Frontlines sucks Ultra megathread

[Aravell]

I'm sorry, but absolutely nothing justifies lethargic play. Lethargic play is very much against the rules and can be reported. The only time it's justifiable to give up is when the enemy is inside your spawn point and farming you as you revive, which is impossible to do in this game.

Premades are more coordinated than your average player, but that still doesn't make them invincible. The people who repeatedly die to the prenades are as much a detriment to your team as the enemy premade itself.

That said, there's nothing wrong with dying to a premade dive, even highly experienced FL players slip up sometimes. What's important is a willingness to learn and having your map open.

[Sinstrel]

Right... sure they're not...

In fact, this was quite the opposite, where you had people being "oh great, I got the winning team again" and LITERALLY doing /sit for part of the match because we had the win on lock down with no hope of counterplay by *either* of the other teams, even when they pinched us (hence my 1 death).

I would not be shocked to find out most of the other two teams also started AFKing at some point, and they'd be justified, because premades *encourage* lethargic gameplay, always have and always will, winning or losing.

Are you implying that a pre-made of just 4 players managed to steam roll 48 people across the entirety of the map simultaneously? Or that the winning team had a leader and organization while the other teams were lethargic/just queuing in for their daily experience + poetics + aesthetics + heliometry + wolf marks + trophy crystals + battle pass xp

[Commander_Justitia]

Seems like they had 2 premades according to chat log, so it was a bit more biased towards them. 8 people knowing how to PvP is enough to win I guess.

[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)

[AllenThyl]

And yet here they were, literally unkillable

Ah yes, because they used cheats, right? Because that's was "literally unkillable" means, right? That even theoretically, when they would have just stood around, there would have been no way to kill these players. Or isn't it more true that they weren't "literally" unkillable, and it's just a sad fact of life that the average skill level of a Frontline player is so abysmally low (and they are happy with it), that someone with half a brain is usually in no danger to actually die.

and finishing the battle by their 8-man self faster than some Crystaline Conflict matches take. Me and the other 63 players could have stood in our spawns with our thumbs up our butts for all the difference it would have made, counter or cooperative-wise, because we were an NPC audience and nothing more.

When your (and a large amount of the Frontline players') skill level is indistinguishable from "standing in spawn with thumbs up your butts" is, how is that the premades fault? It's quite obvious that both other teams just threw the game at some point. Of course a team is gonna lose hard if they just give up.

and dragged us along only because 24 people on each team is "required".

They joined the game with the same limitations as everyone else. Stop victimizing yourself. Your personal incompetence to not make a difference when grouped with / against good players is no one's fault but yours.

And I assume the other teams were indeed trying, given they tried twice to pinch us (one time being right out of our spawn) and *still* got bulldozed in less than 7 minutes even when they were *actively* avoiding each other to focus completely on us. You can see what their effort amounted to, and where the only reason Yellow had any points at all is because they gave up fighting 2/3s of the way to secure nodes.

Because just having a reasonable strategy is only the first step. There still needs to be player skill to realize the potential of the strategy, and as I already said, the general playerbase is absolutely terrible at this game mode, no matter which facet of skill expression is concerned. Just to give you some numbers, when I play SCH, I usually end up with around 2.4 - 3m damage, while commanding. And it's not uncommon for me to see other scholars in my team, who have had the very same opportunity that I had, to only have managed 200-600k damage. You can argue about SCHs inflated damage numbers all you want, but the fact that my output is worth 5-10 times that of other people playing the same job, who aren't commanding at the same time, who have worse k/d/a, less healing and less damage taken, means that bad players are worth a fraction of a good player. So the 2 teams grouping up against yours mean nothing when their collective output is equivalent to 3 good players.

As if anyone else would have had time to learn anything when they had a 8-man spoon-feeding or destroying them the whole time.

