Frontlines: There should not be ANY rewards for 2nd or 3rd place

[TofuLove]

Hi!

Controversial topic I suppose for a lot of people, but I want to address this as someone who really enjoys this game mode, and would like for the general intensity levels of the game to go up and game quality to go up and skill levels to go up.

Over the period that I played this mode (around 2 years almost every day, chain queueing), I noticed a lot of players who come for EXP via daily roulette "throw" matches, to get it over with quicker - dying or going after 2nd/3rd place to let the 1st place win quicker. This is all just to get EXP rewards and Tomes quicker. There is almost no incentive to try to play better.

As someone who enjoys this game mode, this makes the games really unsatisfactory - it feels like a race to the bottom in terms of level of skill, with no attempt to improve. I suppose the mentality is "Why try, if I don't try - I can get it over with it quicker, get some rewards, and i can do stuff that i actually enjoy, and frontlines are all RNG anyway". The fact that frontlines are only RNG to an extent, and that extent is determined by the ability to actually PVP is sadly overlooked.

There is another subset of players who play regularly and "grief" the friends/enemies that they see. Whilst a bit of friendly competition is good, it sort of creates a situation where if they decide to make someone their target and drive their alliance via calls or just attacking their "friends" - they almost always make themselves 2nd or 3rd place. I see this on Light DC sadly too often.

The only real solution I can see to that is to encourage playing to win. I don't think increasing the rewards for 1st place is enough to discourage bad performance, and would love to see 2nd or 3rd place not get ANY rewards for their participation.

Why now? This wasn't a problem before or was it?
It sort of was a problem for awhile, but unfortunately, PVP community for frontlines on EU is kind of in a rut after the hit detection changes and most "good" players who would try to encourage their team to play to win decided not to play the game leaving the majority of players on the DCs not as experienced in the game mode. So this problem just intensified in the recent months to the point of being ... quite painful to ignore.

Would it really solve the problem?
Possibly. If it encourages playing to win, in the long term it would encourage general population to view the mode as more competitive. Sure, some people will stop queueing frontlines completely, as it wouldn't be a guaranteed way to get EXP or tomes. The only way out of that I see is increasing rewards for winning - new rewards and higher exp/tome gain for win.

p.s.
Do I really think SE will implement this? No, unfortunately I do not. They consistently ignored that this mode exists and treated frontlines as a forgotten child. But I can moan about it on the forums so here I am. The benefit of good pvp scene in an MMO could be a subject of it's own post, but I digress....

[Exmo]

I think giving no rewards to 2nd and 3rd place is a bit cruel, especially when all three teams can play really well but ultimately only one team can come first (barring the extremely rare draw).

Instead I would prefer if rewards were allotted based on how a team performed compared to first place. If they end up with 90% of the winning team's points, they should get 90% of their rewards. If they did abysmal and got only 10% of first place's points, so be it.

[TofuLove]

Instead I would prefer if rewards were allotted based on how a team performed compared to first place. If they end up with 90% of the winning team's points, they should get 90% of their rewards. If they did abysmal and got only 10% of first place's points, so be it.

I suppose my initial take on this was intentionally polarising to encourage conversation around the reward structure. I think the reward structure should encourage good performance - taking away all rewards for losing teams CAN be quite toxic (especially to shot callers), i agree, especially in close games. Personally I wouldn't mind this - as I would hope the rush of actually winning should be higher than the low of losing. Unfortunately, I don't know if giving ANY reward to losing team is extreme enough to encourage playing to win hence my polarising take. In my experience such close games are quite rare.

Food for thought: There is another take to this proportional reward system to encourage higher skill(which i don't believe SE would implement) - is to encourage personal responsibility. We can take some numbers that we can see on the scoreboard and use those as metrics to determine the level of reward.

For example:
Has your alliance won? That's immediate bonus for performance, lets say 100 points.
Did you do good damage/good kills/assists/good healing/good performance in some other metric (node occupations, ice licked)? That's some points in per some determined factor.
You had 10 deaths? that's -100 points.

Sure, not every good performance can be captured on a scoreboard - sacrificing yourself to stop enemy advancing to allow someone to cap a node that would win us a game for example, or stalling a node occupation.

[Menriq]

If you think it's a race to the bottom, these changes are only gonna make the race even faster.

[TofuLove]

If you think it's a race to the bottom, these changes are only gonna make the race even faster.

How so, please describe how you see this playing out?

[IceEyes]

Sure, some people will stop queueing frontlines completely, as it wouldn't be a guaranteed way to get EXP or tomes.

And queue will be already dead. Or the team will give up even faster.

[TofuLove]

And queue will be already dead. Or the team will give up even faster.

Team already gives up plenty fast, so I am not sure that is going to change. But i am sure you had games that turned around even from 3rd place.

In regards to queue being dead - if it discourages participation from people that don't want to actually play - that might be for the best. Regardless, if winning is significantly higher exp (say double to what it is now), then even under 33% win rate, it's should be lucrative enough.

[edit]
Team currently gives up fast AND gets rewarded for it, so it's not at all the same. Why the hell are we rewarding shit play?

[IceEyes]

I prefer low quality matches more then dead queue. Also not guaranteed prizes removes FL from roulette.

[brancinaed]

There should be more rewards for second and third place! Right now it feels pretty bad to get second or third without the roulette bonus. I wish there was some more reward. I wish the Frontline or Rival Wings rewards were better besides the achievements and they could be better if we could earn the old rewards.

[TofuLove]

There should be more rewards for second and third place! Right now it feels pretty bad to get second or third without the roulette bonus. I wish there was some more reward. I wish the Frontline or Rival Wings rewards were better besides the achievements and they could be better if we could earn the old rewards.

Old feast & series rewards would be good to make a come back, they promised it for some time. I think in general pvp rewards beside exp and tomes are ...lacking, especially if you played long enough.

As for the "more rewards" to 2nd and 3rd place.... You get pvp series rewards, you get exp, you get tomes, you get wolf marks... I think it's too much, no? As this is not dissimilar to rewards for getting 1st place aside from achievements grind.