The Alliance roulette is unbearable

[Conando]

Yeah I’d rather have Syrcus every day than Puppets’ Bunker. It’s 15 minutes vs almost an hour.

[Juzjuzz]

Yeah I’d rather have Syrcus every day than Puppets’ Bunker. It’s 15 minutes vs almost an hour.

Eh no thanks, Syrcus every day is a pain in the ass. Farming it for the relic weapon in shb was the worst part. I'm not against doing CT tbh, but not too mutch. There's enough of it and sometimes getting something more recent and fresh is fun imo.

I wish they'd actually forbid everyone to access the roulette if the gear isn't on the correct level.

"Oh you don't want to play at lvl 80 even if your job is lvl 87 ? No roulettes for you."

[Ronduwil]

I wish they'd actually forbid everyone to access the roulette if the gear isn't on the correct level.

"Oh you don't want to play at lvl 80 even if your job is lvl 87 ? No roulettes for you."

In reality, it will play out like this:

"Oh you don't want to let me play at the level I'm comfortable with because i progressed too far through your story? No sub for me."

The fact that players are "exploiting the system" in this manner indicates that they prefer the easier old school raids. The alternative is to dial the difficulty down on the current raids to bring them in line with the older, more reasonable difficulties of years past. If there wasn't a significant critical mass of players that was queueing for the easier content, you wouldn't see this phenomenon.

If you want to queue for on-level content, do so outside of the roulette. The purpose of the roulette is to give newer players who are still working through the content a chance to clear that conent without having to wait in the party finder for hours for someone to deign to group with them. It gives the veterans an incentive to help out random strangers who are still leveling through the game. If I want to run a level 90 raid, I'll queue for it, start a new run on the party finder, or find an existing run on the party finder. I don't go to the (random) duty roulette expecting to zone into Pandemonium. There's even a roulette option for players who prefer the harder content, and it's the expert roulette.

To me it looks like some players are simply complaining that the roulette is providing end game players with an alternative to running extremes and savages. If they want to play a game that punishes players for not try harding the game enough, then WoW may be their cup of tea.

[baklava151]

In reality, it will play out like this:

"Oh you don't want to let me play at the level I'm comfortable with because i progressed too far through your story? No sub for me."

The fact that players are "exploiting the system" in this manner indicates that they prefer the easier old school raids. The alternative is to dial the difficulty down on the current raids to bring them in line with the older, more reasonable difficulties of years past. If there wasn't a significant critical mass of players that was queueing for the easier content, you wouldn't see this phenomenon.

If you want to queue for on-level content, do so outside of the roulette. The purpose of the roulette is to give newer players who are still working through the content a chance to clear that conent without having to wait in the party finder for hours for someone to deign to group with them. It gives the veterans an incentive to help out random strangers who are still leveling through the game. If I want to run a level 90 raid, I'll queue for it, start a new run on the party finder, or find an existing run on the party finder. I don't go to the (random) duty roulette expecting to zone into Pandemonium. There's even a roulette option for players who prefer the harder content, and it's the expert roulette.

To me it looks like some players are simply complaining that the roulette is providing end game players with an alternative to running extremes and savages. If they want to play a game that punishes players for not try harding the game enough, then WoW may be their cup of tea.

It's not a matter of later raids being difficult, none of the later alliance raids are that hard nor are "expert" dungeons, it's players being lazy. How about if someone only wants to run CT, they can queue for it directly and stop ruining alliance roulette with ilvl cheesing. There's nothing try hard about expecting people to put in a modicum of effort.

[baklava151]

After reading through the thread more, I do agree Square exacerbated the issue by making the CT raids required for the MSQ and an option for the ShB relic. I can't think of any easy solutions for this other than making the rest of the alliance raids mandatory as well (would prefer if they didn't though, side content should just remain optional imo). Maybe they can at certain points they can somehow inform players of their existence. At the very least, please fix the ilvl cheese, even if it means only 1 less CT raid a month.

[TaleraRistain]

I can't think of any easy solutions for this other than making the rest of the alliance raids mandatory as well

Please no. I wish I could un-unlock the Nier raids on my main and I'm not going to even bother on my alt.

[Iscah]

To further go against your point, I ran Thordan EX with my spouse the other day for journal progress. We are both lvl 90 in jobs we have been playing since the beginning. We know the Thordan fight like the back of our hand from how much we've run it. At 560 iLVL, that fight took as long as it did when we were level 80 in 430 gear.

Thordan EX seems like a poor measure for comparing how long a fight takes due to equipment. 90% of the running time is waiting for a fixed sequence of attacks and events to play out, most of them to be dodged rather than defeated.

If I wanted to participate in a system where I was forced into harder content against my will, I'd go back to playing WoW. Why can't you just let players play the way that they want?

If you're signing up for the roulette then it is not putting you anywhere against your will, because by signing up for it you've agreed to be placed into any alliance raid where you are needed.

