A plea for further refinement of the Duty Roulette algorithm

[Shurrikhan]

When queuing an incomplete party, you're first filling spots for someone who queued for a specific dungeon that nobody is queuing for. As Fish points out, more people have access to and are queuing for lower level dungeons, which increases the probability that you'll end up in an early dungeon. Then, there will probably be more people queuing for Stormblood dungeons than for Heavensward dungeons, due in part to Stormblood being the current expansion, and because people can choose to skip to Lv60 if they want.


If you queue a complete party or end up matched with all roulette runners, random is random.

Though true, this is also irrelevant. The request here is that the roulette, quite simply, not be random. If 4 players are grouped together merely due to ticket position, rather than aiding anyone else's specific queue, then perhaps it should limit the roulette to dungeons within, say, 10 levels of them, or at least disproportionately favor the probability tables for dungeons nearer in level to each of said party members?

Then it begs the issue, what would be the point of Roulettes such as 50/60, 70 and Expert where you don't actually lose that many levels queuing up for them, as opposed to using Leveling roulette and getting something like Sastasha which creates a big difference in min/max levels. Like I get what people are saying, though we may have groups purposely going through the PF recruiting high level players to influence getting a duty no less than 10 levels difference, while the players who actually need the duties (for MSQ) could suffer longer queue times as a result of those bypassing to use PF before the DF.

I'd be fine with that, honestly. When doing Leveling Roulette daily for Cracked Clusters, less than one run per week had even a single member under level 50 (usually quite a bit greater), despite continuously sending me through Copperbell Mines. My one and only first-time completion bonus run (the Aery, for one of the DPS) over a couple months of gathering materia was nice, but frankly, past those first completions necessary for MSQ, I wouldn't be that bothered by some players making PF runs instead so long the bonus also convenienced non-PFers enough to make it seem worth queuing up for Leveling Roulette at all, where they previously wouldn't have. And I suspect it would.

Heck, you can even provide a consolation prize for "dungeons in need", similar to first-time completion bonuses. "This was a dungeon in need. You will receive an additional <X number> of <Y currency> at the completion of the instance."