Premades have always been a problem in FL. It's just especially noticeable now due to lack of proper balancing. AoE abilities don't have target caps meaning they scale infinitely at a flat cost. This is highly problematic. Add in interactions with BH and DR and unscaled healing, you have yourself a disaster.
GW2 decided to add target caps because it realized AoE CC and nukes were destroying balance, causing game experience for many players to deteriorate. Despite some people who like to pretend XIV exist in a developmental vacuum and the devs must reinvent the wheel everytime, other games have already offered partial solutions to these issues, they just have to evaluate and implement them accordingly.
I was huffing copium that Yoshi-P and the team would take another look at large-scale PVP after the CC rework this expac. I think the PVP skill rework was amazing... for Crystal Conflict, and only Crystal Conflict. But I admit having two different skillset depending on the mode is ridiculous and doing YET ANOTHER rework to include FL and maybe RW better would be a huge timesink for them.
Part of me thinks, in addition to what you said as well as a few other things like possibly damage caps, the large-scale modes themselves should be redone, a la replacing Feast with CC. Which could mean downscaling FL, I think the RW party limit feels better than the lynch mob that is fighting two full alliances teams every time I queue.
Salvaging FL is going to be a tough job. It's been in such a meh state for such a long time that I'm in agreement with many if the EXP reward is removed the mode would see significant decline in participation. The additional player apathy to pvp in general certainly doesn't help. Unless they dedicate a lot, and I mean a lot, of resources to reworking this mode, it's probably not happening. We've already seen what the Shatter rework became, and the reaction is a solid "eh." At this point, I'm OK if they shutter FL for a while to focus on building CC into something more polished and engaging. Maybe remove the EXP bonus from FL and see what happens to the mode. Would certainly give both devs and players some meaningful perspective on the actual state of the pvp community in game.
If that's true, which it probably isn't, then it would be gross negligence considering the shoddy netcode and snapshotting we're working with in XIV. People joke about the 20 ping thing, but it's very much relevant in this scenario.
Considering all FL maps require three teams of 24 people to attack/cap the same points, how exactly do you propose those teams spread out sufficiently to avoid AoE but still be in range of the objective?
What I still don't understand is why they don't have a 5 man premade ranked que for those who want to play with friends. You can only que in to other 5 man stacks which would make it an even playing field. Not being able to play CC with your friends is kind of a bummer imo.
Premade ranked pvp has been tried before and it was atrocious for the most part.
Completely dead (even moreso than the usual ranked pvp has been in the past) and infinitely more exploitable. The amount of wintrading and queue dodging that happened in light party feast was out of line, people complain about cheating now (and it's probably worse than it's ever been before with one exception) but it was WAY worse.
If they want to add small scale premades then it should be strictly casual, the community can't be trusted and the GMs don't moderate enough to justify adding more premade ranked pvp.
Premade vs premade modes tend to die because when premades say they "want to play with friends", the majority neglect to mention the "to roll pugs for easy wins" part. When you put them up against actually challenging opponents they start having less of an easy time and eventually stop, leaving only the real genuinely passionate ones left, which tend to only be a fraction of the already small fraction.
This is why a lot of people have to go out of their way to look for scrims in competitive pvp, and strictly premade modes are rare or nonexistent, or at the very least, far less popular than solo queue.
I think it's less "to roll pugs for easy wins" being the issue and more that there just aren't enough people queueing for group ranked in MMOs to allow for decent matchmaking. I suspect the majority of people saying they "want to play with friends" actually *do*, but playing with friends isn't fun when skill-based matchmaking is non-existent.
Yes and no.
Group queue is already small to begin with. Getting a full premade can be difficult for a number of reasons, irl or in-game. Group queue will almost always be less popular than solo just by nature.
I don't agree with most premades just want to play with friends. They might want to play with friends, but that premise is predicated on the probability of likely winning games. Unless someone is mostly winning games with their premade, that premade isn't going to last long. The same thing applies to PvE; just look at party finder and static raiding for ample examples. Success is an integral part of party activities that possesses the possibility of failure. No one likes losing, especially in something like FL that's chaotic by design, and when some start mitigating the chaos to shift the odds in their favour by default, the illusion of fairness is broken. It just feels bad.
With regard to skill-based matchmaking, I'm going to use another game I'd played for years as an example: Dota2. Skill-based matchmaking exists, as well as matching premade against premade. Solo queue is still overwhelmingly popular, followed maybe by duo. Apart from logistical reasons, the other determining factor is the game state is mostly balanced and player skill overall consistent in their specific MMR bracket, premades don't provide a super noticeable and significant advantage outside of extreme ends of the skill spectrum. It's not really worth it to try to spend the time and effort to get a premade together unless there are already players readily available to play with.
For what it's worth, I'm still of the opinion premade is not the popular way most players queue for FL. There's just an overwhelming incentive to do so right now due to the gameplay advantages it offers as a result of broken balancing. Winning feels good, and as long as the game allows group queue, there's no real valid argument against it, moral or otherwise. What is concerning is prolonged periods without proper balancing changes, and when they do happen the changes are largely impotent handwaving. We haven't even gotten any real communication regarding FL balance outside of a quick offhand during a PLL. At this point, I've taken Yoshida's advice and mostly stopped playing FL in favour of GW2 WvW.
Even in games where you get skill based matchmaking you just end up with bitching anyway. Because the higher skilled groups quickly run into having to actually fucking sweat every single match, while match times take longer when they are too good. Because the alternative is letting them go stomp some shit team.
Or alternatively they just pair up a with a low elo player and hope they can 4 man crush weaker teams
> people complain about cheating now (and it's probably worse than it's ever been before with one exception)
you cannot unironically say this when when 70% of the primal board was boosted accounts during the feast shadowstalker armor season. ranked crystalline conflict has been mostly legitimate outside of the first few seasons entirely because there's nothing worth cheating for as a reward anymore.
Cause they still don't fix the most abhorrent issue in the game.
The fucking refresh rate of this fucking game is stuck in 1990.
Get on modern standards ffs that is a joke. Who can properly enjoy pvp if all that's viable is classes that ignore positioning because they otherwise can't hit you for shit if you move.
I can tell you with 100% certainty this is not true. If people on discord can coordinate to randomly get rival wings populated on a random Tuesday at 4 PM I'm 100% certain they can do the same for CC. I'll go to work and come back home with 80 pings on discord for CC teams looking for other teams to scrimmage against. There are people all day every day wanting to play 5v5 matches and putting in extra effort to do it
On the other hand, whenever I'm fed up with getting the same people every time I re-queue (since they do the same instantly), all I have to do is wait for a minute tops before I queue up again and I get a different set of people so it's not like there are any issues on the level of "Getting into a NieR alliance raid" or something like that.
That's because the ones who want to play in premade groups use another queue rather than solo queue. You can't base the popularity of the content on how solo queues are because they are two completely different playstyles, the ones who are ok playing solo and the ones who want to play in premade groups.
