Auto-switch job on Duty entry ... I can't believe this isn't already implemented

If I had to estimate, I'd say about 99.999999999999999999999999999999999999999% of all times that I've missed a duty prompt has been because I've gotten stuck playing another job while I wait for the duty finder to pop. I do this due to the long wait times especially for DPS, which can vary between 10 and 50,000 minutes more or less.

Take today, for example, the most ridiculous one I've ever encountered. I was waiting for a DPS duty during which time I was going around killing level 50 elite marks just for the easy tomes. I was doing this with my level 100 WHM so clearly no threats involved. Well yay for me, I happened to be fighting some random lv50 elite that threw off a massive circle AOE, I stood in it thinking "what could it possibly do to my lv100" .. well it caused a 1 minute long petrify. Ridiculous and shortsighted that a mob was even designed to be able to do this in the open world but of course my unlucky scenario was, I couldn't move, I could suicide, I couldn't run. All I could do was watch my duty finder count down and eventually fail giving me a fail mark for the day.

I get it, there's no permanent issue here as the marks reset daily and odds are you won't encounter something like this 3 times in the same day, but it's still rather infuriating to have lost the 15 minutes spent in the queue. I can't believe this is still a thing years and years and years and years and years later :/ SE get on the ball and just fix these things already. Just allow us to accept entry to the duty even if we're on the wrong job and just switch our job automatically, how hard is that honestly.

That would cost them 20 million bucks to implement. its way too expensive.

I'm assuming they don't do this because of other sorts of edge cases, where someone signed up, and in the 26 minute wait for the DPS queue...somehow decided to desynth their dancer weapons and then they are not actually capable of auto-swapping into the job.

If they could get around that sort of thing, it would be a nice feature.

I just wish I can queue up with multiple classes. I have everything maxed out but I can only queue up for one thing with one character. I want to be able to queue up for multiple duties with any of my classes as long as the ilvl is met.

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Originally Posted by Astronis

I'm assuming they don't do this because of other sorts of edge cases, where someone signed up, and in the 26 minute wait for the DPS queue...somehow decided to desynth their dancer weapons and then they are not actually capable of auto-swapping into the job.

If they could get around that sort of thing, it would be a nice feature.

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Presumably at least for this specific edge case, it's the person's own fault for desynthing their weapon while they're in a queue. Ok one could argue it was also my own fault for deciding to play some kind of open world content while I wait for the queue, but I think most reasonable people can see the difference. In this instance if the weapon is no longer available, the user can't join the duty and therefore gets a failed entry > strike. Honestly if someone is desynthing (or selling or through any other means losing) their weapon for the job that they duty-queued for, it's probably because they're actually trying to be destructive

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Originally Posted by Appleboops

Presumably at least for this specific edge case, it's the person's own fault for desynthing their weapon while they're in a queue.

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Well...yeah. People do dumb stuff all the time. But it would prevent the auto-swap and the game system presumably isn't going to be programmed to know why a player can't swap for the queue, it's just going to try to swap the job and fail. If you want the game to kick people out of queue for that failure to swap, it would have kicked you out as well, because it would have occurred before the zone-in and the game detected an inability to swap jobs. It's not going to be programmed to see this person failed to swap jobs because they were in combat while this other person failed because they don't have a weapon. Otherwise, they would be auto-swapped in-instance and by then they can't be kicked out of queue and we may as well unlock the ability to swap jobs in-instance (I would like that, though it would cause all kinds of other issues!)

I'm not going to pretend to know how the game's engine works or how the different systems interact with one another and all that mess, that's SE's thing to sort out. That said, if/when you sell or desynth a weapon and then try to swap to the job that had that weapon, in the event you have a different weapon of the same type you do get a popup message asking if you'd like to update your gear set with the new weapon that is available. This suggests to me that at least the game has ways to check if the weapon is there or not, and really I don't see why there wouldn't be a way to do that. In any event, again I'm not here to get into the grit of the "how" but I'm more just here to say this should have been a feature right from the beginning and the fact that it's not makes me sad

I don't think you needed to take to the forums because you got jebaited by an overworld mob.

I don't think we need this system for the 1 time a decade you get put into a situation where you're unable to switch to another job for a full minute. It doesn't take that long to leave combat, finish a craft, etc. That's a lot of dev work, testing, implementation, QA, edge case discovery, and new system interactions that would need to be developed for no real gain or QOL.

Most normal people would laugh this off, hold the L, and leave with a funny story to tell. "Haha, I missed a queue because an ARR mob turned me into a statue for a full business day." You should be sad that you've chosen the negative route, op. Not sad that a video game doesn't have every single little corner padded to prevent one from bumping into the corner.

I personally don't think it's so rare a scenario as you're making it out to be, yes MY situation that I described was 1 in a gametime but there's a much more generic scenario of someone farming mobs in the open world for basically any reason and then getting queued and unable to swap jobs. Most mobs are aggro and it's happened on many occasions where I've been doing low-level grind while waiting for the queue, then it finally pops but the aggros are chasing me down. Choice one: hope to kill in time and swap jobs quick - Choice 2: try to run, but then in that scenario I've had times different aggros just keep tagging you and so long as anything's chasing you you're stuck. edit: I forgot to mention but if the Chocobo partner is out it's even worse sometimes because I've had times he runs off to go fight something god knows where and I get stuck "in battle" when I'm not actually in battle, or trying to run but the Chocobo stays behind XD so basically yea the partner Choco can make things messier sometimes here too

In any case, it doesn't help to over exagerate on either side of this coin, this was my experience and this was the reaction I had. Given that the wait time for queues is so drastically varying (sometimes it's 3 seconds, sometimes it's 20 minutes), given that the "estimate" that's shown is laughably wrong a lot of the time, and given that there's an actual penalty system for missing a queue, I feel that yes they should pad every scenario so that the Player is not the one suffering consequences for scenarios where they wanted to join properly but just couldn't simply due to an engine weakness or lack of design foresight

That said we are all privy to our beliefs and opinions on the situation, and I hold nothing against anyone who disagrees with me