any plans to fix DF wait times?

[seekified]

DPS queue times will be long because of the sheer amount of DPS players refusing to do anything else. My solution to this? I leveled a WAR, which is fun as hell and gives me instaqueues for most content. Still play DRG as a main, but when I just don't feel like waiting a few extra minutes I switch to WAR and in I go.

That said, being in an active FC with a bunch of nice members with a similar mindset to yours definitely helps, as you can always go "Anyone up for x" and you can discuss who takes which role to speed things up quite a bit. Don't really see an issue here if you play the game as intended.

[digger]

DPS queue times will be long because of the sheer amount of DPS players refusing to do anything else.

heh, yeah, funny story about that- when first started the character i looked at some of the skills and though the marauder looked pretty good, so selected a marauder. got up to level 12 or so and got sent to do some duty. just following the tutorial-prompts etc.
quick queue, got there and removed the full screen of popups and question marks, then looked around at the other toons there. and waited... thinking c'mon tank, make a move. after a pregnant pause, it clicked.. I was the tank! hahaha.

anyway, the content was just kill some blob, so no problem.

experience from many previous mmos has led me to not attempt to tank or heal unknown dungeons or raids on my first run through, especially with 90 min wait times, but then thats just me, so i switched to a dps to go though the first run/complete the story.

[seekified]

heh, yeah, funny story about that- when first started the character i looked at some of the skills and though the marauder looked pretty good, so selected a marauder. got up to level 12 or so and got sent to do some duty. just following the tutorial-prompts etc.
quick queue, got there and removed the full screen of popups and question marks, then looked around at the other toons there. and waited... thinking c'mon tank, make a move. after a pregnant pause, it clicked.. I was the tank! hahaha.

anyway, the content was just kill some blob, so no problem.

experience from many previous mmos has led me to not attempt to tank or heal unknown dungeons or raids on my first run through, especially with 90 min wait times, but then thats just me, so i switched to a dps to go though the first run/complete the story.

Heh, I didn't understand that MRDs were tanks either at first, but I levelled it with fates and hunting logs at first so it wasn't a problem. :P

I can get the whole "play DPS for story content" because it's less responsibility while getting used to a new game, but at the same time we owe all our tanks and healers a lot for doing what might be considered the heavy lifting.

[technole]

Heh, I didn't understand that MRDs were tanks either at first, but I levelled it with fates and hunting logs at first so it wasn't a problem. :P

I can get the whole "play DPS for story content" because it's less responsibility while getting used to a new game, but at the same time we owe all our tanks and healers a lot for doing what might be considered the heavy lifting.

It can be kind of an awakening to some in early dungeons that thought they were a DPS class and refuse to flash or keep hate (Looking at Riot Blade spamming GLD/PLDs).

I always rolled tank as a 2nd role in previous games and here it's my 3rd and I wish I did it way sooner because it's fun. I do wish they would up the incentives to queue in-need though.

[Dyne_Fellpool]

This would probably be way more complicated than it seems, and very possibly not be viable, but...
It would be cool if:

DF was able to build light parties with 0-2 additional dps players and the mobs in the dungeon simply gained 30% extra max hp for 1 additional dps and 60% extra max hp for 2 additional dps.

So if there were 4 dps and 1 healer queued just waiting on a tank, instead of only 2 of those dps players getting in when a tank queued (and the other 2 having to wait for another healer+tank) it would just throw all 6 into the dungeon and all mobs would simply have 60% more hp than normal. If only 3 dps were queued up when a tank+healer became available, it would throw the 5 of them into the dungeon with a 30% boost to mob hp.

Allowing for variable Light Party size like this could really go a long way to fixing dps queue time. As I said at the start though, this might be a lot harder than it seems. And ONLY tweaking mob hp to compensate seems like the way to go but it might have unexpectedly bad results on certain scripts/mechanics.

[JimboTCB]

heh, yeah, funny story about that- when first started the character i looked at some of the skills and though the marauder looked pretty good, so selected a marauder. got up to level 12 or so and got sent to do some duty. just following the tutorial-prompts etc.
quick queue, got there and removed the full screen of popups and question marks, then looked around at the other toons there. and waited... thinking c'mon tank, make a move. after a pregnant pause, it clicked.. I was the tank! hahaha.

Ah yes. That feeling when the character creation screen does a piss-poor job of explaining class roles, and that unlike many other MMOs each class can do one and only one role. I rolled Gladiator first expecting it from the description to be a one-handed DPS class, only to find out that it was actually a pure tank role, and the blurb about "sometimes" using shields was a complete lie.

