A plea for further refinement of the Duty Roulette algorithm

While I understand the need for keeping ARR dungeons accessible to new players...

As a vet player since beta I have HAD IT with daily ARR dungeons in my leveling roulette, especially when at level 60+. I feel like we can never use our new skills gained because its back to 1, 2, no aoe, Sastasha again. All those beautiful dungeons from Heavensward I literally never see, let alone any from Stormblood.

If this meant I have to wait an extra 15 minutes to get a dungeon closer to my level, I'm ok with that. I want to try out my new skills and rotations when I get them as I level.

Even queuing as a 4 man party, everyone over level 65+, we get put into an ARR dungeon. Why? Copperbell mines, AGAIN, all level 60s.

Level 50/60 roulette needs an exp boost for one. But the same thing applies, if everyone is over level 60, can't it prioritize a 60 dungeon?

Yes, we have to include the new players. But hell, show your vet players some mercy too. 6 years of the same old dungeons is a LOT.

It is statistically more likely for 2 reasons,

A) there are simply more ARR levelling dungeons, with ARR having 11 dungeons (I think) and HW and SB having 10 combined. This means that negating other factors, you still have more than 50% chance to get an ARR dungeon

B) Due to the way that the roulette works, you only get dungeons from your current level and below. This means that every single person in the queue would have access to sastasha and tam tara, and less and less people would have access to particular dungeons the further up you go. This means that you are statistically more likely to get an ARR dungeon due to more people queuing for them.

They could change the algorithm to make you more likely to get the dungeon at your appropriate level, but that wouldn't make it a roulette. Their solution is to give you equivalent XP for all dungeons, allowing you to level the same no matter the dungeon you get. And as more expansions come out, we should see slightly more variety as the % of levelling dungeons being ARR decreases

I remember the last time they tried adjusting the DF algorithm it actually made que times worse and they had to revert, probably best to keep it as is.

When queuing an incomplete party, you're first filling spots for someone who queued for a specific dungeon that nobody is queuing for. As Fish points out, more people have access to and are queuing for lower level dungeons, which increases the probability that you'll end up in an early dungeon. Then, there will probably be more people queuing for Stormblood dungeons than for Heavensward dungeons, due in part to Stormblood being the current expansion, and because people can choose to skip to Lv60 if they want.


If you queue a complete party or end up matched with all roulette runners, random is random.

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Originally Posted by Rongway

When queuing an incomplete party, you're first filling spots for someone who queued for a specific dungeon that nobody is queuing for. As Fish points out, more people have access to and are queuing for lower level dungeons, which increases the probability that you'll end up in an early dungeon. Then, there will probably be more people queuing for Stormblood dungeons than for Heavensward dungeons, due in part to Stormblood being the current expansion, and because people can choose to skip to Lv60 if they want.


If you queue a complete party or end up matched with all roulette runners, random is random.

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Exactly, if the OP wants to test their current skills in actual combat they should que for a dungeon their level, using roullete for that purpose is pointless because even if you got a dungeon your level the amount of exp you'd get from the roullete bonus would be so small you would have been better off just quing for the dungeon itself.

Also the purpose of roulette isn't primarily for the person queing for the roulette its to fill in the gaps for people who are queing for specific dungeons, the exp/tomes bonus is there to give incentive.

Level sync sucks pretty hard, yeah.

I wish they'd just give us access to our abilities. Even if the potency is reduced to a tiny amount when sync'd down, at least we'd have access to our rotations (and avoid cases like sastasha where we're spamming one ability over and over and over and over again...)

Filling spots for people who queue specifically for certain dungeons/ trials is important and I don't mind running Sastasha for the 938459th time if I see a low level character in the party.
But repeatedly getting low level dungeons with a full 50+ party and it being quite clear that nobody needs it for MSQ progression or queued specifically for it IS annoying. Would be nice to have a higher chance for higher level dungeons if the whole party consists of people doing their roulettes.

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Originally Posted by Rilifane

Filling spots for people who queue specifically for certain dungeons/ trials is important and I don't mind running Sastasha for the 938459th time if I see a low level character in the party.
But repeatedly getting low level dungeons with a full 50+ party and it being quite clear that nobody needs it for MSQ progression or queued specifically for it IS annoying. Would be nice to have a higher chance for higher level dungeons if the whole party consists of people doing their roulettes.

