The Praetorium (omg spoilers)

[Theodric]

I just really, really want the songs from there as an orchestrion roll already. Castrum Meridianum's theme, too.

[Kazrah]

It wouldn't be so bad if the rewards were far better. "We've increased the rewards for it!"....woohoo, 80 more poetics....we need a REAL reward if devs want players to sit through every single second of those cutscenes.

Maybe if they gave actual incentives to run it like creation tomes or even mendacity tomes for level 70 characters. Oh, or maybe a few cracked clusters (like five or so) for characters of any role level 60 and above.

[Squintina]

It wouldn't be so bad if the rewards were far better. "We've increased the rewards for it!"....woohoo, 80 more poetics....we need a REAL reward if devs want players to sit through every single second of those cutscenes.

Maybe if they gave actual incentives to run it like creation tomes or even mendacity tomes for level 70 characters. Oh, or maybe a few cracked clusters (like five or so) for characters of any role level 60 and above.

It's not 80 more poetics. It's 80 more poetics for the roulette, plus a lot more poetics for the dungeon completion (a lot of people seem to forget that running MSQ roulette yields 2 rewards) for a total of 300 poetics for castrum and 400 poetics for praet.

I have individual comparisons for castrum and praet that I wrote in another thread:

Castrum 4.1 - Level 61 White Mage
Last boss experience: 31903 (0.65%)
Last boss tomes: 20

Roulette experience: 642,610 exp (13.8%)
Roulette tomes: 120

Queue time: 3 minutes
Total time (people rushed): 21 minutes
Total time: 24 minutes
Total experience (last boss + roulette): 67,4513 (21.13%)

Note: why did I keep track of last boss? Because they said completion rewards would be increased, which I did think would mean poetics, but I also kept the possibility that it would be the final boss experience as well.

Castrum 4.2 - Level 61 White Mage

Last boss experience: 253522 (this went up a lot) = 5.2%
Last boss tomes: 100 (this went up)

After receiving this, I leveled to 62, so numbers are not as easily comparable.

Roulette experience: 1140712 exp = 21.45% (since I just turned 62 the number went up, but percentage-wise it doesn't seem to have gone up much. It doesn't seem to have increased or if it did, it's by a small amount)
Roulette tomes: 200 (this went up)

I also got 78,092 exp seemingly out of nowhere. My guess is that the 253,522 is a new experience bonus for completion and the 78,092 is actually the boss exp. If that is the case, the boss exp wouldn't have increased all the much but the new completion exp is ok - but maybe not worth it because of the extra time spent.

Queue time: 8 minutes
Total time: 37minutes
Total time: 45 minutes
If you compare the run time, before it was 21 minutes. Add 6 minutes of cutscenes and that should have been about 27 minutes. The extra 10 minutes are from doing small pulls and people getting lost because a lot of people were newer, which will happen more often as veteran players stop queuing.

Conclusion
Because of the level up I cannot acurrately compare total (last boss + roulette) experience.
That being said:
Overall it seems like only the boss/completion experience went up by a significant amount, not the roulette experience.
I would estimate about 26% (not counting other bosses and monsters), compared to about 21% before for something that took twice as long and was a bit boring.

For those of us, like me, who ran this solely for the experience (and the nice easy run), it doesn't seem worth it - and that was just Castrum.
Furthermore as time goes on, the queue time will lengthen, and parties doing small slow pulls will also increase as they get less experienced players, leading to even more time added on top of the cutscenes. This would also mean though that the chances of having an actual new person in the run should also increase for an extra 100 poetics and WT second chance.

Note 2: Why did I not include adds and other bosses?
Because different groups pull different amount of skippable adds, and I just forgot about the other bosses. That being said since only completion & roulette "rewards" were mentioned, those should be the only numbers that truly matter, but I should have at least kept some monster exp for reference in case they increased that as well. Too late now.

Back on this thread (I was there before with numbers about Castrum), now I have numbers about praet.

Pre-4.2, level 61 White Mage
I have 2 runs recorded.
1 run took 22 minutes, insta-queue (22 minutes total)
2nd run took 19 minutes, 5 minutes queue (24 minutes total)
Both gave the same rewards obviously.
Once again I only recorded the exp after defeating the last boss (completion exp) and the roulette exp. This doesn't include other bosses or mobs.

completion (last boss): 66261 exp + 20 poetics (1.36%)
roulette: 963,915 exp + 120 poetics (19.78%)

Total: 1,030,131 (21.13%)
total poetics: 140

4.2 run - level 62 white mage
While the level is different, which means the numbers are different, since it's only 1 level it should only be a marginal range of error.

Wait time: 4 minutes, but I did queue with another healer because an FC mate asked and I figured at least then I'd have someone to joke with during the cutscenes.
RunTime: 52-53 minutes (I was a little late to put my timer on, but not by much). We didn't do speed running at the beginning to the teleporters. We actually killed the groups as they came.
Total time: 56-57 minutes

completion exp: 637700 (11.99%) + 200 poetics - holy carp that used to be less than 2%
roulette exp: 2053281 (38.62%)+ 200 poetics - another holy carp
Total exp: 2690981 (50.6%)
Total poetics: 400

New person bonus: 100 poetics - In theory this bonus should pop up more often now as more non-new people quit the roulette so it's worth a mention, even though I didn't add it up to the total.

Overall mood: We were having a blast honestly. I actually noticed a person's outfit for once and we were poking fun at each other and the cutscenes. It was a really fun run.

Conclusion
While the castrum rewards didn't impress me, the praetorium rewards are certainly much more in line with the extra amount of time spent. It took a little over double the time, and gave me a bit over double the exp and quite a bit over double the poetics (even if using only 400 poetics to compare). If someone just had a long day at school or work and was not in the mood for something that required much effort, getting exp to watch some youtube or chat with friends during cutscenes isn't so bad.

[Jijifli]

It wouldn't be so bad if the rewards were far better. "We've increased the rewards for it!"....woohoo, 80 more poetics....we need a REAL reward if devs want players to sit through every single second of those cutscenes.

Maybe if they gave actual incentives to run it like creation tomes or even mendacity tomes for level 70 characters. Oh, or maybe a few cracked clusters (like five or so) for characters of any role level 60 and above.

Not defending the changes, hate them, but they boosted their normal poetics too. A Praetorium from roulette with no newbie is 400 poetics, Castrum is 300.

[Felis]

EQ2 for instance added voice acting to EVERY npc in the game as an optional download and let me assure you they had WAY less revenue than FFXIV does.

In how many languages?