Frontlines sucks Ultra megathread

[Mistress_Irika]

None of my friends bother with PvP, and given the state of it I don't blame them. I have no one to queue with, so I just solo-queue. The alternative is for me to just not PvP anymore, which for how badly skewed so many matches tend to end up is becoming an increasingly enticing option.

My friends started to quit the moment full party premades were disabled. I had a small group of savage raiders that gave pvp a try despite going as a full party and fell in love with it despite losing a ton to the veteran teams. Only one person stayed balancing pvp with savage. The rest went back to strictly raiding over the premade change. I have new players that recently joined the fc around that time fall in love with pvp and looked up to me as a guide. They asked about my journey, and I told them. They quit pvp then and there stating how stupid it was for the 8 man option to be disabled. Hurt over their decisions I stopped talking about my pvp experiences with others. It did not stop other people I knew from quitting overtime. I eventually started invading the other data centers to fill the hole that was starting to build. It worked until we got the new kits. More people quitting. Didn't help that I abandoned frontlines for CC for a time. Now I look out into the crowd, and I hardly know a soul. I'm just there alone struggling to find a purpose. Majority of the people I have played with has moved on. With teammates being random it's hard to make a new friend outside of premading.

Which should have people questioning why the meta comp is so badly skewed toward certain jobs. And it's not just DRK, it's DRK+ that's the issue. You need someone to play DRK matched with people in the same group willing to play the jobs that accompany it the best, and be willing to follow said DRK around as support. Even just a competent DRK with a competent pocket healer AST is silly OP. Which surprise, works out perfectly for premade groups that decide to plan ahead and queue together with one of the meta comps.

I don't see a difference when it comes to meta. You can go ahead and turn the game completely solo, and a meta is going to form there. There's just no getting rid of it. It's no different than how most raiders act. Everyone is just going to go to the best performing class, and it that get's nerf they'll find another to use.

Honestly this is a moot point, because the same argument could be made for why should solo-queuers be punished for having to face up against premade groups that abuse the poorly balanced meta.

Solo q is a punishment. Premades are part of the issue. My personal blame will be the team however. If they're getting dominated 2 minutes in it's, "GG." "Go next game." No different from a moba game or any other team based game. I could simply join a premade. But then I'll run into the issue of not having a challenge. Funny catch-22 in this scenario.

[Mawlzy]

The best possible comps aren't even being played right now because it requires more than 4 people to coordinate. Relying on some random who ques once a day just isn't possible.

...

Frontlines has a skill ceiling in the stratosphere and we barely manage to make it out of the mud as a community.

But we are currently compelled to rely on, or at least play with, a large number of randos. In other words, are we not stuck in the mud because the matches are numerically dominated by people who have little to no interest in developing the exciting strategies that you outline?

Olivia, while I admire your tenacity, your plan of forcing players to care about the mode by drowning them in that mud so that they quit or improve simply isn't going to work, at least as long as everyone queues into the same match. The allure of XP is simply too powerful. And my sense is that the harder you and other commanders push in-game, the more push-back you're going to receive. In addition to rouletters, there is a middle ground of players who like PvP but who don't wish to turn professional.

Even setting job balance aside, SQEX has to take action to create the environment where high-quality NA matches are possible. I'd suggest even the non-roulette XP bonus is currently an insurmountable obstacle.

Custom matches strike me as the simplest, least disruptive option. I think we should all be pushing for this.

But beyond that, we run into this Queue Paradox. For queues to pop on NA, we apparently need massive XP bribes. This attracts players just there for the XP (shock).

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think what you would like is to play matches with people whose devotion to FL at least approaches yours? With the current queue options, you can get close to that through Q-synching, but even that is a blunt instrument and one that will only be employed a few hours a week at most.

So sure, people like me complain about the current meta, and maybe some don't try to improve. But you and yours complain constantly about how crap the player base is, and yet seem to have no interest in addressing it through tiered play.