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Then you would be better off queing for specific dungeon, you don’t want to get a level relevant dungeon for your roulletes because it almost invalidates the roulette bonus exp...

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Originally Posted by SerLuke

Then you would be better off queing for specific dungeon, you don’t want to get a level relevant dungeon for your roulletes because it almost invalidates the roulette bonus exp...

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There is literally nothing lost from Rilifane's suggestion. They already said if there's a low level in the party then it's fine. But if there isn't, there's no reason the roulette can't select a higher level dungeon instead. There is nothing to be lost at all.

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Originally Posted by Risvertasashi

There is literally nothing lost from Rilifane's suggestion. They already said if there's a low level in the party then it's fine. But if there isn't, there's no reason the roulette can't select a higher level dungeon instead. There is nothing to be lost at all.

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There is no point doing the roullete if you want to do a level relevant dungeon, the roullete bonus exp to compensate for the gap in player level and dungeon level, the closer the dungeon level is to player level the less you are getting from the bonus. So if you are level 67 and get Doma Castle for leveling roulletes you are getting a very, very small insignificant bonus because you are getting level appropriate exp from the dungeon. Not worth the dev resources to change this.

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Originally Posted by SerLuke

There is no point doing the roullete if you want to do a level relevant dungeon, the roullete bonus exp to compensate for the gap in player level and dungeon level, the closer the dungeon level is to player level the less you are getting from the bonus. So if you are level 67 and get Doma Castle for leveling roulletes you are getting a very, very small insignificant bonus because you are getting level appropriate exp from the dungeon. Not worth the dev resources to change this.

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The point is that very low level dungeons are extremely boring.

This could also be addressed by changing level sync to not take away access to abilities, though.

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Originally Posted by SerLuke

Then you would be better off queing for specific dungeon, you don’t want to get a level relevant dungeon for your roulletes because it almost invalidates the roulette bonus exp...

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Originally Posted by Risvertasashi

There is literally nothing lost from Rilifane's suggestion. They already said if there's a low level in the party then it's fine. But if there isn't, there's no reason the roulette can't select a higher level dungeon instead. There is nothing to be lost at all.

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Thank you!
You actually got it.

I'm not better off queuing for specific dungeons because as I wrote, I don't mind running Sastasha for the 938459th time if I see a low level character in the party. I have no problem being filler material for people who need to progress through their MSQ or needing low level dungeons for a new class.
But if it's crystal clear that nobody in the party queued for this dungeon, there is no need to still hit low level dungeons with a relatively high chance. ARR has more dungeons than HW/ SB, the bulk of them being in a level range where you spent most of your time pushing one button.
Evening this out by raising the chance to hit a higher level dungeon if and only if nobody in the party specificially queued for a low level dungeon would be a welcome change.

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Originally Posted by Risvertasashi

The point is that very low level dungeons are extremely boring.

This could also be addressed by changing level sync to not take away access to abilities, though.

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And it could be addressed by queing for a level relevant dungeon if you find potentially getting a low level dungeon boring. I mean they are called roulletes which implies risk in that you don’t know what you are going to get, if someone had an idea of what they would be getting roulletes would cease to be roulletes.

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Originally Posted by SerLuke

There is no point doing the roullete if you want to do a level relevant dungeon, the roullete bonus exp to compensate for the gap in player level and dungeon level, the closer the dungeon level is to player level the less you are getting from the bonus. So if you are level 67 and get Doma Castle for leveling roulletes you are getting a very, very small insignificant bonus because you are getting level appropriate exp from the dungeon. Not worth the dev resources to change this.

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It's not insignificant.

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Originally Posted by alimdia

It's not insignificant.

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Getting what like 100-200k if you get Doma Castle at 67 when you need 8 mil to level up is pretty insignificant you aren’t even getting 10% of your level at that point. The bonus is there if you get a lower level dungeon since you are getting less exp from the mob the roulette makes up for it by giving you a bigger bonus. Surely not worth altering the roulette algorithm potentially causing other issues. Even the OP says this would result in higher que times so no thank you.

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Originally Posted by Risvertasashi

There is literally nothing lost from Rilifane's suggestion. They already said if there's a low level in the party then it's fine. But if there isn't, there's no reason the roulette can't select a higher level dungeon instead. There is nothing to be lost at all.

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This would entirely depend how the roulette works on a technical level. What you are asking for is for the roulette to check the level of all participants and run an additional algorithm to work out which dungeon is best to pick. And at that point we come to this:

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Originally Posted by SerLuke

I remember the last time they tried adjusting the DF algorithm it actually made que times worse and they had to revert, probably best to keep it as is.

