Please take Castrum Meridianum and The Praetorium off the roulette.

[Caraway]

This poster right here is the problem with current generation MMO players. "I'm too much of a special snowflake to watch the cut scene in the inn, the 7 other people in my group should cater to my special needs so I can watch them in the dungeon."

You think that just because it's your first time you should get some kind of special treatment where everyone sits around wasting their time doing nothing for 10 minutes while you watch a cut scene in the middle of the dungeon. You have the option to watch them in your inn, but NO YOU HAVE TO WATCH THEM NOW and to hell with the rest of the world because your time is more important than that of anyone else.

I think you're missing a major problem with your little flailing there about "special snowflake" and the poster below you, quoted below, is a perfect example why I'm vocally anti-speedrun for these dungeons.

You also don't seem to understand why I said what I said in the first place. Before MMOs became the incredibly popular thing they are now, people would help each other just for the sake of helping. People respected other people and treated them as more than just a means to an end.

Contrast communities like early EQ and Vanguard and you'll notice a major difference between those and most popular MMOs out these days. The atmosphere is different because they started playing these kind of games where you had to help people, and if you got known to be a jerk you didn't get helped at all. Your reputation mattered back then.

Not so much anymore, and FFXIV is admittedly extremely bad for this due to the way the cross-server Duty Finder is designed (but that's a whole other rant).

Heh, despite my previous post, I just did CN and Prae for the first time with 4 other members from my FC. It was the most miserable experience I've ever had. After getting locked out of the first boss of CM, I realized it was either swallow my pride of wanting to enjoy the game or GTFO. My didn't want everyone in the party to wipe and suffer the endless cycle of people leaving and saying "skip cutscenes or I'm out", so one of them stayed behind to show me where to go after everyone was nearly halfway through.

I managed to get to the next boss just before the lockout, with help skipping enemies and a mate to guide me through at least. I still don't know anything about any of the fights and felt like I was carried the whole time. Same with Prae, but it was less traumatic. Skipped everything because I just wanted to get it over with. I didn't die my first time, and even got a couple commendations for being a good WHM through the fight, but y'know what? Caraway is right. After this, I don't feel like touching end game content at all! If this is a precursor of things to come, I'll stick to crafting and gathering.

I now this is more of a personal problem, and sorry to rant about it like this. My selfishness extends to wanting to learn the fights and see the story as it happens, but that's asking way too much in this community.

As a community we should never, ever want to see this.

This right here is why I feel that even if they're not the majority, the people being forced to go through a story dungeon they've never done before in a way that effectively kills the story is much worse than someone who's done a dungeon X times not being able to shave off five minutes (in the case of CM, ~10-15 in Prae) of their daily run.

I do not believe it's an entitlement issue for someone to want to experience the game as it's designed to be experienced. I do, however, think it's poor form for a vet of the game to bully a new player because they want their pixels faster.

Like I said above, which Aureliami so conveniently decided not to include in their flippant little remark, there is a problem with Duty Roulette: Story Dungeon but I'm not sure what a good solution would be.

Not incentivizing people who've already done it for helping new comers through these fights will just mean they'll be stuck waiting an exceptionally long time to do it. But using Philosophy tomes as a reward for helping just leads to behavior that puts those same new players off.

ruinedmirage, I assure you it gets better. These two dungeons have been a sticking point since 2.0 was released and I don't think they're ever going to find a good balance on them. The decision to gate all of the end-game behind these two dungeons means they are necessary if you want to proceed. In every dungeon I've done after them though the community has been mostly helpful, friendly, and fun.

I think there's just something about the ease of these dungeons and the unbalanced reward that brings out the worst in people.

[Kaoru_Nagisa]

This poster right here is the problem with current generation MMO players. "I'm too much of a special snowflake to watch the cut scene in the inn, the 7 other people in my group should cater to my special needs so I can watch them in the dungeon"

You think that just because it's your first time you should get some kind of special treatment where everyone sits around wasting their time doing nothing for 10 minutes while you watch a cut scene in the middle of the dungeon. You have the option to watch them in your inn, but NO YOU HAVE TO WATCH THEM NOW and to hell with the rest of the world because your time is more important than that of anyone else.

While I agree that people can be a bit entitled when it comes to cutscenes in a dungeon, insulting people isn't going to help either side of the discussion's opinion.

As I've said before, if the majority of the party wants to watch cutscenes or do not mind watching them, then I don't mind waiting. I'll still skip the scenes just because I've seen them 5 million times by now, but I won't be annoyed waiting for the rest of the party. However, I find it extremely entitled and rude when a single person demands people in the party wait for them to watch cutscenes. ASKING people to wait is fine, but demanding them to? No, you're rude and you need to get over yourself.

.... Stupid forum character limit! I had a response to the above, mostly highlighting the suggestion of having a separate duty roulette for people new to the two fights and my copy of what I had posted got eaten so I'll try again.

The character limit is very annoying, yes. I just now realized I can edit the rest of a response in.

Yeah, that would be a backfire of a split roulette system, but I'd still imagine longer queue times would be better than people having horrible first runs.

