Frontlines sucks Ultra megathread

[Sinstrel]

As an individual, you really don't have a solution in a match like this. Your actions are completely irrelevant. We can bemoan the fact that the average skill level of most FL players is low, but that doesn't magically improve it. And it's not a question of "blaming" the premades.

Apparently these eight individuals, on finding their two premades on the same team, concluded correctly they had no need of their 16 team-mates, and communicated only with each other. They massacred the opposition. Could that opposition have put up more of a fight? Yes, of course, but can we please live in the real world? Are 48 randos on Dynamis going to stand a chance against an 8-stack on voice? Of course not. That is precisely why these premades visited Dynamis!

I believe everyone here wants the skill of players in FL to increase. As you note, over the last two years that hasn't happened. Why is that? Do we just continue hoping it will, and citing guides the vast majority of players will never read? Are such players likely to seek out help when the "PvP community" continues to exhibit such contempt towards them?

Without significant modifications to the mode, there is no reason to suppose anything will change.

Points 1 and 2: I do agree that you don't have any solution in this particular match. And that single handed inexperienced actions are completely irrelevant. But these views are very shortsighted of the bigger picture of increasing the quality of matches on your DC over time. Player skill/experienced isn't gained instantly from reading a guide. It takes a lot of time, practice and willingness to learn in combination with said guides. And in the case of new data centers, it is also a communal effort to collectively raise the bar for everyone on the data center.

All of the resources I've mentioned were built up over time by an entire community of contributors among each data center. As more individual players take it upon themselves to improve their own play, the skill floor will gradually raise as well. People on Aether used to server travel across all the servers on the data center promoting PvP discords, events, guides, etc. for years. People joined up over time and the entire skill level of the data center increased. Eventually, pre- and early ShB there were so many commanders that they'd legit be fighting eachother for the dorito marker to lead the alliance. And as I've mentioned before, 48 randoms can indeed steam roll 8 players on voice. All it takes is a single experienced commander and a baseline level of skill from the rest of the alliance of randoms.

Are any such efforts being made on Dynamis? If not, why not? The hard work has already been done. The guides are already made. Disseminate and promote them within your data center.

Point 3: There are definitely people who will help you learn if you directly and personally reach out (myself included). However I do agree the general NA community tends to be just as toxic as they are helpful. I say this with the caveat of only being in the PvP Paisa discord. There are great people in there but its also used a lot for post-match ranting about how bad everyone else on your team was in Feast/CC which is definitely off-putting for new players especially with how fragile the XIV community is in general. I made a few great friends from the discord and never needed to join one again, so even if you don't like discord groups they can be great for finding training partners if nothing else.

[Mawlzy]

Speaking of nodes, the ones doing the killing were also taking them into neutral *and leaving them that way* to use as bait.

More likely they were doing that for padding purposes. Not getting points from objectives gives more headroom to achieve better personal stats. While I believe many premades are taking what the mode gives them and trying to win as efficiently as possible, there's clearly a group with different goals.

[Mawlzy]

We are interested to know how premade advocates explain these farming expeditions to Dynamis, specifically in the context of their claim that they want high-quality, competitive matches. Or are these particular <Traveler> missions carried out by a few bad apples? We admire the dedication given the current instability in cross-DC travel, but detect an inconsistency with the published positions of premade commanders, supporters, and other hangers-on.

We are also interested to hear that the "silent premades" that have started to appear on Aether are now also on Dynamis. Those Discord voice channels must be abuzz with frenetic activity. However, we are not sure how this is helping to teach rookies the mode, other than the tacit message that it sucks synonym-for-a-donkey.

But La Résistance is not here to judge! Simply to note that highly-skilled premades visiting a young DC with an extremely inexperienced PvP player base produces this... It looks to us like complete garbage. Indeed, it is a revealing magnification of the issues facing mature DCs, on which players of vastly different skill levels are placed on the same battlefield.

To encourage rookies to stay and learn, and to prevent veterans from being exposed to miserable matches such as the one presented by comrade Aidorouge, we repeat our call for a tiered matching system.

(Statement prepared by Jessa "Pero" Marko on behalf of the Agitprop Division
Reporting simultaneously to the Executive Committee of La Résistance and the Fifth International)

[Wilford111]

https://imgur.com/a/2dnyj3N

Anyone who thinks this is okay is seriously deluded.

btw we lost, because the other team had more Dark Knights. SE should seriously just delete Frontline if they aren't going to do anything about the horrendous balance. What a joke. How long have they had to fix it, and did nothing? What is going on over there?

[Aravell]

So, I don't have a horse in this race because I'm neither pro-premade nor anti-premade, but I do think both sides have a point.

