Thread: Patch 7.5 Discussion Thread

Originally Posted by SalamanderIX

The no loss of battle high doesn't seem as big of a deal as the insane battle high swings that occur now.
A team could be losing a match all game, then they get involved in a pinch or some situation on the leading team, and they'll suddenly go to half their team having BH5.

What I have been seeing more, is that if a team gets out to a strong lead with BH5, they are almost insurmountable. You can't pull their BH back and, while you can build yours, its just so hard to actually gain any ground.
Sure, this also happened before, usually if your team was passive. But even now, if your team isn't, its just really difficult to make any comeback. Before, you could pinch, drain their points, drain their bh and make their next attacks less effective.
Now, its just endless BH5. And my god, I cannot wait for the flavor of the month Viper to fall off.

That tied with an overabundance of 2nd and 3rd fighting each other. I've seen matches where 2nd and 3rd refuses to engage with 1st and will constantly attack and pinch each other. Or even if you are trying to fight 1st place, the other team will take the opportunity to pinch you. So even if you do try and make some ground on 1st, you get cut off by 2nd/3rd place. Its so ridiculous right now and just leads to spite matches where you go "ok fine, if you dont care, neither do I" and just focus them back.

At least the kill and damage padders are having fun...

If they want to keep some form of battle high, I'd make it more like a rage mode.
You could build it for fighting, and build it even faster for assisting or killing, until eventually you get to go super-saiyan mode, doing like 1.5x damage, it would only last a minute or two. But if you disengaged from battle, it would fall off in half that time. If you were building it and stopped, those gains would quickly decay as well.

This way you could get rewarded, even if you're just trying to stay in the fight- that push would build some momentum. It would reward offense and punish disengagement.
Most importantly! It shouldn't increase healing!

Originally Posted by Divinemights

For far too long, PvE roulette players have treated PvP modes as an obligation, something they’re entitled to participate in without respecting the experience of actual PvP players.
For just as long, they’ve complained about losing, often defaulting to blaming “premades,” when in reality they’re facing coordinated players who understand positioning, timing, and map awareness.
This is the turning point.
If you don’t engage with PvP and refuse to learn, you won’t improve and the gap will only widen.
PvP naturally filters for adaptation and skill; that’s simply how the mode works.
What we’re seeing now isn’t unfairness, t’s PvP running as intended.
And in that environment, only those willing to learn and coordinate will consistently succeed.

Lolwut? This change absolutely benefits premades more than ever, making them even more cancerous because there's no longer anything to even remotely stop them once they get rolling (which can happen as early as the first 2 minutes and then its GG for the remaining 6-8 minutes).

If anything I can see this encouraging even more lethargy because once you're in 3rd place, there's not much you can do to dig yourself out when you can't knock any other team down a peg or build back up in any meaningful way before its too late, and 3rd place just ends up a free farm if they make the mistake of engaging once the outcome is determined. At best, they're better off IGNORING all future fights and just hugging nodes for the rest of the match, hoping 2nd place dies enough against 1st to let 3rd sneak into 2nd. But instead we just end up with more matches of 3rd fighting 2nd because they have zero chance of affecting 1st, or 2nd bullying 3rd because they can't stop 1st either.

They may as well make the mode 1v1 at this point, because one team is completely vestigial with how battle high works now and is literally only there for the XP.

Originally Posted by TofuLove

In defence of Divinemights, I don't think what they are saying necessary disagrees that your point. But I don't think "premades are being benefitted" is a good enough reason to make changes to the mode. Everyone is working within the same rules and winning/losing is the core mechanic. People who want to play well will always win. However, the question of premades has been talked about to death on this forum...like literally every frontline thread devolves into it.

Yesterday I was put in a game with at least 5 BH0 in my party at the end of the game. Some of which had sub 100k damage dealt. Are the premades the problem, or is it just bad gamers? It's the contrast between those who care and those who really really don't.

That's just it though, it doesn't matter if you care if there's no crawling up once the placements are on-lock, and they lock-in REALLY damn fast now with the BH changes to the point I've been getting Frontline matches that snowball faster and end quicker than Rival Wings on mogtome day.

And hell, sometimes people "trying" has been a bigger bane then a boon. I've actually died MORE often and ended up with LESS BH than I used to before the changes because people have becoming increasingly suicidal and "yolo" which quickly dominoes into everyone else in the alliance getting wiped out too. People are just throwing themselves in there because they're worried if they don't establish a little BH, it'll look like they were doing nothing... only to end up dead and have no BH anyway. I've had games where ALL 24 PEOPLE INCLUDING MYSELF HAD BH0, or had teams still standing at 0 points 8+ minutes in because there was just absolutely no way to get out of the hole they got locked into because too many people forgot that while they don't lose BH on death, they still lose points.

