Frontlines sucks Ultra megathread

[CosmoBabylonia]

Good luck finding enough "experienced solo players" to turn the tide, especially when:

1) Shot callers dont need to be alive to continue commanding, and even if you mean the local premade callouts more than the field commanding itself, it's not like somebody else can't pick up callouts anyway.
2) Experienced solo players don't always play the meta jobs
3) Disrupting the DRK is only gonna delay the moment your whole alliance of casuals is gonna get kitchen sinked
4) I have rarely seen more experienced solo players in my team than there was in the premades facing us


Edit: I realize re-reading that you meant by picking out, solo players in your team immediately falling in line with a competent driver (DRK for instance). If so, I need to go play on Coeurl because I've never seen that once in my life, and believe me I tried asking people. Nobody was interested, even the "experienced solo players". Fact of the matter is, nobody cares enough, me included. It's not something most people find enjoyable for the reasons I exposed already.
Odds are, if actual solo players followed you or some random driver that well, they were probably either part of a premade you didn't detect, or premade afficionados playing solo.

Your mileage will vary. It's one of the most hilarious things ever when it falls into place where 24 people will drive a train so hard and kill everything. The reason why I made that post is because I've seen a lot of times where a good pre-made stack is absolutely trashed because the team will simply not play ball.

Also if you want to have some fun even when losing, again your mileage will vary if people are willing to join in, is to completely camp the pre-made stack which I've pulled off a few times leading a team of randoms. What you do is call out in chat that the new team goal is to make the pre-made team lose and help the other losing team win at all costs. Sometimes when that call is made, a miracle happens and the team pulls together and go kill the pre-mades. I've done this successfully a few times, which is to say never underestimate the pure unadulterated hatred that some people have for pre-mades. It's rather entertaining when you can pull this off with a team of complete randoms. Imagine playing techies in Dota.

[Scintilla]

Also if you want to have some fun even when losing, again your mileage will vary if people are willing to join in, is to completely camp the pre-made stack which I've pulled off a few times leading a team of randoms. What you do is call out in chat that the new team goal is to make the pre-made team lose and help the other losing team win at all costs.

Not saying it's impossible: it happens on occasions, but it's very unlikely.

First it requires almost the entire team to commit to this new 'goal' - a goal which often means putting objectives to one side and channeling focus instead on PvP to camp out in the premade team base. Given the number of casual players in Frontlines who are there primarily for the daily, I don't think I need to elaborate too much on how low chances of persuading a team do this can be. Even in the event that you do get your team to focus on the premade, it only takes an A or S rank node to spawn and you lose half your team to that, leaving the remainder to feed the premade. Try to call for focus on the premade, and you'll regularly get conflict calls to focus on objectives instead or to try to avoid the premade team. And that's not counting the number of teams who just take the defeatist attitude of "we can't do anything. Lets just end it quickly". It's particularly difficult to get this support early in the game while the premade are likely to be trailing slightly on points, as it goes against normal practice of 'focus on the winning team'. By the time they've built a notable point lead, they've also farmed very high BH and have begun to take easy control of the game. The two random teams wake up to the reality too late to stop them.

Secondly, it usually requires an unspoken alliance with the other random team, having both teams working together continuously to focus down the premade. Even in the event that your own team are willing to commit to this new goal, there is no guarantee that the same could be said of the other random team.
Common decisions include:
- They instead decide that the best course of action is to leave the other random alliance to 'fight' (die to) the premade alone, while they try to take unguarded nodes in the meantime. Obviously this doesn't work as the other random alliance tend to get flattened very quickly, the premade continue to get the BH, and the fight comes to the 'objective-driven' team anyway.
- They decide to try to leech from the premade and together farm the other random team, basically handing the win to the premade just to secure second-place for themselves.

[CosmoBabylonia]

Not saying it's impossible: it happens on occasions, but it's very unlikely.

First it requires almost the entire team to commit to this new 'goal' - a goal which often means putting objectives to one side and channeling focus instead on PvP to camp out in the premade team base. Given the number of casual players in Frontlines who are there primarily for the daily, I don't think I need to elaborate too much on how low chances of persuading a team do this can be. Even in the event that you do get your team to focus on the premade, it only takes an A or S rank node to spawn and you lose half your team to that, leaving the remainder to feed the premade. Try to call for focus on the premade, and you'll regularly get conflict calls to focus on objectives instead or to try to avoid the premade team. And that's not counting the number of teams who just take the defeatist attitude of "we can't do anything. Lets just end it quickly". It's particularly difficult to get this support early in the game while the premade are likely to be trailing slightly on points, as it goes against normal practice of 'focus on the winning team'. By the time they've built a notable point lead, they've also farmed very high BH and have begun to take easy control of the game. The two random teams wake up to the reality too late to stop them.