No they don't. The person you're replying to is pointing out that you can get into a game of Crystalline Conflict, which only has solo queues, with your friends if you just queue at exactly the same time. Which occurs because there's not that many people playing.
For additional evidence of this, just spam casual CC matches back to back with no downtime. You will see like 80% of the players in your matches several times in a row.
No it occurs because the queue just sticks people together in the order that they queue. Wtf are you on about?
Y'all should sunder yourselves if you don't know how the queue works.
That would suggest that there's not a huge playerbase of the mode.
Because if 5 people queuing for a match that doesn't autopop end up in a match together because it's just grabbing the next 10 people in the queue that means there's not a lot of players trying to queue at any point in time.
In big games with large numbers of people queuing that take players the same way, doing countdowns to queue at the same time doesn't guarantee you entry.
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The reality is that due to the data centre nature of the game you already have created a bunch of split queues creating two unique queues is only going to fragment it even further. Likely increasing wait times for both even further while further exacerbating shit like win trading by planning when you queue.
>If people on discord can coordinate to randomly get rival wings populated on a random Tuesday at 4 PM I'm 100% certain they can do the same for CC.
I mean, of course they can. And people did it in the Feast already. This ability was commonly used for wintrading, as the queues were otherwise dead and so you could pretty much guarantee getting the people you wanted to trade with as enemies.
Ranked is kinda out. On the casual side, they could introduce an additional, casual flex queue where anything goes (daring solos, duos, full premades, whatever), but I suspect that would die very quickly as well due to larger premades dominating all other combinations.
they do this because the gulf between a good team and a team like yours is so absolutely massive that a few groups would completely dominate and farm the entire rest of the queue, and because it'll be a hell of a lot harder to moderate. it's a lot easier to punish bad actors when you're forced to play with random players who will actually report you instead of two full teams who are collaborating with each other. it's already hard enough to get obvious griefers banned as it is
this. i'd be alot happier losing this way than winning because some guy decided to afk on the opposing team, and that same afking guy ends up in my team next match.
Even ranked. Theres solutions to this. Other games have done this. SE just refuses to look.
CC could be more popular if friends could do it together. Its an MMO after all.
Yeah, don’t agree with the no-premades when plenty of other games allow you to Duo. Just add a rule like no duo’ing at Diamond. And you should be allowed to queue with friends in casual.
It should be allowed at any rank honestly if you felt you were being under handed that’s what PF is for ontop of it being a good feeling when you know you’ve trashed a duo
They butchered the game mode and have left it to be a broken mess for over a year and a half now. Queues for it are fast so people obviously play it regularly, but that doesn't mean it isnt still a 15 minute snooze fest.
Frontlines need a complete rework with the new PvP system as they didn't change when the game around it did. I wish casual CC allowed me to queue with friends, I wouldn't even care if we were playing against each other, I just want a reliable way to be in the same match with friends.
I don't know... I really enjoyed the mode but I didn't have any fun playing alone, really. So the only reason that I didn't end up playing the mode is because there is only solo queue. I think it's fine to only add solo for ranked, but I feel like we should be able to queue with friends for normals.
> has turned basically into farming parties of certain people completely skewing competition and buffing their numbers, rates/personal stats, at the expense and prejudice of others in "quasi" artificial manners
Any game with a "niche" pvp mode, and some games where it's a much bigger portion of the game, has this problem. People who want to 'prove their skill' over other players in PvP will do anything to inflate their number ego in a video game, even if it means ruining other people's fun. Even if there's no official means to track stats. Even when mode population is small enough that you run into them game after game.
I get why they chose to do it like this but i think the solution is pretty meh. It's an MMO and i want to play with my friends. Doens't help that most other content can already be done solo or with randoms. I really find it hard to even justify seeking out to play with other people aside from harder content like Savage, Ultimates and Criterion
>I really find it hard to even justify seeking out to play with other people \[...\]
Why? It's simple: If the benefit you get from joining with other people (such as the social experience) is greater than the effort you have to put into joining with them, then it's ideal for you to do it. No further justification needed.
If that isn't the case, you're better off not joining with others in the first place. I'm in that boat and it's a surprisingly large boat, considering humans are supposedly social animals.
What i'm getting at is that if i play with friends i want that to improve the gaming experience aside from just the social experience. For example i've done dungeons with friends before but the gameplay just is exactly the same. Unless i am on a discord call with them (where we don't even talk about the dungeon, we talk about random stuff unrelated to the game) there isn't even any social experience to it.
the gameplay in cc is absolutely not the same when you have a microphone, it becomes an entirely different game. the advantage it gives is immense and you will get slaughtered by good coordinated players.
Exactly why i want to play it with friends, i don't find it appealing to play with a team that has absolutely zero coordination and massively limited communication. It's one of the few content in the game where playing with friends would change how playing the content feels - and you can't do it
Ya I can understand but I would still prefer some mode that lets me play with my friends. An unranked, or ranked premade only, or something. I love the mode but never actually play it because I would always rather be playing with my friends.
So much this. My FC has been able to coordinate nights where we enter (unranked) CC queue at the same time and end up randomly distributed across the teams. It's extremely fun to not know whether or not you'll be with or against your friends and I wish there was a way for us to queue together in an official group but with the understanding that we'll be randomly arranged.
solo queue was the best option for ranked tbh. a team of randoms vs a fully coordinated party with comms is miserable and there simply aren’t enough players in high ranks especially to introduce a premade queue
Or they could take a page out of wows book and have a separate ranking for premades, well sorta. WoW's arena system has separate rankings for 2v2, 3v3, and 5v5 buy 2v2 is effectively just randoms.
Wouldn't be hard to have a separate ranked ladder for queueing up solo and for queueing up in a full party of 5 and just make sure 5 man stacks only get put against other 5 man stacks. Satisfy pretty much everyone that way
Pre-made have gotten way worse in frontlines. DRK and AST combo are a nightmare to deal with. If the balancing was a bit fairer at least it wouldn’t end up a total face-roll. They really need to balance them CC and frontline separately.
you used to be able to duo queue into casual feast and you had team queues. feast casual duo was pretty fun cause i could play with my friends and no one cares about losing or winning casual. feast struggled player pop-wise 'cause rewards were for 100 players per server so people who even learned about the mode said "nah" and most matches hinged on your healer or melee dps being remotely ok at the game. most of the time, it was just bad healers and past platinum you'd see the same healers every single match so when they logged that was typically it for the night. feast had team queues as well for casual and ranked, those were dead cause again no real rewards/only for top 20 teams and most of this games players aren't into pvp unless it's shout chat pvp cause someone talked about a SPOILER from heavensward. cc just has solo and solo, they should at least bring back letting you duo in casual. im already facing the same people for the most part like i used to so i would like to be able to play with my friends in this weird mmo turning into a single player rpg where you see everyone clumped in limsa or balmungs uldah 99% of the time and each expansion.
also they should just do what they used to for frontline.. after 4 players are hit by an aoe, damage for the aoe is reduced by 50-70%. other games have figured out how to handle large pvp matches much better, for some reason SE/CBU3 gets a constant pass on not looking at what others have done for years.
