Cutscenes for Castrum Meridianum and Praetorium: A Suggestion

[MistakeNot]

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.

They are not mere fetch quests, and they are not useless, nor are they any worse than the rest of the game.

[MetisWyatt]

Could you not just make this a solo-dungeon or a solo-instance or replace the party members with npcs ala FFXI's trust system? It would make more sense having the whole band of scions there anyway to do it with you. That would mean the new players see the cutscenes and the older ones aren't stuck in 25 mins of hell.

[Claire_Pendragon]

You currently have 2 options for dealing with CSs. Either D/C, and you're no longer in the CS, or change the audio language to something other than english, since the extra fluff words add extra time to the cutscenes. (Changing the clients base language seems to help cut extra time as well. Not sure how its set up, if its a combo of written words and voice acting, or what)

Could you not just make this a solo-dungeon or a solo-instance or replace the party members with npcs ala FFXI's trust system? It would make more sense having the whole band of scions there anyway to do it with you. That would mean the new players see the cutscenes and the older ones aren't stuck in 25 mins of hell.

You can already solo it as a Lv50 healer. (I Already did this)

You can duo it as a tank + DPS as well.

SMN probably can solo it as well.

They are not mere fetch quests, and they are not useless, nor are they any worse than the rest of the game.

Hes not saying delete all of the quests. Hes saying JUST the fetch quests. (Or at least tone them down, and streamline them)

[Lunavi]

I think you do not get the reason why the story roulette gives a lot more rewards than the other roulettes.

[Niwashi]

I haven't done these dungeons for the last three or four weeks, because I haven't been playing much (too caught up with the HD remake of FFX that I just recently started). But a month or so ago —well after the change was made to them— I was running them daily for quite a while. Queue times tended to be around 15 minutes or so, sometimes less. (Of course, if I'd been doing it at off-peak hours they might have been longer but that's always been the case.) So, to everyone trying to argue that "forcing" people to watch cutscenes would drive away experienced players and make the queue times impossible for new players, sorry to burst your bubble, but you're clearly wrong on that point. There are plenty of people still wanting to run them this way. Please quit reiterating an argument that's now been proven wrong.

I do actually support the OP's suggestion about unsynced runs. So long as you're doing an unsynced run with a pre-made group who have all done the dungeon before, I don't see a problem with letting people skip the cutscenes. Just don't start clamoring for roulette rewards while running it that way. Roulette rewards were added in the first place to ensure old content got run enough for new players to get a chance at it, and then this specific roulette had its rewards massively raised to ensure players could get a chance at doing it properly, with its story intact. To get the rewards that are specifically for doing a full run with cutscenes, you should be doing a full run with cutscenes.

[whiskeybravo]

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.

Sorry bro, we'll be back in 4.4

@thread

I haven't ran MSQ a single time since the changes were made. Though I never ran them much before, mainly just if I was leveling up a job or if a friend needed it. Given the age of these particular dungeons I think the best solution would be to make them solo duties. Add some helper NPCs and adjust HP levels on mobs and viola, problem solved. There is no real reason to run this dungeon after you do it for story, take away the MSQ roulette all together and boost the tome/exp drop on other roulettes to make up the difference.

[van_arn]

I think you do not get the reason why the story roulette gives a lot more rewards than the other roulettes.

Greater rewards to bribe players into getting into a queue is an admission this is substandard content.

Delete the requirement for substandard content.

[van_arn]

I haven't done these dungeons for the last three or four weeks, because I haven't been playing much (too caught up with the HD remake of FFX that I just recently started). But a month or so ago —well after the change was made to them— I was running them daily for quite a while. Queue times tended to be around 15 minutes or so, sometimes less. (Of course, if I'd been doing it at off-peak hours they might have been longer but that's always been the case.) So, to everyone trying to argue that "forcing" people to watch cutscenes would drive away experienced players and make the queue times impossible for new players, sorry to burst your bubble, but you're clearly wrong on that point. There are plenty of people still wanting to run them this way. Please quit reiterating an argument that's now been proven wrong.

I do actually support the OP's suggestion about unsynced runs. So long as you're doing an unsynced run with a pre-made group who have all done the dungeon before, I don't see a problem with letting people skip the cutscenes. Just don't start clamoring for roulette rewards while running it that way. Roulette rewards were added in the first place to ensure old content got run enough for new players to get a chance at it, and then this specific roulette had its rewards massively raised to ensure players could get a chance at doing it properly, with its story intact. To get the rewards that are specifically for doing a full run with cutscenes, you should be doing a full run with cutscenes.

There is no way for a new player to do these dungeons properly in a queue. The combat encounters have been nerfed to the point of irrelevance.

[Niwashi]

Greater rewards to bribe players into getting into a queue is an admission this is substandard content.

Actually, it's just an admission that it's time consuming content, more so than it used to be. People were saying they wouldn't run it if the time to reward ratio didn't work out with cutscenes included. SE increased the reward along with time to maintain that ratio players care so much about.

[van_arn]

Actually, it's just an admission that it's time consuming content, more so than it used to be. People were saying they wouldn't run it if the time to reward ratio didn't work out with cutscenes included. SE increased the reward along with time to maintain that ratio players care so much about.

Meaning, people are running for no other reason than the reward. This means they are not attracted to the content itself.

It's a pavlovian response. You're trained to like it because the rewards are nice. You do not enjoy the content itself, in fact you're probably watching Youtube instead.

This is a bad dungeon.