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We don't know how difficult this is to implement, so we then have to ask, is it worth it? There is never no reason not to do it, because the system needs to be altered, and it is already a complex system that makes up the entire backbone of the game.

I'm pretty sure the reason they lockout our abilities at lower levels is due to A, What little balance they have in the first place, and B, You and I KNOW Elitists would kick unsynced lowbies due to having less abilities available over a synced high level.

While it's obvious if someone hasn't unlocked a certain piece of content or first timers that you're queuing in there but I'm more curious about vets that have unlocked everything. I am curious to just how the algorithm does work because lately I've been getting more Castrum Abania than I'd like. New people/vets, it didn't matter. I would always get that particular dungeon. Is there really an algorithm to this when it comes to anyone who has everything unlocked or is it more rng based?

sometimes rngesus is rngesus. if you get a dungeon you hate, suck it up or leave and take the penalty. you do roulettes for the bonus, not for whatever it is you're going to get.

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Originally Posted by Violet_Galaxy

While it's obvious if someone hasn't unlocked a certain piece of content or first timers that you're queuing in there but I'm more curious about vets that have unlocked everything. I am curious to just how the algorithm does work because lately I've been getting more Castrum Abania than I'd like. New people/vets, it didn't matter. I would always get that particular dungeon. Is there really an algorithm to this when it comes to anyone who has everything unlocked or is it more rng based?

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I THINK I heard somewhere ages ago, that the queue actually picks a duty first, then fills a party into it, assuming no specific-queues are needing people.

LI like your ideas and agree wholeheartedly that DF needs fixing. While leveling my 60's to 70 I have notice raid, Guildhests, and trials give 0 incentive for high level player to do them. If I were to do all 3 the "bonus" experience would move the overall experience bar less than one inch. I avoid 0 incentive DF instances at all cost. I would like to see increases as the whole purpose of incentive was meant to entice veteran players to help new players. Sorry new players.

It sounds like the issue isnt the duty roulette but the level sync system. I think all your abilities should be usable but your stats are scaled so your not OP (even thought you should be a little OP).

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Originally Posted by Djinnrb

It sounds like the issue isnt the duty roulette but the level sync system. I think all your abilities should be usable but your stats are scaled so your not OP (even thought you should be a little OP).

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Problem with this, like I said before, is super elitist people seeing a non-synced player in their party, and kicking them to fish for someone with more abilities unlocked. You can't make any one player have an advantage (outside gear), or jerks will ruin it.

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Originally Posted by Taramin

Problem with this, like I said before, is super elitist people seeing a non-synced player in their party, and kicking them to fish for someone with more abilities unlocked. You can't make any one player have an advantage (outside gear), or jerks will ruin it.

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I HIGHLY doubt this would EVER happen. That would waste so much time and those elitists that you mentioned only care about their time. It would be counter productive.

People boot new tanks for not pulling wall to wall when they aren't geared for it, I don't see why they wouldn't boot a class that hasn't gotten it's AoE/Tank stance/damage combo yet. People get irate when first timers get a long one-time CS in ARR dungeons, like the end of Toto-rak or Stone Vigil and don't skip.

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Originally Posted by Rongway

When queuing an incomplete party, you're first filling spots for someone who queued for a specific dungeon that nobody is queuing for. As Fish points out, more people have access to and are queuing for lower level dungeons, which increases the probability that you'll end up in an early dungeon. Then, there will probably be more people queuing for Stormblood dungeons than for Heavensward dungeons, due in part to Stormblood being the current expansion, and because people can choose to skip to Lv60 if they want.


If you queue a complete party or end up matched with all roulette runners, random is random.

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Though true, this is also irrelevant. The request here is that the roulette, quite simply, not be random. If 4 players are grouped together merely due to ticket position, rather than aiding anyone else's specific queue, then perhaps it should limit the roulette to dungeons within, say, 10 levels of them, or at least disproportionately favor the probability tables for dungeons nearer in level to each of said party members?

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Originally Posted by Kurando

Then it begs the issue, what would be the point of Roulettes such as 50/60, 70 and Expert where you don't actually lose that many levels queuing up for them, as opposed to using Leveling roulette and getting something like Sastasha which creates a big difference in min/max levels. Like I get what people are saying, though we may have groups purposely going through the PF recruiting high level players to influence getting a duty no less than 10 levels difference, while the players who actually need the duties (for MSQ) could suffer longer queue times as a result of those bypassing to use PF before the DF.