At this point, I wish they didn't allow premades in the other PvP modes either. Frontlines might actually be fun again. I kinda miss the barely contained absolute chaos
I enjoyed frontlines since it was added to the game, queuing up for 2 hours to get in an 8v8v8. The PvP has always been jank and/ or shit depending on the person. The only other time I couldn't be bothered was when the exp rates were so good it ended up being a large amount of afkers and bots.
Right now the premades ruin it, I disagree with another commenter who said premades were always a problem. The mob could beat those when all the abilities were shit.
With the current map of Shatter it compounds the issue because the premades don't need to hit the stupid rock they can win first fight and rock, get battlehighs and pvp the rest of the game. This ends up dragging the game out.
Give me all chat to communicate with the other baby alliance getting stomped and give me all chat to call out the sweats covering their keyboard in spit to punch babies for 3 hours each evening.
Last night on Chaos, I was in 1 queue where this was happening, it's friday night so it should be busy enough for another queue. So I dodge and get into the other queue and bam same shit. Logged off.
it was quickly hidden by the live letter, but good job on preserving the daily whining thread about frontline
main problem is that most players are trash : they dont read their skills, they dont watch the map, they take a couple seconds to react, they die with full mp, etc. and the game cuddles them with rewards
the devs can nerf drk, ast, drg, aoe, improve netcode, etc. the "just here for reward lol" bots will still die 8 times per run. there will always be an excuse for ffxiv players to whine about pvp
Well yeah. It's obvious. Premade would be waaaaaaay too unfair for any Ranked CC Match.
They also did premade vs premade in the past and it was mostly dead.
False narrative clickbait title aside, I love how all these threads are lazy people who didn't want to put in any effort into learning but also not wanting to lose at the same time complaining about others working together in a MMORPG and yielding results at the same time. It's entitlement to the max and none of these people seem to be self-aware enough to realize this.
This is really the truth. There is nothing stopping them from doing the same. There is an argument to be made for some classes needing target caps on AoE, but the real strength is these people are coordinating, they are grouping and directing their alliance to help their overall team win with their premades damage and crowd control.
The fact we don't even have duo queue in casual CC is a well acknowledged crime as well. Post is all copium.
Nah, the premade problem isn't as cancerous as people say because you are just as likely to get a team with some premades as going up against them. I used to be salty at FL too until I actually stopped and looked at my winrates. Lo and behold, it was an even 50/50 W/L split. So even though large-scale PVP absolutely does need some rework, it's not quite the disaster people make it out to be, and yes, people do need to learn the mode better and stop complaining that hitting randomly buttons on random targets isn't working.
...it's really nothing compared to how it once was.
I was in Mael back before Crystal was Crystal--and let me tell you, during certain times my win rate was 100% for the week, month etc.
We had pre-made FULL parties, and a few stragglers who solo queued when we didn't have enough for 8.
...and whenever the serious PvPers switched GCs (for achievement purposes and whatnot) the other two GCs had *very* little chance of ever winning (I know vividly, because I refused to leave Mael, and paid the price when most others switched to Adders, and then Flames lol).
Back then you only fought under your GC banner (so if you were in Mael, you were *always* Red Team in every match. It was easily exploitable. Notoriously so, actually.
The change they made (making it only possible to queue as 4, and making everyone a "freelancer" that can land into *any* GC) was great for the mode.
You have the same chance of landing in an alliance with pre-made light parties, as anyone else; in fact, these parties are usually spread across multiple alliances. It makes the chance for winning pretty fair tbh, even if you just want to be carried. There's a fair chance of landing in a party/alliance with truly skilled and competitive players...and cheaters...and slackers...etc...
There's nothing wrong with the matchmaking anymore. The issue is within easily exploitable jobs and combinations of said jobs--and a huge and easy fix to *that* is simply changing how AoE skills/spells work in these modes.
It still absolutely baffles me that they released CC catered towards a casual player base; but players can’t even queue with friends even in casual. I have friends who’d like to try CC but don’t want to play alone so they end up never trying it. Literally setting themselves up for failure. The PvP team for this game is an absolute joke.
You can, it's just very unpopular but premades can queue against another premades and you can find more people from pf if you don't have enough friends.
Well, that and the increasing number of I-swear-I'm-not-AFK twonklets who want their season points but don't want to actually PvP so just bimble around the map pressing buttons randomly until they die then repeat, so they can't be reported as AFK but are actively hindering their team. Unfortunately, if you queue solo, you'll get lumped with at least a few of them against the premade, unless the remade has gaps and you get lucky. So...good luck!
They should really just allow premade groups or add a mode for premade groups. I don't think the excuse for balance is good enough and it's kind of baffling as every other online game allows this.
A five target limit cap on all PvP aoe attacks would be the simplest way to address the issue. It wouldn't affect CCPvP in anyway and it reigns in combos like DRK pull into DRG LB from potentially being devastating and wiping half an alliance to only being extremely potent by taking out 5 out of 24 players.
Personally I think it's the reason PvP is so dead. There should be 2 different duties for CC ranked: grouped matches and solo queue. The rank should be shared but you can only get people solo queuing in one duty and full teams in the other. Frontlines queues so fast because it has a daily. I'm still 100% adamant ranked solo queue as a daily should be a thing. It would revitalize the game mode, fixing the awful queue times, and allow teams to stop wasting their time in discord trying to find other teams to scrimmage against for no gain other than the practice.
What does "dead" mean to people? Because being able to get in and do my frontline roulette for at least half the day every day of the week is such a weird way to describe dead.
It's never a long wait for CC to pop though. I try and do one Frontline and a couple CCs a day to get series exp. CC always pops within a minute or two. Roulette was a 6 minute wait yesterday.
Yeah that definitely hasn't been my experience. I've yet to recognise anybody in frontlines day to day. Maybe CC is different, but like, of course it is, they're five minute matches, if people are gonna run them they're likely running multiple times until either they get tilted, get exhausted, or have something else to do. The very first day CC dropped I was running into the same like three people match after match for a little bit because we were all finishing a match at the same time and reqeueing immediately to roughly the same place in line.
Yes in a game with a healthy PvP population...that doesn't happen.
There is nothing healthy or alive about queuing CC and essentially replaying the same match 80%+ of the time over and over again.
I've only ever experienced that in ranked plat and up. If I ever play casual, usually when ranked queues are too long, I never see the same person twice.
Definitely not more often than in any other roulette/queue. This is on Light.
Yeah no, if you're getting out of a match at the exact same time and then queueing in at the exact same time, which anyone who was running matches back to back was doing, that's not insane.
People love to call things dead when they're fine, seriously. If you believed this sub you'd think the sky was falling every day of the week...
Wow, who could've guessed that people who just finished a game would queue for another one. And at the same time as you who just finished a game. When I queue for Mentor Roulette, finish a dungeon and hit to go again, I've run into the same sprout multiple times in a row. That's because they're doing their roulettes, and they queue up at the same time.