The pro-premades have a point that premades aren't the whole issue with frontlines and that people who find every reason to give up and leech exp are very much detrimental to the game mode. Also they're right that it's not their obligation to make sure their opponents have fun in the game.

However, the anti-premades do also have a point that new players being completely destroyed by a coordinated group and not knowing what to do about it would cause the new player to just abandon the mode when they could've eventually become a regular player.

Neither side is fully in the wrong here.

[Mawlzy]

So, I don't have a horse in this race because I'm neither pro-premade nor anti-premade, but I do think both sides have a point.

The pro-premades have a point that premades aren't the whole issue with frontlines and that people who find every reason to give up and leech exp are very much detrimental to the game mode. Also they're right that it's not their obligation to make sure their opponents have fun in the game.

However, the anti-premades do also have a point that new players being completely destroyed by a coordinated group and not knowing what to do about it would cause the new player to just abandon the mode when they could've eventually become a regular player.

Neither side is fully in the wrong here.

I completely agree with this. I've been persuaded by the arguments of others that, contrary to my starting position, banning premades is a blunt instrument and lazy method of making matches more interesting for all players. But so long as FL offers massive XP rewards, the non-combatants aren't going anywhere, and SQEX sure as hell isn't going to start banning people for doing insufficient damage. Meanwhile, new players conclude the mode is -- to quote one today -- "dogwater."

If someone can tell me how we can achieve a rapprochement, I'm all ears. Otherwise, the battlefield is simply going to get more toxic. I think three ranked tiers would work. It does in many other PvP games.

[AllenThyl]

And yet that's exactly what happened, unless you really think those 48 people did nothing at all the whole time (as opposed to the last minute when they knew they were cooked and done), which doesn't seem to be the case considering how many times they would have needed to die to get that score, or how Yellow was at least trying to take nodes.

You yourself admit that you constantly engage in lethargic behavior. So yes, it can actually be reasonably assumed that quite a number of people basically did "nothing at all" the whole time.

or how I actively ignore "commanders" because these people are *not* playing to my benefit but my active detriment by demanding I play an NPC in "their" mode.

"I deliberately and actively engage in behavior I know is detrimental to my team's success, why are my teams not having much success?"
You are playing a team game. Your ego will have to take a back seat for 12 mins. You are the Warrior of Light only in terms of story, you aren't really the center of the universe. To the enemies, you are just <jobname>. Stop being so unbelievably entitled in a competitive game mode, and start working on your own attitude.

So no, I don't want anything to do with people from these guides, Discords, linkshells, etc because they're the reason the mode sucks to begin with and I would sooner get banned than turn into such a loathsome thing. The only thing they are to me at this point are enemy units I can't target, and if that sounds toxic or hostile to you, I'm simply giving the same energy back because this "community" you speak of never cared about making things better for anyone other than themselves, so spare me the faux-altruism.

Or, you know, stop queueing. That is an option. If you don't intent do be a net positive for your own team anyway, just stay away.

It's not even *just* new players, where exactly is the motivation supposed to be for regular players like myself when I'm no better at stopping a premade from doing what they're going to do whether I'm on their side or not?

If you cannot motivate yourself to engage in a gamemode you voluntarily queued for yourself, why should this burden then somehow fall on others? You have excuses for everything, but show very little personal responsibility for anything it seems.

Is this what PVP (and PVE) has decayed to in this game? That the majority of the group is forced to play a captive audience for someone else to flex on? Seems like another example of "I don't think this community is as well-meaning and cooperative as people think it is" when some of our biggest topics that a *lot* of us keeping popping up in are about premades and "slow-solo" tanks in the Duty Finder, or how one mode is completely dominated by one job with its one skill, while the other mode can't even bloody justify the existence of AN ENTIRE ROLE!

You get the community you foster. By enabling feeders, griefers, afkers, dps who don't aoe in a dungeon, NINs that use doton on single targets, healers that only heal, healers that don't heal at all, tanks who don't mitigate, never calling anyone out for these behaviors but aggressively shouting down anyone that does, you get a community of precisely that. Which makes the few people who actually do give a damn about the game that they pay money for, and invest a lot of time in, actually stand out like a sore thumb. Also, PvP content isn't "cooperative", it's competitive. Just because Frontline doesn't have some league mode or similar, doesn't mean it's not competitive. The other teams aren't interested in giving you a fun match, they are there to win, and that means killing you as often as possible whenever possible. And YOU should have the same motivation.

And for all of that which can be laid at Square-Enix's feet for their less than ideal design decisions, it was ultimately the playerbase that chose to exploit those flaws until we became our own worst enemies. Hell, almost have half a mind to make a separate topic precisely pointing this out...

"Exploit". DRK's pull in doesn't have 20000 km range, stop standing together tightly packed every single second of every single game. The maps are 3D and offer lots of space and at times verticality to have map presence without being an easy target.