[Spoekes]

I have no idea what it means but hopefully it is for the better:

• In preparation for the upcoming expansion, the player-matching algorithms for the Duty Finder have been adjusted.

[KisaiTenshi]

This would probably be way more complicated than it seems, and very possibly not be viable, but...
It would be cool if:

DF was able to build light parties with 0-2 additional dps players and the mobs in the dungeon simply gained 30% extra max hp for 1 additional dps and 60% extra max hp for 2 additional dps.

So if there were 4 dps and 1 healer queued just waiting on a tank, instead of only 2 of those dps players getting in when a tank queued (and the other 2 having to wait for another healer+tank) it would just throw all 6 into the dungeon and all mobs would simply have 60% more hp than normal. If only 3 dps were queued up when a tank+healer became available, it would throw the 5 of them into the dungeon with a 30% boost to mob hp.

Allowing for variable Light Party size like this could really go a long way to fixing dps queue time. As I said at the start though, this might be a lot harder than it seems. And ONLY tweaking mob hp to compensate seems like the way to go but it might have unexpectedly bad results on certain scripts/mechanics.

Again, this isn't "trivial" at all. Correct scaling would be to double the mobs for every additional DPS. If you've noticed most of the dungeons except the 8-man mainstream, have a lot more trash mobs, and is tricky to try and handle with just one tank and one healer. Increasing the HP doesn't increase the difficulty relative to the party configuration. Then you have problems like AV, DD,AK, Hullbreaker Aisle, Keeper of the Lake, WP-hard and AK-hard which have mechanics that can't scale with an increase in party size.

Compare the Trials with the Hard-mode Trials, and their Extreme versions to see what I mean by scaling. It's not just HP that has to scale, the entire monster logic has to be changed to take into consideration that there are additional targets. And once you add more DPS, then you have to add another healer anyway, since zerging through the dungeon with more DPS means more players take damage.

So the way the existing dungeons are designed, there's no getting around it. Making it so that you can "queue as any available role" is the best solution, but requires locking the equipment sets for those roles so they are not removed before the DF pops, which is more complicated.

[Niwashi]

NO one would queue for Gardua NM if it isnt for the story or hes getting it by story roulette

This is one issue that SE could look into. It's common to all the story mode primals. They did take one step to make sure groups would continue to form for them when they added the Roulette system, but that's still the only incentive that exists.

The story dungeons get far more traffic than story trials. A lot of that is people leveling up (whether initial leveling or leveling additional classes/jobs). Dungeons give fantastic XP and some great loot, whether you're doing Roulette or not.

Trials, on the other hand, give people virtually nothing unless they have a Roulette bonus. Killing a primal nets you no loot at all and less XP than killing a single open-world trash mob, and that's something that SE could fix. Give primals some loot rewards like regular dungeon bosses get and an XP reward that's actually commensurate with how much time/effort it takes to kill it, and maybe people will stop avoiding the trials when they're dungeon farming. It wouldn't completely eliminate the DF wait time issue for DPS jobs, but it could certainly improve it.

[JimboTCB]

Trials, on the other hand, give people virtually nothing unless they have a Roulette bonus. Killing a primal nets you no loot at all and less XP than killing a single open-world trash mob, and that's something that SE could fix. Give primals some loot rewards like regular dungeon bosses get and an XP reward that's actually commensurate with how much time/effort it takes to kill it, and maybe people will stop avoiding the trials when they're dungeon farming. It wouldn't completely eliminate the DF wait time issue for DPS jobs, but it could certainly improve it.

I don't think that would help much at all... if anything it'd mean that tanks/healers only ever queued specific for trials, as it means an instant queue and about five minutes effort (unless you get a failgroup, and in those cases they'd probably just quit and re-queue later instead of wasting time trying to actually help people learn). Trials take a matter of minutes to do compared to 30+ for a low level dungeon, if the rewards were anything more than trivial it'd make them overwhelmingly attractive compared to real dungeons and you'd probably see even fewer tanks/healers in the general dungeon queue.

The real issue IMO is that even as an adventurer in need, the rewards for doing roulettes after the first one are a joke, you're much better queuing specific for the one dungeon at the top of your level range, which does absolutely nothing to help alleviate the queues for every other dungeon. Purely by virtue of how long you spend at each level, you end up queueing for higher end dungeons much more than lower ones, so low level people queuing specific for storyline dungeons are largely reliant on synced players queuing under roulette which they only do once a day anyway.