Diadem EXTREMELY Frequently Having Alliance Groups Not Getting Chest Credit

I'm filing the same problem AGAIN. I have included detailed information from the template. But again the problem is the same. We make an alliance with 24 people and every single time one group ends up short on loot drops. This time we were only able to get 5 silver chests and 24 bronze. We were unable to get credit for ANY of the * gold drop chests. And most of the silver did not drop either. The problem became much worse after three other groups joined our FC killing mobs on the island (for a total of ~48 people). Its 100% clear to me the problem is that credit is completely driven by some DPS marker you have to hit and if you don't do enough damage to said mob you don't get credit. This is IDIOTIC. All 6 groups did damage to the mobs. All 6 groups had 7 or more active members. Our group continually lost chests for NO apparent reason. We even were lopsided and only had one healer!!!

YOU NEED TO FIX THIS SE. This is getting freaking old having to apologize to one group every week because you can't balance a simple Damage check marker on treasure chests?! And this is being reported by OTHERS in the Diadem/Exploratory Mission forms. If there is additional information you want/need you need to let us know. I'm not sure what else I can provide you? Again this has happened every time we have brought 24 people to Diadem, one group ends up with a drastically lower number of chests because kill credit does not trigger, even though said group is attacking the mob in question.

Also there are many other people reporting this problem. More can be read here from their posts:
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...no-chest-drops

Time: Every week Tuesday and Thursday at 11:00 pm Eastern to 1:00 am Eastern
Frequency: Every time we do an alliance of 24 people in Diadem
World name: Ultros
Character name: Katrisa Ashe
Monster name: IV, V and * Diadem mobs
Class/Level: 60 Astrologian
Party or solo: Party of 8 (two tanks, one healer, and 5 DPS) and two more groups of 8 for an alliance of 24
Area and coordinates: Different islands with Dinosaurs in Diadem.

Steps:
1. Queue 24 people in Diadem Normal or Hard
2. Go to an island with dinosaurs, and start killing mobs.
3. Generally drops are fine and relatively even between the groups if its ONLY our FC.
4. Once more groups join in the killing some group or groups will start FREQUENTLY missing out on drops (with each of the other groups sometimes missing out on drops)
5. The more groups who team up, the worst the problem gets, to the point where one or two groups can stop getting drops entirely.

Connection Specs
- Type of internet connection/provider: Time Warner Cable 300 MB/s down, 50 MB/s up
- Modem maker/model number: Realtech 1GB

PC Specs
-=-=-=-=- System Information -=-=-=-=-
Machine name: MOONLIGHT
Operating System: Windows 10 Pro 64-bit (10.0, Build 10240)
Processor: AMD FX(tm)-8320 Eight-Core Processor (4 CPUs), ~4.4GHz
Memory: 8192MB RAM
Available OS Memory: 8190MB RAM
Card name: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760
Display Memory: 6084 MB
Dedicated Memory: 1989 MB
Shared Memory: 4095 MB
Current Mode: 1920 x 1080 (32 bit) (60Hz)

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

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Diadem

It is what I was most excited for in 3.1
Turns out it is horrible

SE fix this please!
Diadem doesn't encourage any DoL, because you will screw over any group you go with since it is a giant DPS race.
Since it is a giant DPS race, it doesn't really help newer players as much as it really should.
It doesn't encourage FC's to organize into 3 groups, because usually at least one gets screwed over.

It's not a "bug", it's poor design.

You're better off not fighting where everyone else is.

Forming an alliance for Diadem merely puts all 3 parties in the same instance. Credit is not affected by alliance members.

Monsters don't have enough health to award credit to every group that attacks it, especially when you have 3+ groups of 8 attacking the same mob.

Either way, SE is likely going to ignore or move this thread

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Ashelia_Ferron

It's not a "bug", it's poor design.

You're better off not fighting where everyone else is.

Forming an alliance for Diadem merely puts all 3 parties in the same instance. Credit is not affected by alliance members.

Monsters don't have enough health to award credit to every group that attacks it, especially when you have 3+ groups of 8 attacking the same mob.

Either way, SE is likely going to ignore or move this thread

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Poor user experience can be considered a bug! Where I work, we have had "bugs" that technically worked as designed, but gave a poor user experience so they were fixed. Still there may be another issue that is causing this to happen and it should be investigated.

I'ma performance engineer and we file bugs on poor design all the time. In this case I would argue the design is sooo bad that it is indeed a bug. Last night it was so bad our group stopped getting drops at all until we broke from the main group. They NEED to fix the issue its freaking terrible.

It is a DPS issue it's so that people don't do what they did with the hunts where they can spam Flash and Medica. One of the problems with getting enough DPS on the mob is that there's a server limit on DoTs so classes that have high damage based on using their DoTs like SMN and BRD are really left out, even worse for BRD since they already have nerfed damage stats than any other class.

I think getting people to utilize the fact they are DAMAGE PER SECOND and should perform optimally to the class is fine. You should be encouraging and making sure your TEAM is able to use their rotations correctly and not treat this like the hunts/clan marks. However, if you have classes that are are hampered by server restrictions and cannot then SE definitely needs to fix it.