As you said yourself:

The purpose of the roulette is to give newer players who are still working through the content a chance to clear that conent without having to wait in the party finder for hours for someone to deign to group with them. It gives the veterans an incentive to help out random strangers who are still leveling through the game.

If that is the purpose of the roulette, then deliberately locking yourself out of being available to help fill the higher levels of the roulette is defeating the purpose of it. The people queuing for Dun Scaith and Paradigm's Breach need those veterans' help more urgently than the ones queuing for Syrcus where everyone in the roulette is eligible to join them.

[Ronduwil]

If that is the purpose of the roulette, then deliberately locking yourself out of being available to help fill the higher levels of the roulette is defeating the purpose of it. The people queuing for Dun Scaith and Paradigm's Breach need those veterans' help more urgently than the ones queuing for Syrcus where everyone in the roulette is eligible to join them.

Trust me: a player who deliberately went to the trouble to make themselves unavailable for those raids isn't one you want in one of those raids with you. Ironically, the players complaining the most about this system are the ones are are theoretically benefiting the most from it because those players' lack of availability in the current raids increases leaves more slots open for the available players, thereby increasing the chances that a player who is available to all raids will land one of those spots. The "cheesing" isn't "ruining" the roulette. It's actually improving it for the people who prefer the later raids. I don't cheese the roulette, and I get a healthy mix of raids sprinkled in there on my max level jobs. This week I've gotten Weeping City of Mhach, Puppet Bunker, Copied Factory, and Labyrinth of the Ancients. Last week I was getting Void Ark almost every day. I didn't even know you could cheese the roulette in this fashion until this thread happened. Now I have to resist the temptation to do so. All this thread has accomplished is to bring awareness to an obscure exploit, and for what? They're proposing to alienate players over a non-issue.

[Ronduwil]

It's not a matter of later raids being difficult, none of the later alliance raids are that hard nor are "expert" dungeons, it's players being lazy. How about if someone only wants to run CT, they can queue for it directly and stop ruining alliance roulette with ilvl cheesing. There's nothing try hard about expecting people to put in a modicum of effort.

You completely missed the point. You don't get any current tomestones for queueing for CT. That's why they don't queue directly for it. To say that the newer alliance raids aren't any harder is laughable. Obviously they are, or no one would be deliberately "cheesing" the queue. Furthermore, if the majority of players were really clamoring for the harder, newer raids, then the players who "cheesed" it would actually be increasing your chances of getting into a current raid because they would exclusively be filling the slots for the older raids and leaving the newer raids' slots open for players who want to do the current ones. The reason you don't see as many current raids in the roulette is that players prefer to go into those with premade groups. This has nothing to do with item levels. Again, the roulette is working as designed.

To be honest, as soon as I saw you call players "lazy" for not wanting to put any "work" into a video game, I had to scratch my head. The whole point of playing is to relax. Playing a video game is, in and of itself, a lazy activity. Unless you're streaming the game or creating content from it, you'll never convince me that you're being industrious by investing more time into a video game than the next guy. If I wanted to be industrious, I wouldn't be playing video games in my spare time.

[baklava151]

You completely missed the point. You don't get any current tomestones for queueing for CT. That's why they don't queue directly for it. To say that the newer alliance raids aren't any harder is laughable. Obviously they are, or no one would be deliberately "cheesing" the queue. Furthermore, if the majority of players were really clamoring for the harder, newer raids, then the players who "cheesed" it would actually be increasing your chances of getting into a current raid because they would exclusively be filling the slots for the older raids and leaving the newer raids' slots open for players who want to do the current ones. The reason you don't see as many current raids in the roulette is that players prefer to go into those with premade groups. This has nothing to do with item levels. Again, the roulette is working as designed.

To be honest, as soon as I saw you call players "lazy" for not wanting to put any "work" into a video game, I had to scratch my head. The whole point of playing is to relax. Playing a video game is, in and of itself, a lazy activity. Unless you're streaming the game or creating content from it, you'll never convince me that you're being industrious by investing more time into a video game than the next guy. If I wanted to be industrious, I wouldn't be playing video games in my spare time.

"You completely missed the point. You don't get any current tomestones for queueing for CT. That's why they don't queue directly for it."

I'm just flipping it back on you since you're fine with telling people to directly queue for later raids if they want them so bad, but then they also miss out on the roulette rewards. Yes, raids after ARR are harder, but they're still not hard. They don't even reach extreme level of difficulty.

The rest of your post makes no sense. If I queue for Nier and while I'm waiting, someone takes off their gear and queues alliance roulette, at worst they remove up to 23 players from the pool who could potentially fill my queue. At best they drop into a party that's already forming and there's one less player who could fill my queue. Neither situation helps my queue. Stop defending a bad system, it's no longer random if someone can skew it to one set of raids.

And yes, I get some people play the game very casually and that's perfectly fine, but it's an online game and if you're ruining the experience of others because you don't want to put in any effort, it becomes a problem. It reminds me of healers who actively refuse to DPS because "my role is healer"