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I'd be fine with that, honestly. When doing Leveling Roulette daily for Cracked Clusters, less than one run per week had even a single member under level 50 (usually quite a bit greater), despite continuously sending me through Copperbell Mines. My one and only first-time completion bonus run (the Aery, for one of the DPS) over a couple months of gathering materia was nice, but frankly, past those first completions necessary for MSQ, I wouldn't be that bothered by some players making PF runs instead so long the bonus also convenienced non-PFers enough to make it seem worth queuing up for Leveling Roulette at all, where they previously wouldn't have. And I suspect it would.

Heck, you can even provide a consolation prize for "dungeons in need", similar to first-time completion bonuses. "This was a dungeon in need. You will receive an additional <X number> of <Y currency> at the completion of the instance."

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

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Then it begs the issue, what would be the point of Roulettes such as 50/60, 70 and Expert where you don't actually lose that many levels queuing up for them, as opposed to using Leveling roulette and getting something like Sastasha which creates a big difference in min/max levels. Like I get what people are saying, though we may have groups purposely going through the PF recruiting high level players to influence getting a duty no less than 10 levels difference, while the players who actually need the duties (for MSQ) could suffer longer queue times as a result of those bypassing to use PF before the DF.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

Though true, this is also irrelevant. The request here is that the roulette, quite simply, not be random.

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It is relevant. It's a roulette. Adding bias will allow abuses such as this:

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Originally Posted by Kurando

we may have groups purposely going through the PF recruiting high level players to influence getting a duty no less than 10 levels difference, while the players who actually need the duties (for MSQ) could suffer longer queue times as a result of those bypassing to use PF before the DF.

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Assume that the people who queue up as complete parties will still queue up as complete parties regardless. That means even if they are more likely to queue up, it won't help any additional people needing fills. However, such a change could reduce the number of incomplete parties queuing up, as people who are not currently queuing as complete parties might start queuing up as complete parties in order to bias their roulettes toward more current dungeons. Therefore adding a bias to the roulette would be a bad thing.

Roulettes aren't there to serve the needs of complete parties. Any accommodations added to roulettes should be for the benefit of the people who need them; not the people who want to run them without contributing to the people they're meant to help.

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Originally Posted by Rockette

While I understand the need for keeping ARR dungeons accessible to new players...

As a vet player since beta I have HAD IT with daily ARR dungeons in my leveling roulette, especially when at level 60+.

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I would say (written as if I was writing this for 5.x)... First put together the 4 people in the queue that have been there the longest for their respective roles...

Then:

If anyone's under 50, they set what can be run, and it's 80% the highest they can do, 20% pure random.
If everyone is >= level 50: 90% odds of a dungeon over 50
If everyone is >= level 60: 80% odds of a dungeon over 60, 10% for <50, 10% 50-60 dungeon.
If everyone is >= level 70: 70% odds of a dungeon over 70, 20% over 60, 5% for <50, 5% for 50-60 dungeon.
If everyone is 80, it's 100% something from 71 to the last BEFORE expert.

And then... once the level-range is set, pick the dungeon that has the lowest run count among the players.

so if 4 people's combined run totals for Dungeon A is 53 times, B is 372 times, and C is 9 times - we're running C, with a 5% chance it's random between the 3 instead.

The job in need, needs to be more live. I've queued at Tank or Healer job in need and didn't get a queue switch to Healer or Tank and got in right away.

Duty roulette is working fine IMO, the problem is that it's not specific enough.
It would be easier if we had more roulettes (1-49 dungeons, 50 dungeons, HW dungeons 51- 60, SB dungeons 61-70) or they could just put all the HW/SB dungeons in a "Duty Roulette: Leveling Plus" option.

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Originally Posted by Rockette

While I understand the need for keeping ARR dungeons accessible to new players...

As a vet player since beta I have HAD IT with daily ARR dungeons in my leveling roulette, especially when at level 60+. I feel like we can never use our new skills gained because its back to 1, 2, no aoe, Sastasha again. All those beautiful dungeons from Heavensward I literally never see, let alone any from Stormblood.

If this meant I have to wait an extra 15 minutes to get a dungeon closer to my level, I'm ok with that. I want to try out my new skills and rotations when I get them as I level.

