Cutscenes for Castrum Meridianum and Praetorium: A Suggestion

[Tussin]

i find the design choices made reprehensible for players trying to get the MSQ unlock to move on

how is this helping anyone? lowbies cannot advance and waiting 30+ minutes for a MSQ is unacceptable

and people in mid-end game won't ever be bothered to do this at all now.

you gate so much content behind this and the next MSQ and want to leave it as a serious bottleneck? how are your sub payers supposed to endure the thought of what else is in store for them after they get past the ARR area into HW and SB?

[MistakeNot]

[QUOTE=Tussin;4750978
how is this helping anyone? lowbies cannot advance and waiting 30+ minutes for a MSQ is unacceptable

and people in mid-end game won't ever be bothered to do this at all now.
[/QUOTE]

Do you actually have any evidence this is the case, or are you just guessing?

I do know that when I took an alt through the MSQ a while ago, then I did not have to wait all that long for the queue to pop for these instances.
Same thing the few times I have run the MSQ roulette. I was playing a tank, so a DPS would likely have longer queues - but people are running these instances.

[TalithaSolarien]

Do you actually have any evidence this is the case, or are you just guessing?

I do know that when I took an alt through the MSQ a while ago, then I did not have to wait all that long for the queue to pop for these instances.
Same thing the few times I have run the MSQ roulette. I was playing a tank, so a DPS would likely have longer queues - but people are running these instances.

Depending on day time and workday/weekend it usually takes 20-30 minutes for a DPS to get the DF queue to pop on Chaos, at least in my experience. I haven't tried queueing for the dungeons directly for a long time (no alts), so that might be different. Tanks/Healer pop nearly immediately.
But yes, there are always enough dps queueing for them and it happens often that there are no newbies in the group.

[van_arn]

Just delete these dungeons already. No sane person would want to run them more than once, and the only reason people do them is to get quest progression or they're a player barking like a trained dog for a daily xp bribe.

[Kinetic-duet]

I don't mind the cutscenes. I just watch Netflix, or play a different game inbetween them. Perfect for when I can't pay attention.

But I like the option of skipping cutscenes when doing it unsynced. That makes sense.

[Jkap_Goat]

I avoid that dungeon like the plague. I been there once and it took a total of 40 mins because of waiting for cutscenes to end. That is ridiculous.

[RokkuEkkusu]

Just delete these dungeons already. No sane person would want to run them more than once, and the only reason people do them is to get quest progression or they're a player barking like a trained dog for a daily xp bribe.

Would you call me insane if I admitted that I want to run them more than once? Because aside from the decent rewards for completing the roulette of the two dungeons, I'd rather go through Main Scenario Roulette than having to deal with an EX primal in Mentor Roulette. Also, most of my Castrum Meridianum runs even with cutscenes (25 minutes on average) are faster than most of the Expert Roulette dungeons I've been running as of late because of Zero DPS healers, DPS who don't use AoE attacks, and/or tanks that can't hold aggro.

[TalithaSolarien]

Just delete these dungeons already. No sane person would want to run them more than once, and the only reason people do them is to get quest progression or they're a player barking like a trained dog for a daily xp bribe.

Please don't. They are the culmination of the ARR MSQ line and they BFH moment for your char. The roulette and the XP bonus are meant to bribe other players to queue for them so that enough players are available for new players to make the wait time bearable.

This is a problem later on during the MSQ progression. While most dungeons are in some kind of roulettes that are run regularly (more or less, some of the later HW dungeons can take very long for a DPS) the trials are in a bad spot. Few people run the trials roulette and not everyone wants to cheese the HW by running them unsynced. Most people only run the normal trials only once which leads to a very small pool of players to choose from. 1-2 hours queue time for a dps happen quite often.

IMHO there should be more rewards for people to run the MSQ relevant trials and dungeons so that the player pool for newcomers should be large enough to get some reasonable queue times.

[van_arn]

Please don't. They are the culmination of the ARR MSQ line and they BFH moment for your char. The roulette and the XP bonus are meant to bribe other players to queue for them so that enough players are available for new players to make the wait time bearable.

This is a problem later on during the MSQ progression. While most dungeons are in some kind of roulettes that are run regularly (more or less, some of the later HW dungeons can take very long for a DPS) the trials are in a bad spot. Few people run the trials roulette and not everyone wants to cheese the HW by running them unsynced. Most people only run the normal trials only once which leads to a very small pool of players to choose from. 1-2 hours queue time for a dps happen quite often.

IMHO there should be more rewards for people to run the MSQ relevant trials and dungeons so that the player pool for newcomers should be large enough to get some reasonable queue times.

They're an anticlimax after being nerfed to the ground multiple times, and are little more than a walk-through cutscene gallery. Just remove the combat encounters and play the cutscenes without needing to waste 7 other peoples' time, or waste the time of a poor new player dps that needs to wait an hour in a queue to wait an hour in a terrible cutscene dungeon to continue quest progression. Had these dungeons not been nerfed multiple times, your BFH claim might hold some weight-- it does not now.

While we're at it, just delete the first half of the 2.x series of fetch quests because they're useless padding that keep new players away from the good content and decent storyline.

Mentor roulette can pick up the slack for the HW trials and dungeons if people aren't dodging that because Castrum/Praetorium are wasting the people in that pool. Yes, wasting. If someone has gotten to the point where they've cleared every bit of non-savage content in the game at least once, they are wasted on Praetorium or Castrum.

Would you call me insane if I admitted that I want to run them more than once? Because aside from the decent rewards for completing the roulette of the two dungeons, I'd rather go through Main Scenario Roulette than having to deal with an EX primal in Mentor Roulette. Also, most of my Castrum Meridianum runs even with cutscenes (25 minutes on average) are faster than most of the Expert Roulette dungeons I've been running as of late because of Zero DPS healers, DPS who don't use AoE attacks, and/or tanks that can't hold aggro.

I wouldn't call you insane, but I'd certainly think there's a Pavlovian component to running a cutscene gallery you aren't engaged with for no reason other than the reward. Meaning, you aren't running it for the sake of it being enjoyable, you're running it only because of the reward -- and you've been conditioned to consider the reward enjoyable, rather than the content itself. Relying on conditioning alone to carry content is pretty much the most damning insult I can direct to a designer, and I'll happily direct that insult to whoever thought nerfing these dungeons and forcing cutscene playback was a good idea at SE. Even if it's Yoship himself.

As for the rest of your issues, I can agree the playerbase needs some tough love. Whether that takes the form of ingame feedback that lets players know when they need to improve or hard blocks on progression that don't permit them to see some content until they can carry their own weight I can't say, but I do know taking out one of the avenues for free levels for no effort (these dungeons' roulette) would be a step in the direction we'd need to go to even consider fixing these problems.

I don't mind the cutscenes. I just watch Netflix, or play a different game inbetween them. Perfect for when I can't pay attention.

But I like the option of skipping cutscenes when doing it unsynced. That makes sense.

If you're watching Netflix to get through a dungeon -- or heaven forbid, playing something else -- it's a bad dungeon.

[Lynesse]

snip

You have an interesting perspective. I like and respect that. I also pretty much agree with you.

I enjoy the MSQ Roulette because I always seem to meet interesting people. We've had some seriously entertaining characters -- very fun people to chat with during the cutscenes. I also queue with someone, and we keep each other entertained.

It'll become unbearable eventually, though. I think removing a bunch of the encounters (and dated fetch quests) is a practical solution. This is mostly a +1 to your post.

This game doesn't do much to encourage communication between players. It would benefit from more content that did.