It's irrelevant if you queue as an alliance, all that does it ensure the three groups are in the same instance. Each party has to do enough to get credit for a mob on their own - and also, claim credit only goes to the party that claimed, not the alliance as a whole. Your credit is based either on claiming mobs by pulling and holding or by hitting that DPS threshold. I've had plenty of runs with alliances where all 3 groups get credit, even with 2-3 other parties in the immediate vicinity with us. If there's a bug holding you guys up it's a mighty selective one.

Something is definitely wrong as many people have hit the issue. Obviously it doesn't occur all the time for all groups. But its clear that groups are sometimes loosing some or TONs of loot. They need to review the issue regaurdless as some people are encountering a legitimate problem with parties which are reasonable. As Melon noted I think part of the problem probably does lay in the fact that Direct damage focused classes are proabably contributing more damage than dot based classes resulting in DPS skew in groups. That may indeed be playing a key part in the behavior I'm observing each week.

But again this is ridiculous. If we were running void ark and cleared the content with our 24 man alliance we all get loot. Functionally this should be NO different in Diadem. There is no reason groups should not be getting drops if they are contributing reasonable damage to the targets. Something is clearly off from what our 24 man alliances have observed.

There an explanation if you figured out the clues in my first response. There is a server limit on the number of DoTs that can affect bosses. I believe it is something like 60 and lower number to SEE your DoTs on the boss/mob. So if that server limitation is on bosses, I can imagine that the server can maybe calculate damage from only so many people. There was a mention it takes it from say the highest 51 people doing damage.

There is no configurable Alliance in Void Ark, and it's only 24 people just working in parties of 3 so it's a different beast because it was designed for that number. However, Diadem allows for 72. Guess what? Only 51 of you top DPS folks will count. This is especially worse if you come in a bit too late in hitting the mob.

This is damage based, not "tagging" or "aggro" many would like to believe otherwise.

The short of it is, if your DPS are doing poorly against others who can do much better rotations....whether due to competence or latency. You're not gonna get credit.

A really good question for SE would be if the damage/drop requirement scales to the number of groups attacking a given target in Diadem. I assume the requirement does not, in which case its fairly obvious that is also part of the problem. It makes no sense to have a shared zone if X groups attacking a target means that some won't get credit due to non scaling thresholds.

I concur that a full high DPS group functions in Diadem and gets most chest drops they deserve. Unfortunately not ever group is like this. And many reasonable groups have really crappy experiences with chest drops because the system just isn't a good design. Likewise the poor design encourages terrible teamwork and interaction between other groups (racing for first hits, not healing, not picking up adds etc). Do we really want this type of play to be promoted in current and future content? I sure don't.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by QT_Melon

The short of it is, if your DPS are doing poorly against others who can do much better rotations....whether due to competence or latency. You're not gonna get credit.

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But its not a measure of great vs poorly where this problem is occurring. Its a problem when too many groups gather around, and the lowest group (or groups) on the totem poll lose their drops.

Take the same fight but remove two groups who would have gotten drops... and suddenly your bottom group or groups get their chest drops.

This is a broken scaling threshold issue. There is no reason for the system to work like this. If every groups DPS was perfect, but then you took enough groups and put them on the same mob, eventually as you added more groups there would be a break point where the group who was just slightly lower damage than the others would start loosing chest drops. In other words the fundamental problem here isn't that X groups DPS is too low. Its that when Y groups attack a mob at some point in adding more groups the lowest groups will eventually loose kill credit.

Honestly, I just don't think they ever intended for 5-6 or more groups of people to pile a ton of stuff up in one place and nuke it. A mob can only be affected by so many DoT's and only has so many HP, and since this isn't enmity based like hunts there's no way to artificially inflate your contribution (i.e. medica II, benediction, tank stances). If you're having trouble getting credit, just take your "alliance" away from other groups and assure yourself credit that way. 3 parties is more than enough to farm effectively.

I concur Ashken, I don't think they did intend for this behavior to occur. If they had I would have assumed they would have tried to test it (or test it on paper) and would have seen the problem. I suspect if they threw the minimum numbers at us and the MOB HP we would all be able to look at it and go crap that's not so good.

As you said our "new" strategy will be to take our alliance away from all other groups and NOT announce our locations in shout anymore. While this should allow our alliance to skirt around the problem this will not fix it for solo groups who encounter the issue and are last man out in a large group of groups.

We validated today in Diadem hard with our 24 man group that if we stay away from all other groups we had zero problems with chest drops. Even when we had a group missing two people (gathering/afk) they continued to get all chest drops without any issues. Likewise we did not have issues with dots going nutty or not showing up. We'll continue to do all of our runs like this until SE puts in changes. We were quite efficient too and secured 81 kills, 5 NM kills and 5-6 gold chests which appears to be similar to what zerg DPS groups are seeing on our server. Killing was slower but since every group was getting 100% secure it was a non issue.

Again there were no issues when one or two people were gone from the groups. And we didn't have to focus focus on DPS. We were able to easily off tank adds, control groups away from a star mob, keep agro off healers, heal other groups etc. The experience was what I would have expected as fun and optimal.

So its pretty clear to me the problem is as proposed, the more groups attack a target the more likely some groups won't meet the minimum threshold because it doesn't scale downward as more groups attack the same target.