Suggestion: Adaptive Duty Finder Incentives

Good afternoon,

I am a player on the Materia data centre, and I have been since its creation. As I’m sure we’re all aware, the Materia and Dynamis data centres are experiencing low populations and long queue times at present, and have been for some time. Rather than complain about it, I would instead like to propose a solution, one that hopefully shouldn’t be particularly difficult or expensive to implement.

THE PROBLEM

The Preferred World Bonus to EXP gained is helpful, however it is partially offset by long queue times reducing the overall efficiency of EXP gain on those worlds. The playerbase’s usual solution is to create Party Finders and advertise them in various places, but this creates an issue of fracturing the active playerbase between those who are trying to queue through Duty Finder and those who are trying to use Party Finder, inadvertently making the queue/fill times even longer.

Furthermore, in the case of Dynamis specifically, it creates a perverse incentive to create characters on Dynamis for the bonus, then transfer off to a different server for the short queue times, thus leaving Dynamis even emptier. The Preferred World Bonus is good at incentivising players to create their characters on underpopulated worlds, but with the advent of Data Centre Travel, it has proven to be less effective at actually keeping people playing on those worlds.

THE SOLUTION

Based on past trends and developer comments, the intent in future appears to be to allow any player from any server to Data Centre Travel to any other data centre. As I’m sure Square Enix is aware, this is going to be a costly and time-intensive measure, but in light of this, I would like to propose an additional measure – one that will work even in the current state of the game, but will only grow in effectiveness as Data Centre Travel is expanded. I call this solution Adaptive Duty Finder Incentives.

Individually, every data centre should keep an hour-long running tally of all the times that an instanced duty engaged through a Duty Roulette on that data centre, has resulted in successful completion of that duty. The game already tracks completion via Duty Roulette for the purposes of one-a-day reward allocation, so this should be a relatively simple statistic to monitor.

Every hour on the hour, these numbers are compared across all data centres. For the next hour, the data centres that have the lowest amounts of completed duties gain a bonus multiplier to all rewards from their roulettes. Any player who has access to Data Centre Travel can see in their Duty Finder which data centres have the bonus, to encourage players to travel over there and queue in their Duty Finder.

In this way, queues on Preferred Worlds are shortened, and the Preferred World Bonus now becomes an outright benefit, thus encouraging people to transfer their characters to Preferred Worlds and play there longterm. Queue times will, through the shifting incentives, gradually be standardised across the world, and inactive hours (such as late nights in local time) are instead filled by Voyagers coming over for the EXP and Tomestone bonus, keeping the queue times relatively even for everyone.

As an added benefit, while this solution will function as early as right now, it will only grow in effectiveness as Data Centre Travel opens up to more regions. Every individual player will only be experiencing a net benefit, increasing overall player satisfaction, and while there is a potential issue of high ping and connectivity troubles, almost all of the content that you can engage via Duty Roulette does not need low ping to be successfully cleared, and a dropout can simply be filled in short order by another player.

All of the required metrics to implement this solution, in theory, should already exist within the game, and the fact that it’s a single integer comparison on the hour means the network overhead should be negligible.

The reason I propose that the metric should be clears rather than simply fills, is to avoid a situation where malicious actors create bot accounts to enter roulettes on other worlds and immediately leave, to drive down the rewards on that world and enhance their own. By making clears the metric, it guarantees that people will be entering the duty with the goal of successfully completing them, which will improve overall player satisfaction.

ADDENDUM: ROULETTE REWARDS

As it stands, this solution will work. But there is a secondary issue with Duty Roulettes. As a max-levelled player, once you’ve finished gearing and capped on Allagan Tomestones for the week, your incentive to do roulettes tends to dry up. As many players use The Hunt for tomestones, and tomestones have limited utility outside of gearing, this creates an untapped source of active veteran players that could be using the Duty Finder.

To address this, I propose that we co-opt a reward that already exists in the game – Bicolor Gemstones. Bicolors are already a reward for doing combat content via FATEs, and they have a versatile and extensive reward structure that already exists in the game. Many players already use FATEs as a source of filler content while they wait for duties to fill, and adding Bicolors to the Duty Roulette reward pool (multiplied by the adaptive bonus, of course) would provide an ever-growing and reliable incentive to continue doing your one-a-day duty roulettes even later in the week or once you’ve finished gearing – even if you have most of the rewards, you can always sell the vouchers for gil!

Furthermore, the incentive to do FATEs wouldn’t go away – plenty of players still do them for shared FATE progress to unlock those rewards, and as stated, they work excellently as filler content while you wait for queues. It would also ease the burden of acquiring combat-related crafting materials – thus making it a better value proposition to have non-combat retainers, by the by - while still incentivising you to do combat content to get those materials.

CONCLUSION

Adaptive Duty Finder Incentives should, in theory, be a relatively simple and easy solution to implement, but the positive consequences cannot be overstated. Shorter queue times, more evenly-spread global player count, higher player satisfaction and a better value proposition for players to connect both at home and abroad.

Furthermore, the addition of Bicolor Gemstones to the reward pool will increase the variety of content that players are engaging with, and keep the Duty Finder popping more reliably during offpeak times and further in the week. Above all, it means we can all spend less time grumbling about queue and fill times, and more time doing what we all came here to do – playing the critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV.