

You've made that point before and I don't agree with it. If there is a single premade in the match, you have a 71% chance of not being on that team. The distribution of weak players is random. While you will occasionally find that you have an unusually high proportion of people who don't care, that's a random process comparable to getting bad spawns.

Their presence has nothing like the impact a good premade can have.

You're correct that without a matchmaking algorithm that any individual match likely has a skill imbalance. Again this is simply a statistical deviation arising from the distribution of skill in the overall pool. It has nothing to do with "fairness." It may be, all other things being equal, a bookmaker would give you a 28% chance of winning a given match because of particularly weak team-mates. So what? Next time maybe it's 38%. It washes out. I would love it if everyone who queued into FL was trying, and a matchmaking algorithm is an interesting idea. But bad players isn't a fairness issue.

Besides I think this discussion is being driven by the quality of games and the health of the mode, not by win %. But if you want to take that route, the presence of premades guarantees that an average player who doesn't command has a long-term win-rate below 33.3%! The presence of weak players has no impact whatsoever on the long-term win %.

[Archeron]

The bottom % of players already dictate how most matches go, regardless of if there is a premade on their team or not. Dead weight players are bad enough that even premade teams cannot carry them to a win.

The "Upper portion" of the community should not be SOLEY attributed to premades. I'd wager they aren't even top bracket players in most instances if they queued without the premade. The upper bracket of players are those who rank high ratings in one or several categories like DMG/Assists/Healing/Kills/Caps, and players who help to coordinate their team effectively. None of this is exclusive to premades. The aftermath of a world where we either removed them outright, or reduced premade parties down to 2 players would be fairer matches. Note the key word "Fairer" here. PvP will be unfair in some aspects by nature, its just a matter of it not being unfair to the point where it becomes impossible to overcome with skill. A great example of this is Seal rock. The map has obvious terrain advantages/disadvantages that have been known about for ages, yet the winrates for all teams are fairly even in my experience.

I don't disagree with implementing a MMR system of some kind, even if it were hidden. It could even be perfectly acceptable in such a system if premade teams were paired against 2 enemy teams with more skilled players. I just highly doubt that Square is willing to invest that much in the way of development resources into a mode they have shown no interest in providing regular content to.