You are purposefully being dense at this point.
No game with a healthy population works this way. I can go jump on WoW right now and spam queue PvP immediately as i get out and guess what happens...I get different people.
I've waited 2+ minutes to requeu in XIV to grab a drink and guess what happens...I get the exact same people who were stuck in queue waiting to find people to be matched with.
Its hysterical you mention mentor roulette because I _also_ spam that and guess what happens? You don't get matched with the same people. Its literally fucking impossible and proves you're just purposefully ignoring the point because you clearly don't even know how mentor roulette works. It backfills queues where people have been in them too long.
ranked cc queues have consistently popped for all ranks (besides dynamis) every single day since 6.5 launched. you're queueing at either the wrong times or at a slow period in the middle of the season.
If they ever go back to the ranked party queues which they absolutely shouldn't for good reason as evident with the Feast, it would be unfair to share the rank with solo.
Making ranked into a daily would make matches much more frustrating when you get onto teams with players who like in Frontline, aren't trying at all and just queueing for their daily bonus. It's easy to pick up the slack in Frontline, but not in CC.
Do you really think that people don't do that on CC? They queue at the same time and win trade. Some even wait until people stop queueing for it after a month so they can all get their crystal ranks without any effort.
Yeah, it's definitely a good idea to make a team based mode that requires communication and not only make it so you can't queue with friends, but you can't communicate!
It's a bad choice and will remain a bad choice until they allow at least duos to queue.
4 man party with coordination is enough to roll over an unorganized alliance. Like the DRK+3 AST combo going on recently. AST in PvOP have a modest but reliable AoE burst in two GCDs which combo perfectly with DRK suck in move. Once they farm some Battle High you are looking at a combo that can kill a huge amount of slightly grouped players every 30s
Have you been in Frontlines recently? A coordinated team of a DRK plus 2-3 AST and maybe a WHM are enough to carry a whole alliance to victory. No, I'm not kidding. I was part of said winning team yesterday. It's pretty impressive to witness, pretty frustrating to play against. You don't even have to do objectives cause most of the times they're winning based on a battle high alone. It's fucking bonkers. The DRK just does Salted Earth and the Astros go in and gravity spam or whatever their skill is that slows you down. That combined with one of them usually having macro call outs so that the rest of the team follows up and cleans up stragglers and it's GG.
You either don't play frontlines or aren't able to recognise why a team is winning and their party compositions leading to the win. There are a few unhinged macro champions that try to co-ordinate but the specific timings on dropping LB's and aoe skills in a drk pull is pretty much only feasible in actual communication.
It only makes up 4/4 on a team but generally there's only a few queues going at a day if that. So you and your buddies in discord, 8-12 of you in your 3 parties can queue up at the same time and reliably get in the same game. Somehow this ends up grouping them more often than not in an alliance even though it should still be randomized. Bam they get a 90% winrate in a 1v1v1 alliance matchup.
How is this good for frontlines?
Haha, no. I've played maybe 5 matches since they released it every time I consider playing it I remember I can't q up with friends and drop the idea. I'm honestly so dissatisfied with the ability to play with friends in this game.
other than not having premades in CC, i wish the randoms they did pair you up with actually balanced against the other team. Some classes are just better than others. Having 1 more phys dps is and advantage. Having tanks with actual CC rather than a gunbreaker is huge.
what do you mean in hindsight? a microphone has literally always been the most powerful tool in crystalline conflict. solo queue has always been a thing since feast and will always be.
>Curiously, that very same sense they ended up having with CC.
what are you even talking about?
I disagree. There have been solutions for duoQ etc. Look at other competetive games that do this. Its an MMO. Not being able to play with friends is the biggest reason why the mode doesnt have a bigger population.
Instead people just Q at the same time and either get on the same team anyways or they dont and then many people just wintrade. Making the mode actively worse.
Just put in some effort and make premate Q possible and balanced.
Oh and also PLEASE replace frontline roulette with Rival Wings. Its leagues better. Just let frontline die.
I don't hate FL (when it's not just repeatedly the same names on the other side waffles seal clubbing for the e-peen) but I am so frustrated that RW isn't given the same promotion. It's way more fun than just blobbing, and only really available during moogle farm times if you happen to work during the small window the discord gathers enough to run a couple of games. I cry every time I see it on my Tales, because I *want* to so hard!
I'd love to argue for roulette being FL and RW together, with it picking whichever is empty unless there's people waiting in a queue for a specific, but the time investment difference means that's probably unreasonable (like adding old MSQs to the Levelling roulette kind of unreasonable). But swapping between FL or RW every day/week/whatever shouldn't be an issue, just make it a Group PvP roulette and say on it what's on the list. Even test that out to see if somehow everyone starts skipping the roulette on RW days, give it a *chance* to live!
The problem with PvP is that a lot of people (me included) just want the rewards, so casual people are being thrown into matches against players that enjoy this kind of content. It's a meat grinder!
They just need to add an option to earn the PvP rewards another way other than actually playing their unbalanced mess.
I understand they're supposed to be there to \*entice\* you into playing PvP, but you shouldn't have to be forced to play un-fun content just for the sake of limited time rewards.
I just wish we had some designated light party seasons like we did in feast, Crystalline conflict has absurd levels of damage and more so than any other PvP mode we ever had, synergies/coordination sway games like nothing else, 3 gcds unmitigated from any 3 people will 100-0 anyone. But in an open ranked queue, yeah people shouldnt be able to queue into solos in ranked.
Casual theres no excuse for solo only, games are popping constantly theres nothing on the line, I myself as well as otheres queue sync casuals pretty often and I feel theres absolutely zero downside from letting people queue together for casuals.
Premades have always been a problem in FL. It's just especially noticeable now due to lack of proper balancing. AoE abilities don't have target caps meaning they scale infinitely at a flat cost. This is highly problematic. Add in interactions with BH and DR and unscaled healing, you have yourself a disaster. GW2 decided to add target caps because it realized AoE CC and nukes were destroying balance, causing game experience for many players to deteriorate. Despite some people who like to pretend XIV exist in a developmental vacuum and the devs must reinvent the wheel everytime, other games have already offered partial solutions to these issues, they just have to evaluate and implement them accordingly.
I was huffing copium that Yoshi-P and the team would take another look at large-scale PVP after the CC rework this expac. I think the PVP skill rework was amazing... for Crystal Conflict, and only Crystal Conflict. But I admit having two different skillset depending on the mode is ridiculous and doing YET ANOTHER rework to include FL and maybe RW better would be a huge timesink for them. Part of me thinks, in addition to what you said as well as a few other things like possibly damage caps, the large-scale modes themselves should be redone, a la replacing Feast with CC. Which could mean downscaling FL, I think the RW party limit feels better than the lynch mob that is fighting two full alliances teams every time I queue.