The quality of your matches would be instantly improved by a three-tiered system. Can you really not wait 7.5 minutes instead of 2.5 for the queue to pop?

[Xylira]

It works because few if any people try to stop it from happening.

It is easy to mark an enemy Dark.
It is easy to run away from their engage.
It is easy to play a stronger job.
It is easy to play a job that stops the stronger jobs.
It seems impossible for any common player to give a damn.

I go out of my way to do all of these things when I encounter a premade, yet it rarely makes a difference because it's entirely contingent on the rest of my team being halfway competent.

I'm trying to look at it from a developer's perspective. There's 6ish strong jobs that work extremely well with Dark Knight. How many players in a game actually switch and utilize said jobs? Not very many. I'm lucky to get a single good Dancer, Dark Knight, or Dragoon outside the people I bring with me.

And that right there is something I pointed out before. Premades can be far more discerning about job stacking to abuse the current metas, which is part of what contributes to drastically lopsided matches.

As far as balance is concerned, the mode IS BALANCED. Everyone who ques has the choice to select whatever job they want, use the chat how they wish, party up with 3 other people, and have an equal chance to get f'd by rng.

Incorrect. The premade group that goes out of their way to job stack for a meta to abuse has a drastic advantage over a team composed entirely of solo queuers.

Are the jobs balanced? Not really, but each one still has their niche. As I previously mentioned, a more organized team can use jobs that I consider quite bad to much more devastating effect than anything a single premade could do if a team actually committed to it.

Well at least you can admit that jobs aren't balanced.

You seem to support beating down the skill ceiling as a form of balance when I'd much rather people rise up and try to compete at a higher level.

Believe me, I'd love if the average player was capable of putting in effort and playing better, but I'm just being realistic with what we have to work with. I just want to be able to play FLs with fairly balanced teams. I don't care if it's 4 competent players coordinating together on each team, or 24 competent players on each team, I just want fair matches. The problem is when it's a coordinated premade of 4 competent players on one team, versus the other teams that don't even have that, resulting in heavily skewed matches.

[Mawlzy]

The community in general. It's rather obvious from the tryhard premades that tend to run DRK+ groups that it works.

And yes, it is rather sad that 4 players are able to wipe entire alliance raids simply by coordinating their LBs.

Why are you so insistent on defending poor game balance? PvP is clearly unbalanced for FL, yet your response to anyone raising concern with it is just to dismissively tell them to play better.

This puzzles me too. I do believe Olivia would like to be able to develop the strategies she outlines and play with similarly-dedicated individuals. Interestingly, this makes her quite an oddball within the Discord community, where it is readily apparent that the dominant ideology is not producing more competitive matches, it's padding personal stats. As those on Dynamis can testify.

[Xylira]

This puzzles me too. I do believe Olivia would like to be able to develop the strategies she outlines and play with similarly-dedicated individuals. Interestingly, this makes her quite an oddball within the Discord community, where it is readily apparent that the dominant ideology is not producing more competitive matches, it's padding personal stats. As those on Dynamis can testify.

I could make an educated guess to why they defend it.

The whole position is just nonsense though. Getting curb stomped by premades doesn't encourage me to get better, it just dissuades me from wanting to bother with the game mode. Even if I somehow became the best Front Lines player in existence, it's still largely inconsequential unless I'm paired up with other competent players capable of countering one of the meta comps. The only way to consistently attempt to address the issue is, ironically, to run with a premade group of my own to counter other premades. Which if that's the intent of all of this, then SE should just split the FL queues between group and non-group queues.

[Mawlzy]

I could make an educated guess to why they defend it.

The whole position is just nonsense though. Getting curb stomped by premades doesn't encourage me to get better, it just dissuades me from wanting to bother with the game mode. Even if I somehow became the best Front Lines player in existence, it's still largely inconsequential unless I'm paired up with other competent players capable of countering one of the meta comps. The only way to consistently attempt to address the issue is, ironically, to run with a premade group of my own to counter other premades. Which if that's the intent of all of this, then SE should just split the FL queues between group and non-group queues.

