Something needs to be done about tanks ruining the dungeon queue

[Balaur]

Just another symptom of a broken duty finder.

No, this has nothing to do with the DF. This has to do with two convergent yet distinct problems:

1. Loot in chests, and nowhere else.
2. By-passable mobs.

Placing the loot drops from dungeons into chests means it is possible to merely grab the items, and when done leave. It doesn't matter who does this. The healer has a relatively short queue, and can also run to chests and leave upon finding what they are. But the ability to sneak past mobs is also a problem. These mobs are not intelligent. If you move behind the mob -- anywhere; it doesn't matter where, overworld, dungeon, raid -- the mob can't "see" you. It effectively aggros by sight, and that sight is roughly a 180 circle of view.

This entices players, and permits them the means, of making "chest runs," which were possible in the first version and are now being carried out here.

There are two solutions:

Solution A: Place chests behind areas that can only be revealed or unlocked by drops from monsters. This forces the content to be engaged to earn the chest drops. The forced restriction can be carried out to a larger extent by placing a large section of the dungeon into an "engagement" period. If, after playing in the dungeon and engaging a certain number of enemies, which will be less than the number required to gain access to the first drop, the dungeon locks you in. You cannot leave and re-queue for that dungeon as you are on a timer that can last over an hour. This forces players, especially tanks, to maintain contact in the dungeon. This timer clears completely when the final boss is killed, no matter how long it took to do it. Thus, fast runs reward further runs.

Solution B: Monsters drop loot, not chests. This is a big departure from the classic model, but this resolves the issue of just running past the dungeon. It also makes it harder for bots abuse the game by looting chests by porting to them. The drops will not be available to anyone without engaging the fights the dungeons asks you to. If content were meant to be skipped, we should have clearer indications of this skippability. But the content we need to make dungeons like Wanderer's Palace and Amdapor Keep easier are held inside chests that can be suicide-ran to. Of course, this is just for the initial sections. But WP is all one level, and bots can reasonably jump anywhere needed and avoid all mobs. One can adjust this and make it so that chests that are "guarded" cannot be opened unless the mobs that guard it are killed, but this is an extension of Solution A.

Solution C: Make the "trash" less trashy. That is, remove the tedium or the time-consuming, lack of profit from them. You can do this in one of two ways, or even combine them. You can make it so that the mobs are better guaranteed to drop valuable items. As it is, some mobs drop useful items, such as Amdapor hippogryphs dropping hide and sinew. But dullahans drop gil. One gil. Maybe. If you slightly increase the rate on hippogryphs, and make the humanoid and voidsent mobs drop more frequently or HQ level items, the reward from drops increases, and makes one more prone to want to go through them. Alternatively, one can remove several trash packs and replace them with larger, NM style mobs that, rather than guard treasure, drop chunks of HQ items for various players. These can act as mini-bosses along the way to each boss.

Examples: In Amdapor, the initial trash pack is a group of worshippers which include a summoner that attempts to bring out a voidsent. He must be interrupted and killed or you have a four-mob pack instead of three. This is followed by a pack of hippogryphs, a roaming dullahan, another (avoidable) hippogryph pack, another roaming dullahan, a second group of worshippers with a summoner, and a courtyard with dullahans and a hippocerf, with a third worshipper pack before the first boss. Instead, one may remove half of these and interpolate the non-hippogryph portions with a pack of worshippers, a larger-than-normal Dullahan, a NM Hippogryph, and so forth. These larger mobs will guarantee drops. Keeping the vodoriga gargoyle statue spawns from floor two but removing the packs in favor of special mobs, the annoying succubi stay on floor three, but are interpolated with an NM Ahriman or pack of weaker but NM Soul Collectors, each of which drop guaranteed items useful for crafters. And so forth.

Thus, the solutions offered would reward players for retention and "sticking with it," rather than punish players for avoiding annoying and tedious trash. There should be value to the content beyond the three boss chests and the change of getting the bronze pieces. You should be able to walk away with something, as there is no guarantee you, as the player, can get one of the loot pieces given their randomnality. By adding more, but less gear-based items to the loot system, and making the loot system reward players for engaging it, the content becomes more useful to engage, rather than force players to skip in one way or another.

[Vagrant-0]

stuff

I would agree that some mechanical variation might be a good idea in easing this problem. But that would probably require re-structuring most of the dungeons and putting those things behind various gates (things that the party has to do), meaning more time pulled away from new content or areas that are more in need of a fix. This would also not solve for a tank or healer just working with the party up until a point and just dropping out because the majority of the dungeon loot has been obtained and they don't need to complete that dungeon. The fact that later dungeons have dummy loot (equipment with bad or no stats) only makes this issue a bigger problem.


If anything mechanical about the dungeons should change, then it should be that completing the dungeon has more clear and beneficial rewards for the amount of time spent. Eg: more than 1 chest from bosses, unique equipment from bosses, and higher exp/money rewards for re-running a dungeon that you've done previously. This problem is, afterall, only a major one with the earlier dungeons which will eventually have a lack of anyone running these as most of the population enters endgame (and has no reason to make a new character). Endgame dungeons already have most of their meaningful stuff behind gates, or at the very least a large enough population where this would be rare and inconsequential as most do static groups.


The problem however IS the duty finder. The fact that certain classes can get an instant queue, join a party, and drop at any time, without any penalty. Added with the fact that it is anonymous means that there is absolutely no accountability or way to filter out bad members (as they are on different servers so ignore blacklist), or have a way to chastise them (we just have a name, not what server that person is from).

While I doing one instance, the same exact tank joined and immediately left no less than 3 times as the party went through the dungeon. The only time he stayed around for any length of time was while we were killing one of the bosses with my summon doing the tanking (joined mid boss and just stood outside). He rolled for the gear (a shield), and left immediately after it went through. Given the way that he quit (left the party) and rejoined moments later it was clear that this person was simply queuing for parties in progress and farming the dungeon for equipment.

Bad tank or not, this could have been solved for by just having a mandatory wait time of 30 minutes if you leave a duty after anyone in the party has started combat (been attacked) that begins from the time of last combat. Not only would this prevent the ninja-loot style behavior described here, but in the case of primal fights, encourage people to make more than one attempt at the boss before quitting. It may still inconvenience people occasionally, but with something like this in place it becomes much harder to exploit ANY dungeon mechanics simply for drops or profits.