Frontlines: Leechers and Feeders

[Aravell]

There aren't actually any jobs in PvP that are so bad that playing it is griefing your team, it's mostly just people playing them badly.

That said, VPR is a job that negatively affects your party indirectly if you do play it, because a very good VPR player can contribute way more by playing basically any other melee.

[gidsonBrand]

If you play it as a distraction tank, leading enemies away from larger pulls, it's actually sick.

But that's just me enjoying zoner tech more than playing the game. Maybe it'll get some new tools in 7.1.

[Archeron]

Rival Wings is the 1v1 style of content they should be focusing on expanding. Frontlines if you asked me is a lost cause for as long as the casuals have zero incentives to put effort into their games.

Battlegrounds is frequently compared to Frontlines, but its more similar to Rival Wings. It forces teams to split into offensive, and defensive roles. The only reason Rival Wings stays dead is there is no rewards for queuing into it. It's missing 2 key elements. #1, Incentive to play it, #2, Incentive to perform well so people don't throw matches for quicker rewards. This goes for pretty much any PvP mode, on any game ever. Fortunately there are many competitors who have trialed and errored many ideas, and when in doubt SE can just simply draw inspiration from them, in the rare occasion they've decided to invest money into adding replayable content to their game.

You can add thresholds to give extra rewards to the top 5 performers on either teams, or you can just reduce the rewards for people who are obviously playing lethargically and didn't press more than 5 of their spells in one match.

[Mawlzy]

Rival Wings is the 1v1 style of content they should be focusing on expanding. Frontlines if you asked me is a lost cause for as long as the casuals have zero incentives to put effort into their games.

Battlegrounds is frequently compared to Frontlines, but its more similar to Rival Wings. It forces teams to split into offensive, and defensive roles. The only reason Rival Wings stays dead is there is no rewards for queuing into it. It's missing 2 key elements. #1, Incentive to play it, #2, Incentive to perform well so people don't throw matches for quicker rewards. This goes for pretty much any PvP mode, on any game ever. Fortunately there are many competitors who have trialed and errored many ideas, and when in doubt SE can just simply draw inspiration from them, in the rare occasion they've decided to invest money into adding replayable content to their game.

You can add thresholds to give extra rewards to the top 5 performers on either teams, or you can just reduce the rewards for people who are obviously playing lethargically and didn't press more than 5 of their spells in one match.

So you add rewards, queues pop, and the tiny minority who actually enjoy the mode get massively frustrated by those just there for the rewards. Except it'd be worse than FL because RW is complex, convoluted and... to me just not very good.

Ultimately for a successful PvP mode within 14 which is not played primarily for rewards, you need something genuinely engaging. And as you've pointed out previously, a tutorial that provides sufficient info that players know what they're doing.

[Archeron]

So you add rewards, queues pop, and the tiny minority who actually enjoy the mode get massively frustrated by those just there for the rewards. Except it'd be worse than FL because RW is complex, convoluted and... to me just not very good.

Ultimately for a successful PvP mode within 14 which is not played primarily for rewards, you need something genuinely engaging. As as you've pointed out previously, a tutorial that provides sufficient info that players know what they're doing.

A tutorial is literally a BASELINE expectation that should literally be in every game, and that there isn't one in FF is a prime example of bad game design. You say that Rival Wings is complex, and convuluted. Well you know what, thats because it is. Lets fix that. Say good bye to the mechs, the CE, the bases. Implement something else with the same team sizes. Capture the Flag, Capture/Hold Bases, King of the Hill. Simple objectives, self explanatory what needs to happen. Back it up with a proper reward structure, and I guarantee you Frontlines will die over night. Keep it simple, and keep it fun, and keep the jobs somewhat balanced. Thats all it takes for PvP to thrive. If the majority of players want to suck and get a free prize for doing nothing, they can keep it to Frontlines. The rest of us prefer having engaging, rewarding, and replayable content to engage with.

So long as the community on NA isn't incentivized to put effort in, they will continue to be farmed by (Insert current meta here). Because even with a tutorial it only helps new players, who aren't the majority except on Dynamis (Where Frontline doesn't pop very frequently anyway) these lethargic players do not care about winning or losing. They care about making it to the end of the match even if their team has to carry their dead weight for them. Set a bar, with an abritrary minimal expectation of what a single player should contribute. Those who fall below it should not recieve a full reward. Win, Lose, or 2nd place.

A problem I have is that NA is primarily a reward driven community. You can have engaging content, that is totally dead because there is no reason to participate in it. You can see exactly which modes are popping off, and what quality of matches can be expected if they do pop with a simple check.

Rival Wings; No Rewards, No performance incentive. Result; Completely dead, except w/ Mogtome events giving an incentive over other modes.
Frontlines; Adequate Rewards, No performance Incentive. Result; Queues pop, matches are full of weak gameplay.
CC: Adequate Rewards, Performance Incentive. Result; Queues Pop, matches are often competitive and close.
Ranked CC: Inadequate rewards, Performance Incentive. Result; Queues don't pop, Matches are competitive, but not enough people willing to farm a weak reward.

[Loggos]

Capture the Flag, Capture/Hold Bases, King of the Hill. Simple objectives, self explanatory what needs to happen.

I know you are talking about RW-sized groups but on that note I'd also love to have small scale objective-based pvp modes other than CC. Capture the flag, hold the base or king of the hill but with 5-8 people.

[Aravell]

You can add thresholds to give extra rewards to the top 5 performers on either teams, or you can just reduce the rewards for people who are obviously playing lethargically and didn't press more than 5 of their spells in one match.

