All Greed on Alliance loot

[KisaiTenshi]

Why not just give people 1 guaranteed drop every run like the leveling aspect of ffxiv til you reach 70 that was added in the

Because that's not how it works. It's a Raid, not progression.

There's three real strategies, all have a downside:

"All Need" - Only the role for the gear can need it, nobody can greed on it unless the players with that role pass or aren't present (eg such as an alliance with no DRG's), but because the game doesn't check that you already have it in anything but your inventory, players will still "need" on items they already have for seals/desynth.

"All Greed" - Every player has an equal chance for the item, but the system has to actually check that the player doesn't already have it (presently it only checks that you don't have the item in your inventory, not retainers, saddlebag or glamour dresser.) Downside is that players will "greed" on everything, and may intentionally make it so they can greed on things they already have so they can turn it in for seals/desynth.

"Tokens" - Every player just gets a token for participating, however this removes the RNG aspect of the loot roll, thus you only have to play the content once. So if you don't play it when it's new, you'll never play it again. See Alexander and Coil, even Deltascape now.

The token solution only solves one problem (everyone getting something) while creating another one (raid abandonment when it's no longer new)

The Need/Greed solutions solves the abandonment problem but creates a problem where people will need/greed on gear for reasons other than they can use it. The solution here, and I know people will cry about it, would be to make items obtained from raids not be able to be turned in for seals, and unable to be desynthed. Rather these items need to go to some kind of "raid marketboard" where you can trade like-for-like, at no cost. eg "I want (raid) healer's foot gear, trading (raid) DRG foot gear", this ensures that people can get the items they want by playing the raid, and not by simply buying it off the marketboard.

Though that begs the question, why not just allow the items to be put on the marketboard for gil? Because then people wouldn't farm tomes for the tomes gear, people would farm the best gear and whoever can farm the gear the fastest makes all the money (see mount farms.)

It seems like some mid-compromise is needed between the gear drops and the tokens. However I don't see how it can be done without causing the raid to be abandoned faster. There needs to be an incentive to play old content, and not even Khloe gets people to play old content. They could put the old NM raids into a roulette, and the high-end raids into a separate roulette, where 4 wildcard tokens can be traded for any piece of left-side gear from old content, or 1 token for the right-side gear/belt. Though I imagine this would just propagate the existing problem in the roulettes where the easiest raid/duty just keeps being selected.

[Zojha]

[...], however this removes the RNG aspect of the loot roll, thus you only have to play the content once. So if you don't play it when it's new, you'll never play it again.

Asdfasdgast.

No. Why does this notion still exist? Along with the silver platter comment?

If you get one token a run and you need 100 tokens for an item, how many runs do you need to do? The answer is not: One. The answer is 100. That is statistically roughly equivalent to something having a 1% chance to drop into the inventory. (Roughly, because outliers are open ended on one side)

Token solutions are very flexible and can be tuned as desired. As a matter of fact, currencies like tomes are nothing more than universal tokens for participating in set DoW/DoM content. And some things, like the old Anima or the EX primal mounts might take a lot of tokens to get. RNG does not make content last longer than tokens.

The only thing RNG does is to change the distribution: Some people get things before the statistically expected amount of runs, other people get it after the statistically expected amount of runs. Token systems allow neither, everyone has to do the exact same amount of runs. That is the actual difference.

[Remedi]

No. Why does this notion still exist? Along with the silver platter comment?

The thing is: with tokens you are effectively giving a deadline to the content which can be very problematic.
Loot and rewards are an important aspect of a battle and tokens kinda diminishes the sense of it and essentially trasform the looting to just some checks
Not all RNG is bad, if done correctly RNG can also be good for the experience. Tokens simply go against this and makes you uncaring toward the whole process.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

snip

All they needs do is copy the Savage or EX Primal system. You receive a token/page, which you require say... 15 to exchange for the gear you want. Now it comes down to you either get lucky beforehand or get your preferred item after your fifteenth run. Certainly better than "run this x amount of times and pray to the heavens you out roll potentially seven people."

[KisaiTenshi]

All they needs do is copy the Savage or EX Primal system. You receive a token/page, which you require say... 15 to exchange for the gear you want. Now it comes down to you either get lucky beforehand or get your preferred item after your fifteenth run. Certainly better than "run this x amount of times and pray to the heavens you out roll potentially seven people."

Which would be fine if there was a way to get people to play the content past when it's new. Right now, try to play any of the Coil or Alexander content. It's completely abandoned. The Alliance raids were also nearly abandoned before they put the roulette in as well, and people still bend the rules so they don't get the hard content (I swear 75% of Alliance raids are LotA or Void Ark.) People would just spam the easy raids to get tokens, so whatever they eventually come up with needs to better than the tomes system (where you can basically buy everything pre-SB that came out with the same tomes.)

[Bourne_Endeavor]

Which would be fine if there was a way to get people to play the content past when it's new. Right now, try to play any of the Coil or Alexander content. It's completely abandoned. The Alliance raids were also nearly abandoned before they put the roulette in as well, and people still bend the rules so they don't get the hard content (I swear 75% of Alliance raids are LotA or Void Ark.) People would just spam the easy raids to get tokens, so whatever they eventually come up with needs to better than the tomes system (where you can basically buy everything pre-SB that came out with the same tomes.)

That's what Alliance Roulette is for. All of Crystal Tower basically died until the Anima step forced us back into. Once they added it to the Roulette, it's fairly active. The tokens would only come from one raid. If you wanted Rabanastre gear, you must run Rabanastre, for example.