Secondly, it usually requires an unspoken alliance with the other random team, having both teams working together continuously to focus down the premade. Even in the event that your own team are willing to commit to this new goal, there is no guarantee that the same could be said of the other random team.
Common decisions include:
- They instead decide that the best course of action is to leave the other random alliance to 'fight' (die to) the premade alone, while they try to take unguarded nodes in the meantime. Obviously this doesn't work as the other random alliance tend to get flattened very quickly, the premade continue to get the BH, and the fight comes to the 'objective-driven' team anyway.
- They decide to try to leech from the premade and together farm the other random team, basically handing the win to the premade just to secure second-place for themselves.

Agreed on all points. It's rare to have the team suddenly unite and commit, and it's even rarer for the team that you are trying to help realize what's going on to cooperate. It can definitely happen, and when both scenarios occured it was the most fun I've ever had in FL since about 2020...

[AriannaStormwake]

well i got a yellow premade(on the enemy team) together with stacking bh5 and ambushes(stunlocks and limit break stacking) which led to another lowscore third
after we started catching up to get 2nd too it wasnt fun

[Valence]

Yeah well, doesnt happen here. NA sounds like a wild place. What happens usually when this is attempted is that half of the team doesn't listen or even understand the idea/concept, doesn't follow, and you end up with only half a team going against the target and just end up feeding them.

Not really sure how you pull off camping a whole team at spawn for more than a couple of minutes without getting attritioned to death tbh.

[Mawlzy]

Seems to me the summary of the last few posts is that premades aren't invincible (of course true, some are much better than others), and that there are low-probability scenarios when a team/teams coordinate to neuter the premade.

Such situations can be fun on the rare occasions they happen, but as Valence has emphasized so eloquently, the least-fun scenario for a decent solo player is to be on the same team as a premade. And when on a typical team opposing a premade, you're basically holding a banana in a bar fight when the other side have knives.

The solution seems pretty obvious to me.

[Colt47]

I mean frontlines is a problem because it isn't just about committing to a goal...

1) Targeting is a nightmare in frontlines and half the time I can't even target someone before they just dive back into the protection of their super cluster of players.
2) Ranged dps need a major range increase so that they can shoot targets that are behind the blue tanks trying to bait all the attacks. There needs to be a role to force or help break up these massive mobs and they just don't have them.
3) Fishing targets is too strong in frontlines. It works in CC because there isn't enough players to just flat out annihilate someone that gets fished by a holm gang or something, but in FF someone gets fished and then even guard isn't really enough since you'll be engulfed in less then a second.
4) Three kingdoms style pvp is just bad. I don't think there has ever been a time I've been in a first place team since the changes to jobs in pvp, and the majority of the time I've been on the teams that make third or second. There is no clear way to improve, no one is communicating, and it just turns into whichever team gets ahead first loses, since both other teams then pick on that team and continuously hound them well after they went down. This mode literally punishes trying to win.

This would mean that they'd have to set role restrictions on the groups, though. Like people would lose the ability to just swap to whatever or everyone would do ranged or everyone would just do what they do now with fishing players out with tanks or diving in as dark knights to eat up all the valuable damage skills.

[Niroken]

2) Ranged dps need a major range increase so that they can shoot targets that are behind the blue tanks trying to bait all the attacks. There needs to be a role to force or help break up these massive mobs and they just don't have them.

I wouldn't want this, they would just increase melee DR even more.

[IDontPetLalas]

"Three kingdoms style pvp is just bad."

Well, you're perfectly entitled to your opinion, I disagree, and want to keep this mode- we have RW as the 2 opponent large scale mode.

" I don't think there has ever been a time I've been in a first place team since the changes to jobs in pvp,"

That is odd, since even with RNG, you should somehow end up on a first -place team.

" and the majority of the time I've been on the teams that make third or second."

Due to pure RNG, that would make more sense.

" There is no clear way to improve, no one is communicating, and it just turns into whichever team gets ahead first loses, since both other teams then pick on that team and continuously hound them well after they went down. This mode literally punishes trying to win."

Well, I would disagree that the team that gets ahead first always loses. Yes, that can happen, however it is also quite possible that they build on their advantage and steamroll as they build BH as per the comments above- both can happen - that's exactly why the 3-way mode can be interesting.

[Valence]

I do agree that mathematically you'll be winning less, but I do think that the 3 ways system prevents a lot of snowballing, which still happens don't get me wrong, but imagine if the strongest team had literally no secondary check beyond your own alliance that apparently can't get the superiority no matter when you engage...