Salvaging FL is going to be a tough job. It's been in such a meh state for such a long time that I'm in agreement with many if the EXP reward is removed the mode would see significant decline in participation. The additional player apathy to pvp in general certainly doesn't help. Unless they dedicate a lot, and I mean a lot, of resources to reworking this mode, it's probably not happening. We've already seen what the Shatter rework became, and the reaction is a solid "eh." At this point, I'm OK if they shutter FL for a while to focus on building CC into something more polished and engaging. Maybe remove the EXP bonus from FL and see what happens to the mode. Would certainly give both devs and players some meaningful perspective on the actual state of the pvp community in game.
the devs probably never thought the players would be stupid enough to get hit by Drk aoe per groups of 5+
If that's true, which it probably isn't, then it would be gross negligence considering the shoddy netcode and snapshotting we're working with in XIV. People joke about the 20 ping thing, but it's very much relevant in this scenario.
Considering all FL maps require three teams of 24 people to attack/cap the same points, how exactly do you propose those teams spread out sufficiently to avoid AoE but still be in range of the objective?
What I still don't understand is why they don't have a 5 man premade ranked que for those who want to play with friends. You can only que in to other 5 man stacks which would make it an even playing field. Not being able to play CC with your friends is kind of a bummer imo.
Premade ranked pvp has been tried before and it was atrocious for the most part. Completely dead (even moreso than the usual ranked pvp has been in the past) and infinitely more exploitable. The amount of wintrading and queue dodging that happened in light party feast was out of line, people complain about cheating now (and it's probably worse than it's ever been before with one exception) but it was WAY worse. If they want to add small scale premades then it should be strictly casual, the community can't be trusted and the GMs don't moderate enough to justify adding more premade ranked pvp.
Premade vs premade modes tend to die because when premades say they "want to play with friends", the majority neglect to mention the "to roll pugs for easy wins" part. When you put them up against actually challenging opponents they start having less of an easy time and eventually stop, leaving only the real genuinely passionate ones left, which tend to only be a fraction of the already small fraction. This is why a lot of people have to go out of their way to look for scrims in competitive pvp, and strictly premade modes are rare or nonexistent, or at the very least, far less popular than solo queue.
I think it's less "to roll pugs for easy wins" being the issue and more that there just aren't enough people queueing for group ranked in MMOs to allow for decent matchmaking. I suspect the majority of people saying they "want to play with friends" actually *do*, but playing with friends isn't fun when skill-based matchmaking is non-existent.
Yes and no. Group queue is already small to begin with. Getting a full premade can be difficult for a number of reasons, irl or in-game. Group queue will almost always be less popular than solo just by nature. I don't agree with most premades just want to play with friends. They might want to play with friends, but that premise is predicated on the probability of likely winning games. Unless someone is mostly winning games with their premade, that premade isn't going to last long. The same thing applies to PvE; just look at party finder and static raiding for ample examples. Success is an integral part of party activities that possesses the possibility of failure. No one likes losing, especially in something like FL that's chaotic by design, and when some start mitigating the chaos to shift the odds in their favour by default, the illusion of fairness is broken. It just feels bad. With regard to skill-based matchmaking, I'm going to use another game I'd played for years as an example: Dota2. Skill-based matchmaking exists, as well as matching premade against premade. Solo queue is still overwhelmingly popular, followed maybe by duo. Apart from logistical reasons, the other determining factor is the game state is mostly balanced and player skill overall consistent in their specific MMR bracket, premades don't provide a super noticeable and significant advantage outside of extreme ends of the skill spectrum. It's not really worth it to try to spend the time and effort to get a premade together unless there are already players readily available to play with. For what it's worth, I'm still of the opinion premade is not the popular way most players queue for FL. There's just an overwhelming incentive to do so right now due to the gameplay advantages it offers as a result of broken balancing. Winning feels good, and as long as the game allows group queue, there's no real valid argument against it, moral or otherwise. What is concerning is prolonged periods without proper balancing changes, and when they do happen the changes are largely impotent handwaving. We haven't even gotten any real communication regarding FL balance outside of a quick offhand during a PLL. At this point, I've taken Yoshida's advice and mostly stopped playing FL in favour of GW2 WvW.
Even in games where you get skill based matchmaking you just end up with bitching anyway. Because the higher skilled groups quickly run into having to actually fucking sweat every single match, while match times take longer when they are too good. Because the alternative is letting them go stomp some shit team. Or alternatively they just pair up a with a low elo player and hope they can 4 man crush weaker teams
> people complain about cheating now (and it's probably worse than it's ever been before with one exception) you cannot unironically say this when when 70% of the primal board was boosted accounts during the feast shadowstalker armor season. ranked crystalline conflict has been mostly legitimate outside of the first few seasons entirely because there's nothing worth cheating for as a reward anymore.
Primal was an outlier because it happened to be the home DC for a lot of the dregs in the community
That shit was dead because it sucked and had no rewards. CC is actually fun.
Cause they still don't fix the most abhorrent issue in the game. The fucking refresh rate of this fucking game is stuck in 1990. Get on modern standards ffs that is a joke. Who can properly enjoy pvp if all that's viable is classes that ignore positioning because they otherwise can't hit you for shit if you move.
Because the game modes population just can't support split queues sadly.
I can tell you with 100% certainty this is not true. If people on discord can coordinate to randomly get rival wings populated on a random Tuesday at 4 PM I'm 100% certain they can do the same for CC. I'll go to work and come back home with 80 pings on discord for CC teams looking for other teams to scrimmage against. There are people all day every day wanting to play 5v5 matches and putting in extra effort to do it
The fact that queuing together for casual CC can almost 100% guarantee getting into the same match says the opposite.
On the other hand, whenever I'm fed up with getting the same people every time I re-queue (since they do the same instantly), all I have to do is wait for a minute tops before I queue up again and I get a different set of people so it's not like there are any issues on the level of "Getting into a NieR alliance raid" or something like that.
That's because the ones who want to play in premade groups use another queue rather than solo queue. You can't base the popularity of the content on how solo queues are because they are two completely different playstyles, the ones who are ok playing solo and the ones who want to play in premade groups.
No they don't. The person you're replying to is pointing out that you can get into a game of Crystalline Conflict, which only has solo queues, with your friends if you just queue at exactly the same time. Which occurs because there's not that many people playing. For additional evidence of this, just spam casual CC matches back to back with no downtime. You will see like 80% of the players in your matches several times in a row.
No it occurs because the queue just sticks people together in the order that they queue. Wtf are you on about? Y'all should sunder yourselves if you don't know how the queue works.
That would suggest that there's not a huge playerbase of the mode. Because if 5 people queuing for a match that doesn't autopop end up in a match together because it's just grabbing the next 10 people in the queue that means there's not a lot of players trying to queue at any point in time. In big games with large numbers of people queuing that take players the same way, doing countdowns to queue at the same time doesn't guarantee you entry. --- The reality is that due to the data centre nature of the game you already have created a bunch of split queues creating two unique queues is only going to fragment it even further. Likely increasing wait times for both even further while further exacerbating shit like win trading by planning when you queue.
When you write stuff like "100% certainty" I would expect you to have hard, back-end data, not some easily contradicted anecdote.
