Aetherwell should not be tied to the level of the duty

This relic step really confirms for me that the developers likely do not play their own game, do not test their game, or don't listen to feedback from the English audience.

Tying the amount of aether that a player receives to the level of a duty when the player has absolutely no control over what duty they may end up getting into is a decision that makes very little to no sense. You are punishing a player over something they have no control over, as they are required to queue for a roulette (which is entirely random by definition). This cascades into further punishing players, as people who are trying to efficiently fill their Aetherwell array are rewarded for leaving the duty, and the players that remain have to wait for a fill and struggle in the meantime.

How are those leaving rewarded? Well, the 30min wait time for leaving a duty is meaningless if the player that leaves receive higher aetherpool rewards for getting a different duty. Sometimes the amount is doubled or even tripled the amount they would have received initially if they had stayed (ie. leaving a lvl 50 duty and getting lucky and getting into a lvl 100 duty later).

This kind of decision making and game design is incredibly perplexing. I would understand tying aetherpool to level if the players had ANY CONTROL over queuing for the duty in question, but punishing players for things that are entirely outside of their control?? It's made even worse that the ONLY option to complete this step is roulettes and ONLY ROULETTES. Who okayed this decision? Was any thinking involved in this, at all? Supposedly you're listening to feedback, but the feedback is overwhelmingly "more options to complete relic steps", and yet the result we're getting is.... no options?? What feedback are you listening to? WHO are you listening to?

The opposite would be players dropping every roulette that's longer, we've had that in the past because some people would rather eat a 30 minute penalty than play the game for 20 extra minutes.

I think the highest level duties should drop 4x the amount and same for the longest 24 man raids..... and if forcefully dropping out of eg. alliance raid and the likes or not doing anything inside 24 hour penalty for aetherpool.

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Originally Posted by Fawkes

The opposite would be players dropping every roulette that's longer, we've had that in the past because some people would rather eat a 30 minute penalty than play the game for 20 extra minutes.

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I don't see how that makes sense whatsoever. If aetherwell is not tied to the duty but instead to completion bonus, for example, then people are incentivized to stay in the duty regardless of what they get as the bonus would be the same no matter what. As it stands right now, people are actively punished for staying in a low level duty because aetherwell is tied to the duty level and not to the completion bonus. Your response makes no sense.

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Originally Posted by Themarvin

I think the highest level duties should drop 4x the amount and same for the longest 24 man raids..... and if forcefully dropping out of eg. alliance raid and the likes or not doing anything inside 24 hour penalty for aetherpool.

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Did you read the post? This reply makes no sense in response to my post. Making the punishment for leaving a duty even harsher than it is right now is nonsensical, and harshly punishes people who have legitimate reasons for leaving a duty. This is not a solution, and they should not take this as good feedback.

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Originally Posted by tank2fish

I don't see how that makes sense whatsoever. If aetherwell is not tied to the duty but instead to completion bonus, for example, then people are incentivized to stay in the duty regardless of what they get as the bonus would be the same no matter what. As it stands right now, people are actively punished for staying in a low level duty because aetherwell is tied to the duty level and not to the completion bonus. Your response makes no sense.

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If every alliance raid gave the same amount of aether why would anyone stay on TAPB if they could drop to do CT in a third of the time

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Originally Posted by tank2fish

I don't see how that makes sense whatsoever.

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People have been doing this for *years*, before adjustments to the Alliance Raid roulette preventing you queing while undergeared for your level, people would actively unequip their gear to reduce the number of available Raids to the point it'd guarantee CT, some people have outright refused to unlock other Alliance Raids because doing so guarantees they will get CT every time, they only care that it is the shortest option, since the roulette payout, in particular tomes, is the same whether you spent 10 minutes in Syrcus or 40 minutes in Tower at Paradigm's Breach, balancing out the point reward based on length IS a good choice based on previous player behavior.