Honestly, at this point in time, it's just better for newbies to a dungeon to point out that they're new, they want to watch story, and they'll need some help with dungeon mechanics, at the beginning of a run. If people don't want to do any of those things, they can just ask to be kicked and requeue, or use Party Finder instead (since unlike other MMOs I've been in with a party finder option, this one is actually getting used a lot). Whether intended or not, the way MS DR is used right now makes it so 90% of the parties want to speedrun, so anyone who uses this to try getting their stories done just needs to be fully aware of that. It's always a safer bet to try getting at least 80~90% of your party to be friends/FC-mates who don't mind helping/like-minded people, rather than hope for the best solo queuing.

The commendation idea might work, since I've seen people going nuts about those to the point they beg for commendations (which is really sad imo, and makes me much less inclined to give commendations to those people). It has less room for abuse than lowering reward systems I suppose.

[Magis]

I laugh when people say new players who want to watch the cutscenes to the climax of the main story line are "entitled". Oh sorry, it's not like the whole thing was being built up from lvls 1-50 and they'd like to have some immersion in the game. Nahh, they should skip out on seeing that because I WANT MY TOKENS. It's already a joke that 70% of the dungeon is skipped anyway through the transporter.

[Kaoru_Nagisa]

I laugh when people say new players who want to watch the cutscenes to the climax of the main story line are "entitled". Oh sorry, it's not like the whole thing was being built up from lvls 1-50 and they'd like to have some immersion in the game. Nahh, they should skip out on seeing that because I WANT MY TOKENS. It's already a joke that 70% of the dungeon is skipped anyway through the transporter.

When pretty much all but a single person in the party has said they are speedrunning/would prefer to speedrun, that single person demanding a bunch of strangers wait on them IS entitled. You wouldn't go into a movie theater and demand everyone stay until the end of the credits, would you? I would hope not. Demanding people do things like that, whether in real life or in a game, is entitled and rude.

[Viridiana]

When pretty much all but a single person in the party has said they are speedrunning/would prefer to speedrun, that single person demanding a bunch of strangers wait on them IS entitled. You wouldn't go into a movie theater and demand everyone stay until the end of the credits, would you? I would hope not. Demanding people do things like that, whether in real life or in a game, is entitled and rude.

No, but if someone's trying to do a rifftrax in the middle of the theater when it's my first time seeing it and there's absolutely no reason to think that they've, for example, reserved this viewing of the movie for this purpose, you can damn well bet I'm gonna tell them to shut up and let me enjoy the movie.

[Kaoru_Nagisa]

No, but if someone's trying to do a rifftrax in the middle of the theater when it's my first time seeing it and there's absolutely no reason to think that they've, for example, reserved this viewing of the movie for this purpose, you can damn well bet I'm gonna tell them to shut up and let me enjoy the movie.

If one person in the theatre is doing so, and thus disrupting everyone's viewing pleasure, then yes, it's fine to tell them to stop. But if the entire theatre is doing that? While it still may not be enjoyable or how things "are supposed to go", if it's one voice amid an entire theatre of people doing that, then the better thing to do is either sit and bear it since you can't do much about it either way, OR just walk out of the theatre and hope your next attempt at viewing the movie isn't ruined by people making noise.

Might sound like crappy options, but that's more or less what would be available to you (within this context, anyway. We all know in the real world that entire theatre would get expelled out of the building for disruption, but I digress). In game terms, this means that if you really HAVE to use Duty Finder/Roulette to get through your final story quests, you just should be prepared to maybe have to leave a party due to conflict of desire and interest for the run. You cannot force 90% of the party to do what YOU want them to do, and attempting to is just going to cause everyone problems and unnecessary anger. If, when you ask, people won't stop for cutscenes, you can either skip the cutscenes to keep up, watch the cutscenes but likely get left behind by the rest of the party, or ask the party to kick you so you can requeue and hope for a party more in line with your own interests.

But honestly, at this point, due to how many are using MS DR for philo tomes and thus speedrunning, it's likely a lot less of a hassle to put together a party with Party Finder who will all desire to/be willing to watch cutscenes/are also doing their story.

[BlueMage]

The Praetorium is really cool, so I definitely understand wanting to see all the cutscenes, because it makes it so much more epic.

However, with Duty Finder, you get what you get. Be it everyone deciding to watch cutscenes, or everyone deciding not to. Regardless of which side of the fence you're on, if you want everyone in your party to be a certain way or behave a certain way, I suggest forming a premade through party finder where you outline your guidelines and expectations.

[Ezikiel]

SOLUTION START YOUR OWN PARTY IN PARTY FINDER AND MAKE SURE YOU TELL EVERYONE ITS TO WATCH THE CUTSCENES

[Hayward]

A lot of the posters in this thread should either:

*Switch to decaf/stop guzzling Red Bull

-or-

*Switch to Call of Duty or any other FPS copycat that appeals to ADHD-addled no-lifers.

Seriously, would it kill some of you to let new players have a few minutes to actually enjoy a game they're putting money into? I really don't think SE is sending you checks for completing dungeons in record time.

[Magis]

The last Praetorium run I did was nice. One of the players wanted to watch cutscenes, so we let him. We started the fight on Ultima early though since there is no boss block for him. We still had 70min on the clock or so, so the argument that you can fail the duty is BS (since you skip 70% of the dungeon ANYWAY).

TBH, I am surprised SE didn't fix the magitek transporter exploit.