Quote Originally Posted by Aidorouge View Post
Pretty much, yes. Consider that premades in other PVP-centric games have been brought up but I didn't respond to their presence with anywhere near the amount of vitriol I have for when they show up in Frontlines here.

Smite, Paladins, Heroes of the Storm, Overwatch, League of Legends... encountering a premade is a fluke during peak hours/bad luck during off-hours. But in FF14, a premade is positively suffocating during all hours of the day depending on which Discord group started queuing up and when (at least on NA side).

Hells, that 3 or so weeks when Dynamis was locked down during Dawntrail release was the worst PVP I ever experienced in this game (including where my screenshot came from), because nobody from Dynamis could data center travel out, but anyone could come to us. Suffice to say, a *lot* of groups (mostly from Aether) practically drooled at having a bunch of fish in a barrel to shoot at because they had a whole data center with little to no PVP experience being pushed into a mode if they wanted to level or get tomes (doubly so with Road to 90 being active) with literally nowhere else to go.

I mean, we're at a point that when most players see they have a premade on their side, they start coasting because they know they've already won, and if they're up against a premade, they can faff about because a loss is inevitable. A whole data center was taught this for nearly a month and I'm afraid it may have outright ruined the mode for all of those new players because they either don't take the mode seriously, they don't bother to queue at all, or they did the smart thing and deleted their fresh-faced level 30 and re-rolled elsewhere.

Premades, at least in FF14, do not inspire other players to "git gud" they encourage them to stop trying.
The problem I have is that you conflate FLs with CC in your reasoning where FLs have nothing to do with CC at all. And the premades in FLs isn't the problem, the problem is combo abuse based around a mode that's a dumpster fire of balancing, unlike CC. Nobody denies that the current state of FLs is lamentable, but it's not tied to people playing with their friends: as an example, when I party up with my friends and don't abuse DRK, then, strangely enough, we don't nuke the entire enemy party, what a shocker.