got exactly 1 more win on seal rock this afternoon. so that number has just gotta sit at 99 until thursday. absolute misery.
ffxiv has the worst pvp in an mmo, perhaps ever. I picked up RuneScape when i was 10 and for 20 years i’ve been playing one mmo or another. frontlines is the worst; i don’t think it’s even particularly close.
a lot of the issue is having three teams. plenty of other WoW likes have modes functionally identical to frontline that are vastly more tolerable. the old republic is a great example; mechanically way worse than ffxiv but i’d much rather play huttball simply because i don’t have to worry about a third team showing up and wrecking things. the lack of irl sports where 3 teams compete is a real good clue here.
does ffxiv need large scale pvp? not really and it doesn’t seem like it’s a priority for the dev team. there hasn’t been a new frontline map for over 3 years. tweaks to the maps take ages and seem really poorly play tested (reducing the score limit in seal rock has made it vastly more unpleasant). and like, there’s rival wings which may as well not exist; i haven’t had a match of rival wings since they reworked pvp and added crystalline conflict. there’s a whole rival wings map i’ve never seen because seemingly they just never remembered to turn it back on in duty finder.
the problem is they tied frontlines into The Lore and had story beats to set it up. the story has moved on completely from where it was at then, to the point where that stuff no longer makes sense (we’re just a million miles removed from the grand companies seeming like anything other than one big happy family), and they’ve shown themselves quite happy to edit a realm reborn so it feels weird to me that they’ve left maybe the most odd and out of place story beat untouched. they’re clearly very attached to the idea of the teams in frontlines representing the three grand companies. this is silly for a few reasons, the obvious one being that nowadays you’re just assigned one randomly at the start of the match. another reason is that the player base (at least on my dc) just calls them red, blue and yellow anyway.
which is all to say, i think you could probably save frontlines if you made it a mode for two teams and accordingly tweaked the maps and edited a few realm reborn cutscenes.
what i actually want is for them to give a shit about rival wings because i think it’s really fun but there is just no incentive to play it.
pvp in ffxiv has been largely rudderless the whole time i’ve been playing and at a time when the whole game is kind of rudderless that kind of feels even worse. it’s contributing to an overall bad vibe.
anyway, fuck seal rock. dogshit map.
there’s other shit i could bitch about here too, like PvP not being impacted by battle effect settings (love when i can’t see what’s going due to all the big explosions), or how the servers clearly cannot keep up with so many people fighting at once, or how busted the balance is (dark knight is unspeakable), or how the way map rotation works sucks ass.