A lot of the positions are nonsense. Complain about a loss because your team was full of idiots, then show how clever you were via K/D/A/ when the idiots were on the other teams. Doing this without imploding through cognitive dissonance is a real gift.

But to the main point, Olivia's approach is not only stymied by the dominating presence of rouletters who are not going anywhere, she's also hamstrung by players who claim to be in her camp who clearly enjoy the current situation.

[Archeron]

I see a lot of blame being thrown at "Leeches and Feeders". "Trash teams". Yes they are out there. People play deliberately poorly. Just run a few matches on Dynamis and you'll see the attitudes pop up in Alliance chat semi-frequently.

I know a decent chunk of these players are *Trying* to figure out what the hell is going on. The fact that they have to depend on Third party guides, and the community to understand how to play PvP is honestly an embarassment. There NEEDS to be a mandatory introduction that forces you to set up Recuperate/Guard/Purify/Elixir at the bare minimum. That alone would solve a lot of problems with the "Worthless trash" players as they're so commonly referred to. That really encourages them to want to stick around and learn PvP after all.

I don't see a push for that very often. The focus on performance based incentives is obvious for Premades. They want to reap even more rewards off their stomping of random players. I'm not against performance based incentives, but the reality of its implementation is that it will punish new players, and even further alienate people who may have otherwise given PvP a chance. The excuse of ignorance for performing poorly in matches needs to be eliminated as a priority. And I stand by slashing premades down even further to a maximum of (2) Players. Every other PvP game I have EVER played that is worth its salt balances Premades against other teams with premades. Thats not happening in a 1v1v1 system with 4 party premades.

Now I wouldn't mind if there was a competitive mode, with 8v8v8 frontline matches with premade teams only. That would certainly have far more interesting matches, but the population of frontlines is lacking as it is, and I strongly doubt Frontlines can ever have its queue seperated without the merging of duty finder across the entirety of NA.

[WeakestZenosEnjoyer]

It works because few if any people try to stop it from happening.

It is easy to mark an enemy Dark.
It is easy to run away from their engage.
It is easy to play a stronger job.
It is easy to play a job that stops the stronger jobs.
It seems impossible for any common player to give a damn.

If the solution to a DRK is:

play a job that specifically counters it,
feed (or be) an allied DRK ("play stronger jobs"),
run away,

that's bad actually. You should not be forced into a job you don't know how to play because otherwise you'll die to a midly coordinated DRK if you actually try to fight the player in the PvP mode. That's how you get apathetic players instead.

[Mawlzy]

I'm weary of a tier-system because of the inevitable queue issues for the highest rung that would see some of them waiting forever once they realize there's less of them than they thought, or how a lot of them don't actually want to play against each other. So they start *letting* themselves lose enough to get demoted so they can go back to getting their one-sided matches, at least until the system pushes them back up only for them to "conveniently" fall back down again.

Smurfing would be an obvious danger, agreed. And if that did happen to any degree, it would demonstrate definitively that the perpetrators never had the slightest interest in high-quality, JP-like matches in the first place.

[Spiffer]

Personal meme I'd like to see while going against a premade is everyone swap to sch if you notice it after first initial wipe and spread that dot if more then 5 schs with no bh start applying the dot correctly. no team can handle it at a early stage of the game. It is a effective counter. if you get the dot off right and have 5 or more schs doing it its bascially 25k dot tick and requires you to instantly spam heal your self and try for elixer or die. I think everyone swap to warrior is a good strat too, like if you got 10 warriors all primal rending and yoinking the drk around it gets very annyoing im sure and can easy break up the normal drk zerg. Did the warrior thing the other day someone said lets swap to war and had like 7 wars just constantly jumping on the pile and yoinking the dark and ended up winning after being down from pinch at start.