Queuing in Duty Finder as a "Freelancer"

[Jonnycbad]

I think it would be cool if you could queue for a duty with a "Freelancer" setting. This would mean that your role is "randomized" among all the jobs you have leveled for that duty or roulette. Sometimes I just want to do a duty but I kind of want the game to "random select" one of any of my max level jobs to send me into a duty, and I think it would be fun. This way I queue as a DRG80 but as a "Freelancer", and it would choose 1 of the 17 jobs I have at 80 to put me into the duty as and I won't know until it queues and I would have to change that job before accepting. Would be like the "Random Character Select" option in fighting games.

[Rongway]

I think this would be fun, but.

The server would need to know all your gearsets and iLv scores for all your jobs. Currently, this information is only stored client-side, so one of the following things would need to happen for your idea to work.

A) The server would need to store all your gearsets, or at least the iLv scores for all of your jobs. This option increases the size of character save data on the server.

B) The server would just pick a job based on your all of your job levels. Issues would arise if your jobs are not geared appropriately, despite being leveled. A selection based solely on job levels could result in you being assigned a duty on a job that you have leveled but lack the gear for, causing you a withdrawal penalty because you have no gearset for that job that can confirm participation.

C) The client would need to communicate all your gearsets and iLv scores to the server upon queuing, which the server would then have to remember for the duration of your time in the queue. It would increase the amount of data the servers need to handle by a large multiplier. If the DF servers currently need to keep track of your character ID and the job you queued as, the servers would need to keep track of your character ID and all 19 or 20 jobs' iLvs (including next expansion's jobs), which means the queue data for people doing job roulette could be 10 to 20 times larger than the current queue participant data.

D) Any of a number of other options that involve an increase in data transfer or storage for at least some part of the process. Even the most efficient solutions will require an increase in the amount of data stored on the character servers, or the amount of data transferred between the client and DF servers, or the amount of data stored on the DF servers as part of the queue process, or somewhere, and the devs have historically been firmly resistant to increasing the amount of data any part of the servers handles or stores, no matter how small the increase. Whether it's because of actual technical limitations or because they just don't know how to implement such changes in an efficient and effective way, only they could say.


tl;dr: this would be great, but the devs would never go for this.