Even queuing as a 4 man party, everyone over level 65+, we get put into an ARR dungeon. Why? Copperbell mines, AGAIN, all level 60s.

Level 50/60 roulette needs an exp boost for one. But the same thing applies, if everyone is over level 60, can't it prioritize a 60 dungeon?

Yes, we have to include the new players. But hell, show your vet players some mercy too. 6 years of the same old dungeons is a LOT.

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I agree 100%, I like to help newbies but damn it would be nice not to get copper bell mines for the millionth time. This is what makes the roulette's a chore since you always know what you are getting.

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Originally Posted by Lambdafish

And as more expansions come out, we should see slightly more variety as the % of levelling dungeons being ARR decreases

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Not really.

You are correct in that you are statistically more likely to land in sastasha say than abamia but its exponential in the way it works.

If your level 69 and queuing the roulette for example

Sastasha is available to 100% of players queuing in the levelling roulette. Where as castrum abamia is available to maybe 3%

Those 3% then have a 1in 25 chance?(Including 4 man trials that can come in the roulette) of getting castrum abamia. Which is 4% of 3% effectively a 0.12% chance of getting castrum abamia in your levelling roulette.

Going down to doma castle. It's available to maybe 7% of players queuing the roulette. Which then equates to 1 in 24 chance which is almost 4%
So a 0.28% plus 0.12% = effectively a 0.4% chance of getting doma castle.

So a level 69 player has roughly a 0.5% chance of getting one of the top 2 dungeons..

This will change by many things such as are they queuing alone or with friends time of day time of patch. For example when 5.0 lands a huge chunk of players in the levelling roulette will be at the higher end in the rush to the new level cap. So this will greatly boost the likelihood of getting higher dungeons. But once the initial surge has calmed those chances will once again decline.

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Originally Posted by Taramin

People boot new tanks for not pulling wall to wall when they aren't geared for it, I don't see why they wouldn't boot a class that hasn't gotten it's AoE/Tank stance/damage combo yet. People get irate when first timers get a long one-time CS in ARR dungeons, like the end of Toto-rak or Stone Vigil and don't skip.

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Is this something you've experienced, or more hearsay? I ask because I never see it despite the claim popping up often enough. Almost no one in this game is kick happy, even with new tanks in a party. No one seems to care about people watching cutscenes either. I'm sure that it happens rarely, but it's probably the kind of thing you'll run into maybe once or twice, forget about and move on. I don't foresee any problems from removing level sync. Most likely, no one will care about the tank's level as long as they can tank.

As far as making roulette less of a bore, I think level sync should be replaced with potency sync or something along those lines. Players should also be allowed to mark dungeons as unwanted, which would remove that dungeon from their roulette list unless perhaps someone is queuing for it directly and needs help.

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Originally Posted by PyurBlue

Is this something you've experienced, or more hearsay? I ask because I never see it despite the claim popping up often enough. Almost no one in this game is kick happy, even with new tanks in a party. No one seems to care about people watching cutscenes either. I'm sure that it happens rarely, but it's probably the kind of thing you'll run into maybe once or twice, forget about and move on..

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It's fairly common. Its why many of the changes have been made to various things.
like when a boss arena gets sealed off and your outside it because your watching a cs you now get warped in because people generally arent willing to wait for you to watch a cs.

it's also why they made the cutscenes in the msq roulette mandatory and unskippable because skip skip skip them all gotta go fast!!!!

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Originally Posted by Risvertasashi

Level sync sucks pretty hard, yeah.

I wish they'd just give us access to our abilities. Even if the potency is reduced to a tiny amount when sync'd down, at least we'd have access to our rotations (and avoid cases like sastasha where we're spamming one ability over and over and over and over again...)

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I was thinking about this earlier but I do think one of the main reasons is, class balancing for synced players. I mean look at World of warcraft syncing, let's forget the fact it is impossible to balance out 30- something specs but the balance in synced mode will NEVER be anything but a big huge mess because abilities stay the same just lowered.

I do agree with you though, something should be done because going into a dungeon and losing most of my abilities that even make the job fun, feels real bad. Because of it, I do not even enjoy doing lower level dungeons unless it gives a huge chunk of experience. I do think that the dev team has done what imo is the best class balancing in any mmo I played, they could keep all abilities but scale down numbers. They just might not want to deal with it and this current system is just a whole lot easier.