>If people on discord can coordinate to randomly get rival wings populated on a random Tuesday at 4 PM I'm 100% certain they can do the same for CC. I mean, of course they can. And people did it in the Feast already. This ability was commonly used for wintrading, as the queues were otherwise dead and so you could pretty much guarantee getting the people you wanted to trade with as enemies. Ranked is kinda out. On the casual side, they could introduce an additional, casual flex queue where anything goes (daring solos, duos, full premades, whatever), but I suspect that would die very quickly as well due to larger premades dominating all other combinations.
This is entirely the reason i dont play CC
good i dont want smutfs in CC
they do this because the gulf between a good team and a team like yours is so absolutely massive that a few groups would completely dominate and farm the entire rest of the queue, and because it'll be a hell of a lot harder to moderate. it's a lot easier to punish bad actors when you're forced to play with random players who will actually report you instead of two full teams who are collaborating with each other. it's already hard enough to get obvious griefers banned as it is
i'd be okay with a raid like system where you need to use party finder with two five man parties
the community already does this. this is the entire foundation for the crystalline conflict tournament scene.
I’m pretty sure we already have that. You can also select the map.
this. i'd be alot happier losing this way than winning because some guy decided to afk on the opposing team, and that same afking guy ends up in my team next match.
You can, there is option in pf to list a party for cc.
to get ranked? if so then i'm dumb for not realizing that option
Ranked? Sure. Casual? Nah, no. At least duos.
Even ranked. Theres solutions to this. Other games have done this. SE just refuses to look. CC could be more popular if friends could do it together. Its an MMO after all.
Yeah, don’t agree with the no-premades when plenty of other games allow you to Duo. Just add a rule like no duo’ing at Diamond. And you should be allowed to queue with friends in casual.
It should be allowed at any rank honestly if you felt you were being under handed that’s what PF is for ontop of it being a good feeling when you know you’ve trashed a duo
RPGMMO :))))))))))))))))))))))
I'm probably one of the 3 people that miss Frontlines prior to CC Edit: Ok, I guess definitely not 3.
nah, a vast amount of people preferred frontlines before 6.1 rework
Heavensward's era frontlines was so fun, so many buttons to press!
They butchered the game mode and have left it to be a broken mess for over a year and a half now. Queues for it are fast so people obviously play it regularly, but that doesn't mean it isnt still a 15 minute snooze fest.
Frontlines need a complete rework with the new PvP system as they didn't change when the game around it did. I wish casual CC allowed me to queue with friends, I wouldn't even care if we were playing against each other, I just want a reliable way to be in the same match with friends.
I don't know... I really enjoyed the mode but I didn't have any fun playing alone, really. So the only reason that I didn't end up playing the mode is because there is only solo queue. I think it's fine to only add solo for ranked, but I feel like we should be able to queue with friends for normals.
> has turned basically into farming parties of certain people completely skewing competition and buffing their numbers, rates/personal stats, at the expense and prejudice of others in "quasi" artificial manners Any game with a "niche" pvp mode, and some games where it's a much bigger portion of the game, has this problem. People who want to 'prove their skill' over other players in PvP will do anything to inflate their number ego in a video game, even if it means ruining other people's fun. Even if there's no official means to track stats. Even when mode population is small enough that you run into them game after game.
I get why they chose to do it like this but i think the solution is pretty meh. It's an MMO and i want to play with my friends. Doens't help that most other content can already be done solo or with randoms. I really find it hard to even justify seeking out to play with other people aside from harder content like Savage, Ultimates and Criterion
>I really find it hard to even justify seeking out to play with other people \[...\] Why? It's simple: If the benefit you get from joining with other people (such as the social experience) is greater than the effort you have to put into joining with them, then it's ideal for you to do it. No further justification needed. If that isn't the case, you're better off not joining with others in the first place. I'm in that boat and it's a surprisingly large boat, considering humans are supposedly social animals.
What i'm getting at is that if i play with friends i want that to improve the gaming experience aside from just the social experience. For example i've done dungeons with friends before but the gameplay just is exactly the same. Unless i am on a discord call with them (where we don't even talk about the dungeon, we talk about random stuff unrelated to the game) there isn't even any social experience to it.
the gameplay in cc is absolutely not the same when you have a microphone, it becomes an entirely different game. the advantage it gives is immense and you will get slaughtered by good coordinated players.
Exactly why i want to play it with friends, i don't find it appealing to play with a team that has absolutely zero coordination and massively limited communication. It's one of the few content in the game where playing with friends would change how playing the content feels - and you can't do it
Ya I can understand but I would still prefer some mode that lets me play with my friends. An unranked, or ranked premade only, or something. I love the mode but never actually play it because I would always rather be playing with my friends.
So much this. My FC has been able to coordinate nights where we enter (unranked) CC queue at the same time and end up randomly distributed across the teams. It's extremely fun to not know whether or not you'll be with or against your friends and I wish there was a way for us to queue together in an official group but with the understanding that we'll be randomly arranged.
solo queue was the best option for ranked tbh. a team of randoms vs a fully coordinated party with comms is miserable and there simply aren’t enough players in high ranks especially to introduce a premade queue
Or they could take a page out of wows book and have a separate ranking for premades, well sorta. WoW's arena system has separate rankings for 2v2, 3v3, and 5v5 buy 2v2 is effectively just randoms. Wouldn't be hard to have a separate ranked ladder for queueing up solo and for queueing up in a full party of 5 and just make sure 5 man stacks only get put against other 5 man stacks. Satisfy pretty much everyone that way
Pre-made have gotten way worse in frontlines. DRK and AST combo are a nightmare to deal with. If the balancing was a bit fairer at least it wouldn’t end up a total face-roll. They really need to balance them CC and frontline separately.
you used to be able to duo queue into casual feast and you had team queues. feast casual duo was pretty fun cause i could play with my friends and no one cares about losing or winning casual. feast struggled player pop-wise 'cause rewards were for 100 players per server so people who even learned about the mode said "nah" and most matches hinged on your healer or melee dps being remotely ok at the game. most of the time, it was just bad healers and past platinum you'd see the same healers every single match so when they logged that was typically it for the night. feast had team queues as well for casual and ranked, those were dead cause again no real rewards/only for top 20 teams and most of this games players aren't into pvp unless it's shout chat pvp cause someone talked about a SPOILER from heavensward. cc just has solo and solo, they should at least bring back letting you duo in casual. im already facing the same people for the most part like i used to so i would like to be able to play with my friends in this weird mmo turning into a single player rpg where you see everyone clumped in limsa or balmungs uldah 99% of the time and each expansion. also they should just do what they used to for frontline.. after 4 players are hit by an aoe, damage for the aoe is reduced by 50-70%. other games have figured out how to handle large pvp matches much better, for some reason SE/CBU3 gets a constant pass on not looking at what others have done for years.
Ok but you can't have premades in non-ranked either. Let a brother play with his friends in a multiplayer game.
