Frontlines sucks Ultra megathread

[IDontPetLalas]

No one is claiming Premade requires skills; at least, I am fairly certain I am not
People joined Premade mainly to avoid players that are not trying hard and constantly whining.

I find it hard to understand why some people find this hard to believe, but they apparently do, or don't care. I don't even join premades but I really wish Square would score individuals so that if they didn't make some decent contribution for their job, they would be penalized for their rewards, be it exp, tomestones, etc.

[Teno]

Premades are fine, and far from godlike. If anything you can definitely play around them. It only becomes a problem when there are multiple, or 1 premade + other good players who can take advantage of it.

Also I'm a solo player.

[Divinemights]

I find it hard to understand why some people find this hard to believe, but they apparently do, or don't care. I don't even join premades but I really wish Square would score individuals so that if they didn't make some decent contribution for their job, they would be penalized for their rewards, be it exp, tomestones, etc.

Let me ask you, how is this rating system going to work?
By kill?
BY the damage done?

For example, a team need a good Monk to break enemy guard at correct timing, but that would mean this monk need to sacrifice his performance on the scoreboard
How is this system going to fairly evaluate this monk?

Unless you have a super AI that overseeing everyone on the Frontline, this kind of suggestion is just Utopia dream, not practical at all.

[Scintilla]

No one is claiming Premade requires skills; at least, I am fairly certain I am not
People joined Premade mainly to avoid players that are not trying hard and constantly whining.

It doesn't avoid players not trying or constantly whining so I don't understand that point at all. On the contrary, in my own experience, it only makes such issues even more prevalent.
A number of premades have endlessly haunted FL roulette repeatedly and for so long that they have become widely recognised and are often targeted with negative reactions from allies and opponents alike. They haven't avoided the 'whining' - they're fuelling it.
In good games where both of the random alliances have some semblance of sense and determination, they will both work together to focus down the premade alliance, doing anything to ensure that anyone wins except them. However, this doesn't always happen, it only takes one alliance to take a defeatist attitude or to decide to hand the win over to the premade to get 2nd place for themselves, and the only real chance of stopping the premade has been destroyed. This defeatist attitude becomes more prevalent when vs premades.

[IDontPetLalas]

Let me ask you, how is this rating system going to work?
By kill?
BY the damage done?

For example, a team need a good Monk to break enemy guard at correct timing, but that would mean this monk need to sacrifice his performance on the scoreboard
How is this system going to fairly evaluate this monk?

Unless you have a super AI that overseeing everyone on the Frontline, this kind of suggestion is just Utopia dream, not practical at all.

I doubt very much that it's a "utopia dream", nor that it takes a "Super Ai" given that the evaluating and rewarding performance based upon various types of contribution in large scale non-organized (ie non pre-made) combat has been around for at least 15 years that I'm aware of, at least more- so it pre-dates AI.

Which is not to say that those systems are perfect, and that whomever designs them doesn't factor in some types of contribution, or work-arounds that benefit specific roles- however it should be possible.

I'm not saying how it would be done - I would be surprised if it didn't factor roles into account - so no -why would kills matter equally across all jobs, I would also be surprised in modes with objectives, that points towards breaking ice- for example- wouldn't count. I've seen similar contribution used in other games.

However I'm not the game designer. I have no idea of how they would weight what type of contribution and how they would calculate in the game. Not my problem.

[Sinstrel]

It doesn't avoid players not trying or constantly whining so I don't understand that point at all.

To help put things in a bit more perspective to help you understand what he meant:

There are mainly 2 types of players queing for Frontline Roulette.

1. The player who is "just here for xp/reward" for participating
2. The player who ques to PvP for fun and/or win games.

The expectation from both of these players is drastically different from one another. Player 1 does not care too much about winning or losing, they are here to collect the daily reward they get just for simply being here. These are the majority of players queing up for Frontline Roulette.

Player 2 may que Frontline multiple times in a day. They expect thier team mates to have put forth an effort to learn thier jobs, have some PvP awareness, and try thier best to coordinate with the team to win the match. There are much fewer of these players.