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Originally Posted by VeyaAkemi

People have been doing this for *years*, before adjustments to the Alliance Raid roulette preventing you queing while undergeared for your level, people would actively unequip their gear to reduce the number of available Raids to the point it'd guarantee CT, some people have outright refused to unlock other Alliance Raids because doing so guarantees they will get CT every time, they only care that it is the shortest option, since the roulette payout, in particular tomes, is the same whether you spent 10 minutes in Syrcus or 40 minutes in Tower at Paradigm's Breach, balancing out the point reward based on length IS a good choice based on previous player behavior.

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But that's not what I'm talking about? I'm specifically talking about aether being tied to duty level inside a randomized queue, with no other alternatives to farm for the aetherwell. As it currently works the points are not tied to time to completion, as similarly time completed duties are awarding different points based on level with the lower level duties awarding less. I have been in several alliance raids with 5> people dropping raids regularly. I know this is anecdotal, but player retention is worse, not better, in roulettes.

As it works right now, it is punishing players who play normally, and it is STILL rewarding players who leave roulettes in droves in the name of efficiency. Roulettes is not content that needed refreshing. It is not content that they needed to incentivize people to do. People already do roulettes very regularly, outside of this relic step.

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

If every alliance raid gave the same amount of aether why would anyone stay on TAPB if they could drop to do CT in a third of the time

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For the same reason people intentionally queue for specific duties: to play them. Just because you or other people leave long alliance raid does not mean the vast majority does. Believe it or not there are people out there who want to experience something other than CT, and you know what? If this step had given people open options to queue for whatever raids they wanted to do and clearly listed the rewards, that would give players the OPTION and the CHOICE to do whatever they want, instead of punishing players for having bad luck in the roulette.

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Originally Posted by tank2fish

For the same reason people intentionally queue for specific duties: to play them. Just because you or other people leave long alliance raid does not mean the vast majority does. Believe it or not there are people out there who want to experience something other than CT, and you know what? If this step had given people open options to queue for whatever raids they wanted to do and clearly listed the rewards, that would give players the OPTION and the CHOICE to do whatever they want, instead of punishing players for having bad luck in the roulette.

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I don’t leave the roulette don’t put words in my mouth, I’m the one who laughs at people who leave nier raids in alliance chat and leaves CT to give others a free out

I’m saying that providing the same reward for duties of vastly different length when the roulette is already biased is not the answer

They should have made the wells fill with any duty on the roulette, not do the roulette itself, I’d just sit in the queue for monastery and tower so I never had to see crystal tower

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

I don’t leave the roulette don’t put words in my mouth, I’m the one who laughs at people who leave nier raids in alliance chat and leaves CT to give others a free out

I’m saying that providing the same reward for duties of vastly different length when the roulette is already biased is not the answer

They should have made the wells fill with any duty on the roulette, not do the roulette itself, I’d just sit in the queue for monastery and tower so I never had to see crystal tower

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Alright sorry, that's my mistake.

The highest Nier 24man drops 900+ light. So a few of those and you are done. I finished it earlier on it was handy enough. It's the trials that takes the longest. Chimera only gave me 31 and I got it at least 5 times. It's only a minute so it doesn't really matter. I was just chilling with it. Honestly a really good step, hope we get more like it. Duties were popping off.

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Originally Posted by Asako

The highest Nier 24man drops 900+ light. So a few of those and you are done. I finished it earlier on it was handy enough. It's the trials that takes the longest. Chimera only gave me 31 and I got it at least 5 times. It's only a minute so it doesn't really matter. I was just chilling with it. Honestly a really good step, hope we get more like it. Duties were popping off.

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It does matter if players don't want to be beholden to the whims of randomness, and are given absolutely no other choice in the matter. I'm happy for you that you were chilling, but I don't want my completion time to be severely hampered because of total randomness that I cannot in any way affect. There are numerous other people who feel the same way, but they're not here on the forums because they, perhaps accurately, recognize that the feedback will not be listened to in favor of people saying "having no choices is a good step".

Got lota and people were leaving. After I finished it I understood why. Terrible amount given. Pretty poorly thought out system.

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Originally Posted by Milea

Got lota and people were leaving. After I finished it I understood why.