Matches are just a bunch of recklessness and carelessness, which only further contributes to premade dominance because they're less likely to blunder into fights they can't win and/or may have the rest of their alliance on a tighter leash.

Before I just didn't take Frontlines seriously but still tried to contribute, but now I'm starting to just not bloody care and join the rest of the lemmings in dying because at least the lowered quality matches will end sooner that way.

I'm ... mixed on the BH changes. After clearing the patch content tour, It feels worse now to catch-up late-game if your team cannot or does not want to engage (close matches when a company hits around 80% score are nigh-impossible to turn around now if you're last place below that unless you get lucky on nodes or second hard-focuses first alongside your own company). Maybe it's too early, but it's also not fully understood yet that you NEED to be fighting to get BH VERY early on to not only /keep up/ with the other companies with BH's damage increases but to also be able to /survive/ other companies' damage with BH's healing potency increases. The changes do absolutely nothing to make players want to engage if they weren't already; they'll still be too afraid to push because either they don't understand what their (or other's) role/job can do to get kills/where to sponge assists or they simply don't want to play the mode itself.

Personally, it feels like there's just too many stat modifiers in Frontline synergizing with certain jobs for the damage and healing potencies increases to remain on BH as well. You have varying incoming and outgoing damage base modifiers on every job, you have role PvP actions that also synergize too well (or not enough) with certain job combinations, and depending on when or where the wind blows for PvP balance patches, some compositions become too heavy to deal with once they snowball (I don't have an issue with very efficient comps; the issue lies with inexperienced players who have no idea how to defang oppressive comps because they lack understanding which jobs need more attention when playing against and what their own job can do to help survive, there's not much time you can explain during an ongoing match either).

My own thought is to probably move the damage and healing potencies from BH to be based on companies' scores instead being granted to individual players, as if it were like a second wind. Of course, first place shouldn't benefit and second might benefit a little (or not at all either), but perhaps third place can be given --for an example, the equivalent of a BH3 to keep them in the game if they're behind.
I do realize that if this were to happen though, BH really wouldn't be useful outside of last place and would possibly border on removing it entirely in the future if there's no good incentive to even fight for high BH. That said, while increasing rewards by a percentage like wolf marks and series exp based on tracking a player's BH at the end of a match could be an incentive, it becomes an entirely different discussion on pvp rewards not being inticing enough to keep playing FL beyond series completion.

Forgive me if I'm wrong though on any of this, I'm just a soloist who just likes FL chaos; I just want changes to make sense.

Originally Posted by Scintilla

If we lose, did we fight a good game and hold our own? Is there anything I could do differently to maybe help swing it a bit more in our favour next time? If it wasn't close, there's very clearly a strong ability difference between the teams, but why is this blindly labelled as a 'cancerous premade' fault, rather than considering your own teams performance?

Completely unrelated scenario:
I'm entering a race/match/competition. I've practiced really hard for months and worked to improve my ability ready for this event. Many of the people I'm vs haven't really bothered to practice at all, they just want to get it over with. Event day comes: I try my best, I win. My competitors then begin to complain that it's unfair and I only won because I'm a 'try-hard' who's dominating. They claim that the whole process was a fix in my favour.

Sound familiar?

Except in your "scenario" you had anywhere from 3 to 7 other people hobbling other racers to make sure they took the placements right behind you. It's indeed fixed in your favor when they're collaborating to make sure nobody places above 5th or 9th outside of your friend group.
+++

Originally Posted by Scintilla

The excuse used to be that these 'premades' would continuously wipe less good teams, making BH very hard for those teams to get and keep, making it harder to counter. That excuse no longer exists.

I completely get the frustration when you're stuck in a team who seems to be getting nowhere, but the blame for that does not lie on regular players, as is the usual default excuse. There is only one way that the system will change from what it is now and that's if more casual players began to push themselves in PvP, not just in ability but in keeping a competitive, improvement-driven attitude.

Defaulting to 'premade's fault', 'why bother?', 'who cares' after losses is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It's not self-fulfilling prophecy, it's playing the mode as intended now. Either be in a premade, or accept being a useless solo-queuer. Until now I've avoided lethargic play, but this change actually ENCOURAGES it because matches can be called faster than ever, and there's NO counter play when you can't do anything against the teams that built BH5 first. Comebacks and upsets were already unicorns, now they're just extinct.

Giving up is the only choice for someone in my position, and I'm "just here for the Series XP" from now on because I'm not going to be gaslit into thinking I can contribute anymore, and the only "improvement" to be found here is if I party up with others and hop into voice chat.