People able to skip cutscenes in MSQ roullete o.o

[Iscah]

In the old system, where cutscenes are skippable, players could have politely waited on the occasions when one player was watching the cutscenes. With lots of people running the roulette, the chances of your party getting that new person should be relatively low. There would be a gamble of your time when you queue for it - will you get a party that can speed through, or not? - but first-timers get their climactic finale and everyone else gets their 15-minute run most days.

Instead, people refused to wait - and so the developers have had to "take a side", decided the new player's experience is more important and the (only?) way to ensure that, at least without heavily revisiting the content, is to make the others wait. And if the game framework doesn't allow for dynamic "sometimes forced, sometimes not" cutscenes then the only way to achieve that is to make everyone wait, every time.

Ideally there could have been some kind of warning before it happened - "if you don't voluntarily wait for new players, we will have to force everyone to watch cutscenes every time" - and maybe people would have listened to that and realised it would be better to wait sometimes than to lose the "quick run" entirely.

(I'm guessing the game's coding means they are not able to implement a dynamic "unskippable cutscenes only with a new player present" setup, or they would have done so - but in any case it comes back to the ideal scenario of the old system. If people chose to wait for new players when necessary, that would have the same final outcome, without needing to force it at a programming level.)

Where in their post were they maligning first timers?

Saying that "changing it the way they did was just a dumb idea" can come across that way, because the change was specifically meant to help first-timers. Thus, an interpretation that 'changing it for the sake of first timers was a dumb idea'.

[BillyKaplan]

(I'm guessing the game's coding means they are not able to implement a dynamic "unskippable cutscenes only with a new player present" setup, or they would have done so - but in any case it comes back to the ideal scenario of the old system. If people chose to wait for new players when necessary, that would have the same final outcome, without needing to force it at a programming level.)

The devs have proven time and again that when they want to, they can make anything happen in this game. The code is theirs, they can do whatever they want with it. Question is, do they want to (broad 'want' term that also includes priorities and outside interference from higherups). The answer seems to be 'no' as this very 'solution' we were given only shows how little they actually want to bother with this.
And you can talk about that ideal until you're blue in the face, the fact remains we never saw anything like that in the game again. ARF and Ala Mhigo were both normal, zero-cutscene dungeons. Thordan and Shinryu were separated from the dungeons leading up to them so that people can enjoy the cutscenes in between dungeon and trial at their leisure. There's no need to defend the design, still existing in the MSQ roulette dungeons like a scorned lover, when the devs themselves acknowledge it's bad by never once having repeated it.

Saying that "changing it the way they did was just a dumb idea" can come across that way, because the change was specifically meant to help first-timers. Thus, an interpretation that 'changing it for the sake of first timers was a dumb idea'.

We've seen plenty of first timers complain about this change, so even portions of the target demographic think it's, shall we call it, less than ideal.