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Not necessarily, people have been leaving LotA like that for years, just like there is people who refuse to do anything but CT, there are others that refuse to do CT, and proudly(derogation) talk about "taking the sacrifice" since only the first person to leave gets the penalty, and them leaving means others are free to leave without a penalty.

Personally, I subscribe to the idea that when you click a roulette, you are effectively signing a contract, and you are a loser if you leave just because you don't like the instance you got, breaking a deal the moment it doesn't go exactly your way is just bad business.

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Originally Posted by Milea

Got lota and people were leaving. After I finished it I understood why. Terrible amount given. Pretty poorly thought out system.

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The core problem with it in the context of roulettes is that the DF works by searching from the lowest level duty and extending up, which is why low level duties are so common even when everyone in the party is 90+. The two systems would ideally meet somewhere in the middle, but they're fighting each other instead.

I think it's a clever way to make Alliance raids not be CT series exclusively or almost, the way they are now. Although I dislike Nier raids because they are boring to me, they are still better than the CT I had to do 90% of the time.

I mean, yeah, but we are also not going to get a new relic step for how many months? Going to do some roulettes when I feel like it, no need to rush this. Also, it's just adding some SFX. Why is it important to get this done quickly?

You're not being punished for being queued to low level content, you get a bonus for being queued to high level content which is "harder" in general.
This encourages player to queue with lvl100 job and high item level and discourage queue pool manipulation.

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

I don’t leave the roulette don’t put words in my mouth, I’m the one who laughs at people who leave nier raids in alliance chat and leaves CT to give others a free out

I’m saying that providing the same reward for duties of vastly different length when the roulette is already biased is not the answer

They should have made the wells fill with any duty on the roulette, not do the roulette itself, I’d just sit in the queue for monastery and tower so I never had to see crystal tower

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the whole point of the well is to populate roulettes.
and the whole point of roulettes is to populate every content(mainly low level content) to help newer players.

If any the bonus should just give the offset so its roughly the same no matter what you get, high bonus on lower level stuff and lower bonus on high level stuff.

bro this aetherwell experience has completely blackpilled me on the tomestone grind approach going forward
i apologize. i was one of those people asking for a more interesting relic grind experience than tomes, but if this is their answer to that then yeah, no, never mind, just make it tomes. tomes were essentially just roulettes too, but at least there were other things to do for tomes that could break it up. this is just 4 arbitrarily picked roulettes, some of which are the worst roulettes that people avoid for a reason btw, only now it's more limited than ever and feels soft-timegated to boot. i don't know how these guys did it, but they managed to produce something worse than a tomestone grind. and once it's over, all that's left is yet another tomestone grind!
so, congratulations. I never thought I'd say it, but hit me with the tomes. jesus christ.

i mean, christ, man. Remember in shb? i remember enjoying that one. there were some annoying one time steps, like that CT grind, but iirc you could do other things instead. and plenty of the steps actually involved doing the new bozja content. idk man. it feels like whoever knew how to make things fun got fired or quit because yeah, damn.

Tbh they should buff the bonus from daily alliance and then make it so you can queue into individual alliance raids and still get your stuff.

I've enjoyed doing the roulettes so far, but I've had to switch job each day for obvious reasons. I initially dreaded doing the alliance raids, but it's alright once you get used to it.

I've only got CT 2x, WoD 1x, and most of the time have got others, including: Dun Scaith, Rabanastre, Ridorana Lighthouse, Tower (Nier), Aglaia 2x

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Originally Posted by 0blivion

Tbh they should buff the bonus from daily alliance and then make it so you can queue into individual alliance raids and still get your stuff.

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There isn't much stopping you just doing a second queue if it's CT. You can choose to abandon CT or just do it since it's quick. The penalty shouldn't be as bad as when doing Mentor Roulette.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

There isn't much stopping you just doing a second queue if it's CT. You can choose to abandon CT or just do it since it's quick. The penalty shouldn't be as bad as when doing Mentor Roulette.

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This is a huge part of why I don't see this as an issue, if you get CT... you can go again, even if you get CT twice, two CTs should be equal to any other alliance raid, or even more, plus they are so short that doing CT twice should take about the same time, maybe slightly more or less, as doing any other Alliance Raid. The only issue I see is if you are the kind of person who hates CT so much that you refuse doing it, but then the entirety of Alliance Raid Roulette is an issue for you, relic or not.