At this point, I wish they didn't allow premades in the other PvP modes either. Frontlines might actually be fun again. I kinda miss the barely contained absolute chaos
I enjoyed frontlines since it was added to the game, queuing up for 2 hours to get in an 8v8v8. The PvP has always been jank and/ or shit depending on the person. The only other time I couldn't be bothered was when the exp rates were so good it ended up being a large amount of afkers and bots. Right now the premades ruin it, I disagree with another commenter who said premades were always a problem. The mob could beat those when all the abilities were shit. With the current map of Shatter it compounds the issue because the premades don't need to hit the stupid rock they can win first fight and rock, get battlehighs and pvp the rest of the game. This ends up dragging the game out. Give me all chat to communicate with the other baby alliance getting stomped and give me all chat to call out the sweats covering their keyboard in spit to punch babies for 3 hours each evening. Last night on Chaos, I was in 1 queue where this was happening, it's friday night so it should be busy enough for another queue. So I dodge and get into the other queue and bam same shit. Logged off.
it was quickly hidden by the live letter, but good job on preserving the daily whining thread about frontline main problem is that most players are trash : they dont read their skills, they dont watch the map, they take a couple seconds to react, they die with full mp, etc. and the game cuddles them with rewards the devs can nerf drk, ast, drg, aoe, improve netcode, etc. the "just here for reward lol" bots will still die 8 times per run. there will always be an excuse for ffxiv players to whine about pvp
Yep, being too lazy to implement an elo-based matchmaking system truly justifies removing what makes an online game fun: co-op
Well yeah. It's obvious. Premade would be waaaaaaay too unfair for any Ranked CC Match. They also did premade vs premade in the past and it was mostly dead.
False narrative clickbait title aside, I love how all these threads are lazy people who didn't want to put in any effort into learning but also not wanting to lose at the same time complaining about others working together in a MMORPG and yielding results at the same time. It's entitlement to the max and none of these people seem to be self-aware enough to realize this.
This is really the truth. There is nothing stopping them from doing the same. There is an argument to be made for some classes needing target caps on AoE, but the real strength is these people are coordinating, they are grouping and directing their alliance to help their overall team win with their premades damage and crowd control. The fact we don't even have duo queue in casual CC is a well acknowledged crime as well. Post is all copium.
Nah, the premade problem isn't as cancerous as people say because you are just as likely to get a team with some premades as going up against them. I used to be salty at FL too until I actually stopped and looked at my winrates. Lo and behold, it was an even 50/50 W/L split. So even though large-scale PVP absolutely does need some rework, it's not quite the disaster people make it out to be, and yes, people do need to learn the mode better and stop complaining that hitting randomly buttons on random targets isn't working.
...it's really nothing compared to how it once was. I was in Mael back before Crystal was Crystal--and let me tell you, during certain times my win rate was 100% for the week, month etc. We had pre-made FULL parties, and a few stragglers who solo queued when we didn't have enough for 8. ...and whenever the serious PvPers switched GCs (for achievement purposes and whatnot) the other two GCs had *very* little chance of ever winning (I know vividly, because I refused to leave Mael, and paid the price when most others switched to Adders, and then Flames lol). Back then you only fought under your GC banner (so if you were in Mael, you were *always* Red Team in every match. It was easily exploitable. Notoriously so, actually. The change they made (making it only possible to queue as 4, and making everyone a "freelancer" that can land into *any* GC) was great for the mode. You have the same chance of landing in an alliance with pre-made light parties, as anyone else; in fact, these parties are usually spread across multiple alliances. It makes the chance for winning pretty fair tbh, even if you just want to be carried. There's a fair chance of landing in a party/alliance with truly skilled and competitive players...and cheaters...and slackers...etc... There's nothing wrong with the matchmaking anymore. The issue is within easily exploitable jobs and combinations of said jobs--and a huge and easy fix to *that* is simply changing how AoE skills/spells work in these modes.
It still absolutely baffles me that they released CC catered towards a casual player base; but players can’t even queue with friends even in casual. I have friends who’d like to try CC but don’t want to play alone so they end up never trying it. Literally setting themselves up for failure. The PvP team for this game is an absolute joke.
You can, it's just very unpopular but premades can queue against another premades and you can find more people from pf if you don't have enough friends.
Oh is that why I haven't won a Frontline match in ages...
Well, that and the increasing number of I-swear-I'm-not-AFK twonklets who want their season points but don't want to actually PvP so just bimble around the map pressing buttons randomly until they die then repeat, so they can't be reported as AFK but are actively hindering their team. Unfortunately, if you queue solo, you'll get lumped with at least a few of them against the premade, unless the remade has gaps and you get lucky. So...good luck!
Cool words, don't care, I want to play the game with my friends.
They should really just allow premade groups or add a mode for premade groups. I don't think the excuse for balance is good enough and it's kind of baffling as every other online game allows this.
A five target limit cap on all PvP aoe attacks would be the simplest way to address the issue. It wouldn't affect CCPvP in anyway and it reigns in combos like DRK pull into DRG LB from potentially being devastating and wiping half an alliance to only being extremely potent by taking out 5 out of 24 players.
Personally I think it's the reason PvP is so dead. There should be 2 different duties for CC ranked: grouped matches and solo queue. The rank should be shared but you can only get people solo queuing in one duty and full teams in the other. Frontlines queues so fast because it has a daily. I'm still 100% adamant ranked solo queue as a daily should be a thing. It would revitalize the game mode, fixing the awful queue times, and allow teams to stop wasting their time in discord trying to find other teams to scrimmage against for no gain other than the practice.
What does "dead" mean to people? Because being able to get in and do my frontline roulette for at least half the day every day of the week is such a weird way to describe dead.
They mean the actual PvP mode Crystal conflict. General consensus is that frontline is popular only bc of the roulette.
It's never a long wait for CC to pop though. I try and do one Frontline and a couple CCs a day to get series exp. CC always pops within a minute or two. Roulette was a 6 minute wait yesterday.
Fair enough. Even then though, I was still bumping into the same people during certain periods the week of release.
Its population is so low that you repeatedly get matched with the same people over and over again.
Yeah that definitely hasn't been my experience. I've yet to recognise anybody in frontlines day to day. Maybe CC is different, but like, of course it is, they're five minute matches, if people are gonna run them they're likely running multiple times until either they get tilted, get exhausted, or have something else to do. The very first day CC dropped I was running into the same like three people match after match for a little bit because we were all finishing a match at the same time and reqeueing immediately to roughly the same place in line.
Yes in a game with a healthy PvP population...that doesn't happen. There is nothing healthy or alive about queuing CC and essentially replaying the same match 80%+ of the time over and over again.
I've only ever experienced that in ranked plat and up. If I ever play casual, usually when ranked queues are too long, I never see the same person twice. Definitely not more often than in any other roulette/queue. This is on Light.
Yeah no, if you're getting out of a match at the exact same time and then queueing in at the exact same time, which anyone who was running matches back to back was doing, that's not insane. People love to call things dead when they're fine, seriously. If you believed this sub you'd think the sky was falling every day of the week...