Things aren't learned by osmosis or just "hanging around" or casually interacting with a gaming system. You can see in all the PvE threads and when doing PvE content that it's not the lack of training opportunities, but the lazy and learning resistant mindset of the community as a whole. People barely know their own kits, they sure as hell don't know other class kits, much less how to play against them (see the constant whining about DRK pull, and the ridiculous amounts of people getting obviously baited into SAM LBs every game). You don't get to "magically" just know these things, they have to be actively learned. But that would mean there is some "correct" way of playing the game, right? And we can't have that, because that would be tYrAnNiCaL.

Okay, you got me. One last response.

Ahahahaha, of course you couldn't stay away. And still with the pretentious rEsIsTaNcE shtick.

[Sinstrel]

I have no idea if there was any "leadership and organization" our side because there wasn't a single shoutout, the 8-man was basically playing by their voice-chat/Discord lonesome the whole time and dragged us along only because 24 people on each team is "required".

I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt here and assume that the two 4-man parties luckily got into the same alliance through RNG, and since there was no leadership or organization on your alliance while all communication is through their own voice chat that means it was basically an 8 v 48 match with the pre-made focused solely on PvP without objectives.

That being said, 8 v 48 are still abysmal odds assuming everyone is doing everything they can to secure points for their respective alliances. I understand the frustration of newer/less experienced players wanting to blame the entirety of their loss on factors outside of their control like que sync-ing/pre-mades/whatever the new buzz word is. But it's going to be a bit hard to convince a lot of the more experienced folks on this forum that 48 people, doing everything they could, couldn't gain a single point against 8 players when in the past we've had full on 24-man pre-made que sync alliances that still managed to lose games to good commanders.

You all already have the solution to your problems. There are plenty of guides to help you, plenty of discords to spitball your questions, cross-world linkshells for dueling to learn yours and other jobs better, content creators who actively help in all aspects of the PvP community allowing you to join high level games with them. In no part of your post was any personal accountability, and I see from your screenshot that you decided to stay on MCH despite everything that was happening (I understand you were on the winning team but the point stands).

I could tell you at least 3 ways to counter a small pre-made tunnel visioning on kills only. At what point are you all going to decide you've had enough, and start actually putting up a fight against these groups? Waiting around not learning anything new for 2 years and hoping for Yoshi P and devs to delete/change the mode is... just sad tbh.

[Mawlzy]

You all already have the solution to your problems. There are plenty of guides to help you, plenty of discords to spitball your questions, cross-world linkshells for dueling to learn yours and other jobs better, content creators who actively help in all aspects of the PvP community allowing you to join high level games with them. In no part of your post was any personal accountability, and I see from your screenshot that you decided to stay on MCH despite everything that was happening (I understand you were on the winning team but the point stands).

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.

[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.

[OliviaLugria]

Pvp Paisa... now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time

[Mawlzy]

snip.

I appreciate you engaging in a positive manner, and I agree with some of your points. Notably, improvement needs to be community-driven.

As with many other games, Discord has become an obvious medium to lead efforts to improve the skill of the player base. That places a significant responsibility on the shoulders of Discord moderators. I would suggest that currently they are failing in that responsibility. Some examples:

Events can be an effective means to grow the community and to learn. Some of them are very positive. But that whole effort gets poisoned by non-filtered Q-synchs featuring single jobs. And when new players browse the Discord server promoting them, and read conversations deciding what the most annoying such event would be for the stupid "normals" (that would "set Reddit on fire"), they are likely to conclude that the main purpose of this clique is to grief the broader community.

Check out the "Frontlines" channel on some of these servers. As you note, the most common topic is how awful the randos play. One can agree with that sentiment, while recognizing that flooding a channel with such content is both tedious and unwelcoming to new members. That said, at least it is somewhat on topic, unlike the stream of gifs, anime, and player portraits. If Discord is going to lead FL into a bright future, current servers need to clean up their channels.

Finally, what is the invariable FL advice that new Discord members receive? "Join a premade! Get on voice! It's fun!" Sure, for some it's fun and effective. For many others, particularly those new to the mode, the idea of doing this is horrifying. And when nearly all the strategic content is aimed at a playstyle that is not adopted by the vast majority of players, such players conclude they are not wanted and leave.