What metric of performance would they measure though?

If they measure damage done to players, everyone would fight over piloting CC/BJ. If they measure damage done to structures, everyone would fight over Opps and would go out of their way to destroy the 2nd tower and pad their score without caring that it gives the enemy team access to their 2nd BJ.

I'm not against rewarding good performance, but what metric would be the most fair to measure by?

[IDontPetLalas]

I love hearing people just come out with "Keep it simple, and keep it fun, and keep the jobs somewhat balanced. Thats all it takes for PvP to thrive."

Well- if it was easy to do then anyone would just crank out PvP blockbuster AAA games by the dozen. In reality, you can probably focus on 1 or 2 of those objectives, but the third is going to be difficult to be done as well as you want.

Personally- I 'm not really motivated by "simple", fun of course is relative but I do want it to be fun, and I do want balance to be stressed. I don't want the PvP team to look at balance changes only ever 2 years (i.e. as per the present) - however I don't want them to go overboard and have some FOMO with major nerfs etc every minor release.

I agree that the FFXIV community is incentivized by rewards, every community is. As long as they are carefully considered, I don't have an issue with rewards. For that reason- adding some to RW would be fine. However- I like RW, I don't want the mode changed- for that reason, I have long wanted the mandatory completion of a tutorial quest for both FL and especially RW - that would also include concepts such as setting up - there's a lot of ground to cover- aside from the UI and the maps, and the basic strategy - there's the basics -PvP hotbars, switching jobs, etc.

[Archeron]

I love hearing people just come out with "Keep it simple, and keep it fun, and keep the jobs somewhat balanced. Thats all it takes for PvP to thrive."

Well- if it was easy to do then anyone would just crank out PvP blockbuster AAA games by the dozen. In reality, you can probably focus on 1 or 2 of those objectives, but the third is going to be difficult to be done as well as you want.

Personally- I 'm not really motivated by "simple", fun of course is relative but I do want it to be fun, and I do want balance to be stressed. I don't want the PvP team to look at balance changes only ever 2 years (i.e. as per the present) - however I don't want them to go overboard and have some FOMO with major nerfs etc every minor release.

I agree that the FFXIV community is incentivized by rewards, every community is. As long as they are carefully considered, I don't have an issue with rewards. For that reason- adding some to RW would be fine. However- I like RW, I don't want the mode changed- for that reason, I have long wanted the mandatory completion of a tutorial quest for both FL and especially RW - that would also include concepts such as setting up - there's a lot of ground to cover- aside from the UI and the maps, and the basic strategy - there's the basics -PvP hotbars, switching jobs, etc.

If you're going to reply to me, use my name next time.

Why do you suppose that 15+ year old games STILL have lively PvP communities attached to them? It's because they adhere to the principles of simplicity. Modern Triple AAA Don't want block buster titles. They want fast cash, with as little investment as possible. Pay to win games full to the brim with microtransactions, cosmetics, gacha, and FoMo. Milk the whales, kill the game when things slow down, repeat as necessary. FFXIV wants to hold people hostage to the subscription. You better believe there is going to be more FoMo to keep you playing, and paying, regardless of how bad the PvP matches get, or how long the content droughts become.

If you need a wall of text to explain how a PvP mode functions, you've already failed. FFXIV is a community of PvE players, which is fantastic because they don't even understand dying on Frontlines costs their team points, or that they can change jobs mid match at the spawn point. If they can't even figure that out, they're never going to understand Rival Wings. There is too much ground to cover, and nobody is going to care to find out because the queue is dead when the mogtome event ends, and even if the queue wasn't dead, there is still no incentive to perform well. Only for matches to end quickly, and if we ever got a roulette for Rival Wings I guarantee people would be complaining about it constantly.

[IDontPetLalas]

If you're going to reply to me, use my name next time.

Why do you suppose that 15+ year old games STILL have lively PvP communities attached to them? It's because they adhere to the principles of simplicity. Modern Triple AAA Don't want block buster titles. They want fast cash, with as little investment as possible. Pay to win games full to the brim with microtransactions, cosmetics, gacha, and FoMo. Milk the whales, kill the game when things slow down, repeat as necessary. FFXIV wants to hold people hostage to the subscription. You better believe there is going to be more FoMo to keep you playing, and paying, regardless of how bad the PvP matches get, or how long the content droughts become.

If you need a wall of text to explain how a PvP mode functions, you've already failed. FFXIV is a community of PvE players, which is fantastic because they don't even understand dying on Frontlines costs their team points, or that they can change jobs mid match at the spawn point. If they can't even figure that out, they're never going to understand Rival Wings. There is too much ground to cover, and nobody is going to care to find out because the queue is dead when the mogtome event ends, and even if the queue wasn't dead, there is still no incentive to perform well. Only for matches to end quickly, and if we ever got a roulette for Rival Wings I guarantee people would be complaining about it constantly.

I agree that overly complex modes appeal to a niche market. I also agree that FFXIV is largely composed of PVE players. It's up to FFXIV whether they want to continue to support what is a a very small segment of their player population going forwards - personally I would see that it could stay on, but get minimal investment. PvP likely goes into modes that are, as you say- easier for people to jump into and understand.

If you seriously think that FFXIV PvP would ever resemble a P2P PvP game- I don't ever see that happening. There would have to be massive changes to the PvP system, in addition to the monetization system, I just don't see it. Not to mention - the game runs so poorly in PvP , just fixing that would be a major hurdle.