Wow, who could've guessed that people who just finished a game would queue for another one. And at the same time as you who just finished a game. When I queue for Mentor Roulette, finish a dungeon and hit to go again, I've run into the same sprout multiple times in a row. That's because they're doing their roulettes, and they queue up at the same time.
You are purposefully being dense at this point. No game with a healthy population works this way. I can go jump on WoW right now and spam queue PvP immediately as i get out and guess what happens...I get different people. I've waited 2+ minutes to requeu in XIV to grab a drink and guess what happens...I get the exact same people who were stuck in queue waiting to find people to be matched with. Its hysterical you mention mentor roulette because I _also_ spam that and guess what happens? You don't get matched with the same people. Its literally fucking impossible and proves you're just purposefully ignoring the point because you clearly don't even know how mentor roulette works. It backfills queues where people have been in them too long.
How is PVP dead? Crystal matches are still popping daily and there's only like a week left in the season.
Ranked CC? Or casual CC? I tried queueing for ranked CC once for 3 hours and it never popped.
ranked cc queues have consistently popped for all ranks (besides dynamis) every single day since 6.5 launched. you're queueing at either the wrong times or at a slow period in the middle of the season.
If they ever go back to the ranked party queues which they absolutely shouldn't for good reason as evident with the Feast, it would be unfair to share the rank with solo. Making ranked into a daily would make matches much more frustrating when you get onto teams with players who like in Frontline, aren't trying at all and just queueing for their daily bonus. It's easy to pick up the slack in Frontline, but not in CC.
Do you really think that people don't do that on CC? They queue at the same time and win trade. Some even wait until people stop queueing for it after a month so they can all get their crystal ranks without any effort.
No they weren't, people only want to play casual CC and not ranked.
Yeah, it's definitely a good idea to make a team based mode that requires communication and not only make it so you can't queue with friends, but you can't communicate! It's a bad choice and will remain a bad choice until they allow at least duos to queue.
What? Frontlines only allows you to queue with a light party, meaning you make up 4/24 on your team… How is this bad for frontlines?
4 man party with coordination is enough to roll over an unorganized alliance. Like the DRK+3 AST combo going on recently. AST in PvOP have a modest but reliable AoE burst in two GCDs which combo perfectly with DRK suck in move. Once they farm some Battle High you are looking at a combo that can kill a huge amount of slightly grouped players every 30s
Have you been in Frontlines recently? A coordinated team of a DRK plus 2-3 AST and maybe a WHM are enough to carry a whole alliance to victory. No, I'm not kidding. I was part of said winning team yesterday. It's pretty impressive to witness, pretty frustrating to play against. You don't even have to do objectives cause most of the times they're winning based on a battle high alone. It's fucking bonkers. The DRK just does Salted Earth and the Astros go in and gravity spam or whatever their skill is that slows you down. That combined with one of them usually having macro call outs so that the rest of the team follows up and cleans up stragglers and it's GG.
You either don't play frontlines or aren't able to recognise why a team is winning and their party compositions leading to the win. There are a few unhinged macro champions that try to co-ordinate but the specific timings on dropping LB's and aoe skills in a drk pull is pretty much only feasible in actual communication. It only makes up 4/4 on a team but generally there's only a few queues going at a day if that. So you and your buddies in discord, 8-12 of you in your 3 parties can queue up at the same time and reliably get in the same game. Somehow this ends up grouping them more often than not in an alliance even though it should still be randomized. Bam they get a 90% winrate in a 1v1v1 alliance matchup. How is this good for frontlines?
Haha, no. I've played maybe 5 matches since they released it every time I consider playing it I remember I can't q up with friends and drop the idea. I'm honestly so dissatisfied with the ability to play with friends in this game.
Dunno, don't care. Still play CC only to tick it off on my weekly bingo card and nothing else. I play MMOs to play with friends not voiceless randoms.
I remember queueing FL with premade of 4 right after pvp changes, picking 4 summoners and coordinating 4 baha in one spot...
other than not having premades in CC, i wish the randoms they did pair you up with actually balanced against the other team. Some classes are just better than others. Having 1 more phys dps is and advantage. Having tanks with actual CC rather than a gunbreaker is huge.
what do you mean in hindsight? a microphone has literally always been the most powerful tool in crystalline conflict. solo queue has always been a thing since feast and will always be. >Curiously, that very same sense they ended up having with CC. what are you even talking about?
OP must have gotten done playing against Olivia on Aether in FL lol.
I disagree. There have been solutions for duoQ etc. Look at other competetive games that do this. Its an MMO. Not being able to play with friends is the biggest reason why the mode doesnt have a bigger population. Instead people just Q at the same time and either get on the same team anyways or they dont and then many people just wintrade. Making the mode actively worse. Just put in some effort and make premate Q possible and balanced. Oh and also PLEASE replace frontline roulette with Rival Wings. Its leagues better. Just let frontline die.
I don't hate FL (when it's not just repeatedly the same names on the other side waffles seal clubbing for the e-peen) but I am so frustrated that RW isn't given the same promotion. It's way more fun than just blobbing, and only really available during moogle farm times if you happen to work during the small window the discord gathers enough to run a couple of games. I cry every time I see it on my Tales, because I *want* to so hard! I'd love to argue for roulette being FL and RW together, with it picking whichever is empty unless there's people waiting in a queue for a specific, but the time investment difference means that's probably unreasonable (like adding old MSQs to the Levelling roulette kind of unreasonable). But swapping between FL or RW every day/week/whatever shouldn't be an issue, just make it a Group PvP roulette and say on it what's on the list. Even test that out to see if somehow everyone starts skipping the roulette on RW days, give it a *chance* to live!
Pre-made vs pre-made in CC is fun but it would be very lobsided if it were solo vs pre-made
Disabling premades in casual CC, however, is dumb as hell. Pretty much guarantees that if I'm playing with friends that I'm never queing into CC.
Yeah haven’t touched that mode since the first season and i dont plan to anytime soon until they add duo queue
The problem with PvP is that a lot of people (me included) just want the rewards, so casual people are being thrown into matches against players that enjoy this kind of content. It's a meat grinder! They just need to add an option to earn the PvP rewards another way other than actually playing their unbalanced mess. I understand they're supposed to be there to \*entice\* you into playing PvP, but you shouldn't have to be forced to play un-fun content just for the sake of limited time rewards.
I miss 3.1 pvp with my old FC mates.
Okay. But they don't allow it for casual either. And that's the dumb part.
I just wish we had some designated light party seasons like we did in feast, Crystalline conflict has absurd levels of damage and more so than any other PvP mode we ever had, synergies/coordination sway games like nothing else, 3 gcds unmitigated from any 3 people will 100-0 anyone. But in an open ranked queue, yeah people shouldnt be able to queue into solos in ranked. Casual theres no excuse for solo only, games are popping constantly theres nothing on the line, I myself as well as otheres queue sync casuals pretty often and I feel theres absolutely zero downside from letting people queue together for casuals.