Just a few points I wanted to touch on re: 5.1 feedback based on what we've seen as of this morning's live letter.
Frontlines:
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Frontlines:
- New map: Looks great. Wanted to see the Nadaam in a PVP context, wish fulfilled, looks fun as fuck. A+++
- Party size limits: While I understand that 8 man premades tend to run the show and PERSONALLY feel that a 4 person limit on premades does address that, this does feel like a bit too strict of a limit that has a much larger effect on those more passionate/interested in PvP over anybody else and directly reduces the ability for not just PvP communities but FCs, linkshells, static raid groups to play together. This is especially strange since the mode itself doesn't have any competitive rankings or rewards beyond overall wins achievements. Further, I'd emphasize that currently established PvP communities (PvPaissa, Revival Wings among others) do not look very positively on this change for the aforementioned reasons. The mode is already being referred to as Flatlines now.
I feel like the better solution here would be to give more incentive queuing as a group - bonus marks, tomes, EXP, something of that nature based on the size of the premade. There's already a limit to the carry potential of an 8 man premade just by virtue of teams scaling up to 24 players - This feels like, despite the intention, it may end up doing more harm than good.
- 72 Player match restriction:A t the moment activity might seem fine, but there's a real worry in the community that once the novelty of the new map wears off that queues are going to suffer the same fate as Rival Wings - Once the novelty wore off initially, it required the creation of a community centered around coordinating queue pops across different datacenters (shoutouts to Revival Wings for this). With Rival Wings having a hard requirement of 48 total players requiring that much effort (and sometimes not seeing success!), there's a sentiment that it's going to require an even larger effort just to get Frontlines modes to pop.
On top of that, the removal of the smaller scale versions of the mode feels kinda bad. One of the most common complaints I see about people who dip their toes into PvP is that it's very hard to gauge individual contribution in a match, and 72 mans amplify this by quite a lot.
Requiring 72 players for Frontlines (especially coupled with the change to premade party sizes) is going to significantly affect the queues - I'd walk this change back entirely, honestly.
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