The problem lies within the difference in expectations for Player 1 and Player 2. Player 1 does not care about winning because no matter what they are getting thier full reward of massive xp, poetic tomes, causality tomes, comedy tomes, and moogle tomes. This is frustrating for player 2 since there is nothing they can do to motivate thier teammates to try (why try if you get the same reward?)

After months/years of constantly being matched with Player 1, Player 2 decides they will form a group with other Player 2's who have the same expectations, thus a pre-made is born. Player 2 finally has a team of players with the same expectations and they flatline every Player 1 in the lobby, and player 1 is not having fun being farmed. So they come to the forums to ask for a ban on Pre-mades.

Of course there are other types of players like solo and those in the middle between Player 1 and 2. But you get the idea.

[Mawlzy]

It feels like one side is playing one game, and the other side a totally different game, and both are mutually exclusive to my own enjoyment.

- I didn't mind fighting against premades because it's still fun to mess with their BH5 players, but the games end in less than 10min most of the time which is just extremely frustrating and yields games with not much happening if at all.
- I hate being on the premade's side because no matter what I do, I'm useless, they don't need me, and the game will end in less than 10min anyway.
- I don't want to be part of a premade myself even though I tried. It's boring and uninteresting gameplay.

This is why I quit, not because people keel over at the start of a game. If anything, I myself gave up when I stopped participating into them. It's not the first time this happens either, I also did during SB at some points where high BH nin premades were so dominating that it felt like seal clubbing and the only way to deal with them was to stay in our spawns and deny them any fight or fun until they left the queue.

I agree with all of this, but the emboldened statement is a beautifully distinct summary.

Mixing solo and party queueing means that, in the presence of premades, two completely different games are occurring simultaneously on the battlefield. My least favorite scenario is being on the same team as the premade.

I also don't understand why members of a premade find the playstyle amusing, but given the volume they put in I guess they must. Here's a suggestion to premade commanders though. Solo queue. Experience a few games when you're on the same team as a competent premade. Did you have fun? Why or why not?

It seems to me the only reason for premades to exist is to artificially skew win-rate, and the only reason to do that is to get rewards faster. Which frankly is a bit sad and pathetic.

[Mawlzy]

To help put things in a bit more perspective to help you understand what he meant:

There are mainly 2 types of players queing for Frontline Roulette.

1. The player who is "just here for xp/reward" for participating
2. The player who ques to PvP for fun and/or win games.

I think this is an accurate breakdown of the demographic, but in that case I'd suggest your conclusions don't actually follow from that starting hypothesis.

There are certainly daily one-and-done players in FL. Many people when leveling jobs run some or all of the roulettes for the XP boost, and FL is particularly advantageous because of job switching and it being such a big boost. It is more probable that people in this category play poorly, either through the limited experience they get, or because they just don't give a crap (an attitude, as others have noted, which gets massively magnified by the presence of a premade).

However, particularly later in the day, the presence of such players should be completely swamped by genuine PvP enthusiasts. You can see the volume some players put in from the leaderboards or just by seeing them match after match. They are actually playing for the challenge and the fun of it. But that enjoyment is completely denied them once some damn premade settles in for a few hours.

[Mawlzy]

I find it hard to understand why some people find this hard to believe, but they apparently do, or don't care. I don't even join premades but I really wish Square would score individuals so that if they didn't make some decent contribution for their job, they would be penalized for their rewards, be it exp, tomestones, etc.

A parallel approach would be to give anyone queuing in a light party of four one quarter of the rewards.

[IDontPetLalas]

A parallel approach would be to give anyone queuing in a light party of four one quarter of the rewards.

Well, in some games it's not quite calculated a 1/4 of the results, however a solo player could potentially get higher rewards. In one game that I played I would get higher rewards when soloing , the downside (at least for some players or jobs) was that it came with a higher risk. Being in a small pre-made in that case had the benefit of lowering the risk while not diluting the rewards too much due to the way that rewards were calculated, but being in a large premade- equivalent to our alliance- lead to much lower rewards for the best and/or most experienced players but pretty much decent rewards were a good chance in a very good alliance.