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

I don’t leave the roulette don’t put words in my mouth, I’m the one who laughs at people who leave nier raids in alliance chat and leaves CT to give others a free out

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Even worse, the other day I saw someone leave DT Jueno First Walk alliance raid in a roulette i guess they don't want the bonus light lmfao

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Originally Posted by Renaclock

the whole point of the well is to populate roulettes.
and the whole point of roulettes is to populate every content(mainly low level content) to help newer players.

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And by and large biased roulettes like the alliance roulette utterly fail this because the barrier to not default to CT is too high

You have to find 24 players that have a higher alliance raid unlocked, are at a level where they can queue into it, are queueing at the same time and aren’t competing with too many people who are also in the roulette only able to pop CT

You can even notice this when you queue for rare alliance raids at off hours, eventually the raid may pop but someone is either AFK or backs out. Then maybe it pops again. Someone backs out again. Then it won’t pop again for hours. Because the roulette at that point decided to take the path of least resistance and dump most of those people who weren’t directly queuing into the path of least resistance- CT

The normal raid roulette suffers from this as well but the roulettes are so biased that they barely even serve their function and the alliance raid definitively does not

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

I've enjoyed doing the roulettes so far, but I've had to switch job each day for obvious reasons. I initially dreaded doing the alliance raids, but it's alright once you get used to it.

I've only got CT 2x, WoD 1x, and most of the time have got others, including: Dun Scaith, Rabanastre, Ridorana Lighthouse, Tower (Nier), Aglaia 2x

There isn't much stopping you just doing a second queue if it's CT. You can choose to abandon CT or just do it since it's quick. The penalty shouldn't be as bad as when doing Mentor Roulette.

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Same. I've actually be surprised at how consistently Alliance Raids other than CT have popped. That isn't to say it hasn't popped - but I've seen more of 'The Tower at Paradigm's Breach' than I usually do (outside of Mogtome events), had Euphrosyne and Aglaia pop for the first time in ages, and have had Rabanastre a few times too.

I actually really like this - getting to play AR's that don't usually 'pop' otherwise has been quite refreshing - particularly the Myths of the Realms ones (which are a personal favorite of mine), which never usually pop via Roulette and don't pop if you queue them individually.

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Originally Posted by Themarvin

I think the highest level duties should drop 4x the amount and same for the longest 24 man raids..... and if forcefully dropping out of eg. alliance raid and the likes or not doing anything inside 24 hour penalty for aetherpool.

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Ivalice and above should give insanely high aether imo

It didn't appear to be based on the level of the duty. I got less for Jeuno than for Nier. I believe there's a thread here that broke down numbers and general consensus was that it was based on average completion time. That would make sense because Nier automatically takes longer than any other alliance raid due to damage sponge bosses.

They do need to reconsider the approach if they do this for future steps, though.

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Originally Posted by VeyaAkemi

This is a huge part of why I don't see this as an issue, if you get CT... you can go again, even if you get CT twice, two CTs should be equal to any other alliance raid, or even more, plus they are so short that doing CT twice should take about the same time, maybe slightly more or less, as doing any other Alliance Raid. The only issue I see is if you are the kind of person who hates CT so much that you refuse doing it, but then the entirety of Alliance Raid Roulette is an issue for you, relic or not.

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Actually, Aglaia's run time these days is about on par with WoD and LotA... with the bonus being that Aglaia is a heck of lot more fun than WoD or LoTA because we get to actually use a significant amount of our toolkit.

I do wanna say that the ratio of which I get non-CT raids were a bit higher than usual in the first week of relic implementation. My tinfoil hat theory says it's because at the same time when people are 'rushing' to get their aetherwell filled, those are the same people who normally wouldn't populate the roulette & also have other non-CT raids unlocked. My entire ex-FC are those players. At least two CWLS that I'm in are also those type of players.

Fast forward today, it's back to CT after CT again from dailies.