The Alliance roulette is unbearable

[RitsukoSonoda]

Remember when LotA and ST were new? The amount of wipes on them? Imagine if they dropped the maximum ilvl for those two raids a little. i90 for LotA and 110 for ST. You'd see a return of those hells...and at this rate, I kind of want them to do it if only to remind people that the entirety of CT used to be as hard as WoD.

Ah yeah. The days where ppl wiped at the zombie dragon cause they didn't do the adds right, or walked the giant into the meteors at the behemoth and it broke them before the big one dropped, oh and wipes on the last boss cause ppl thought they could burn the last 10% of his health before ancient flare went off... ST I feel like was the easiest of the set when comparing initial launches at essentially min ilvl. The only wipes I recall on that one were either ppl letting the boss that spawns the bits to charge itself getting a full charge bar or on amon cause they didn't kill slimes fast enough or broke out all the frozen players when he did curtan call.

[Atma]

I don't even know what you are saying. Nothing is locked until you are in the instance. What Scaramouche and I said is that the gear swapping happens before you even get into the instance. So what exactly are they going to lock?

Nothing. At no point was that offered as a real, actual suggestion for something I actually think they're going to do. Hence "meme reply."

[Atma]

Ah yeah. The days where ppl wiped at the zombie dragon cause they didn't do the adds right, or walked the giant into the meteors at the behemoth and it broke them before the big one dropped, oh and wipes on the last boss cause ppl thought they could burn the last 10% of his health before ancient flare went off... ST I feel like was the easiest of the set when comparing initial launches at essentially min ilvl. The only wipes I recall on that one were either ppl letting the boss that spawns the bits to charge itself getting a full charge bar or on amon cause they didn't kill slimes fast enough or broke out all the frozen players when he did curtan call.

There was always Ancient Quaga wiping half the raid because everyone who got orbs ran around in a blind panic cause they didn't know what to do.

[RitsukoSonoda]

There was always Ancient Quaga wiping half the raid because everyone who got orbs ran around in a blind panic cause they didn't know what to do.

I usually saw the ppl with the markers run off and die on their own because those were stack markers and everyone else being annoyed because they were all far away from the boss so none of the melee could hit him while standing in the float fields lol

[technole]

It's been Dun Scaith as usual again. I finally spoke up after the first wipe and said in ally chat for diablos, tanks please use a cooldown on the tankbusters cause I get the aggro when they die. You know how the baddies still get one shot by that.

[Seraphor]

Original post for reference as it's several pages back:
"How about adding an ilvl bonus? Rather than scaling down.
A serepate bonus exp value like the new player bonus, which scales with your ilvl when queuing.

Something like 1000 x (currrent ilvl) so an ilvl 90 player queuing into alliance roulette would get a 90,000 exp bonus, while an ilvl 500 player would get 500,000 bonus exp.
Maybe adding an exponent rather than a straight multiplication to create a larger divide.
Plus a tomestone bonus, you get 10 additional tomestones of Astronomy if your ilvl is 550 or higher, scaling up to 560, 570 ext with each patch."

Creating a "Castrum Meridianum V2.0" situation is probably undesirable. Penalizing someone for the choices (or abilities) of others by reducing their experience potential is probably not for the best.

This is not creating a 'Castrum Meridianum' situation at all. Castrum awards fewer tomes because it's the shorter option of the two raids in the roulette, and we're rewarded by time spent.

In this case, it doesn't matter if you get Crystal Tower or Orbonne Monastery, if you queued in at ilvl 500 you still get your 500,000 bonus exp.
But if you're the one choosing to game the system and lower your ilvl to ensure you get a CT raid, then you are forfeiting that bonus.
Moreover, this would more closely scale with the level of the job you're queuing in on. At level 50, a 100,000 exp bonus is more significant than at level 80. So if you're legitimately level 50 queuing for Alliance roulette, you will not be penalised. But if you're level 80+ queuing in at ilvl <100, then you are not getting as much as you could be, in return for gaming the system.

The suggestion put forth was to incentivise the positive, rather than penalise the negative which this does better than any other suggestions so far.

[Packetdancer]

That's kind of my point to fixing it. It is designed to suit the way I want to do it, so it's unfair to say I'm rigging or otherwise cheating it. I'm doing exactly what is allowed within the parameters of the game. It's been this way since 3.0. If the devs didn't like how this is going, they would have fixed it.

I mean... it is currently functioning the way that suits what you want to use it for. I do not know that I would say it is functioning as designed (or that it was designed for what you want to use it for), because...

1. The roulettes are supposedly meant to allow folks who have already done content to go and backfill needed spaces in whatever duties that people are specifically queuing for, in order to allow them to not wait in queue forever.
2. People who are queuing specifically for later alliance raids sometimes have to wait for up to an hour.
3. Given points #1 and #2, I'm not sure you can legitimately argue that the roulette is functioning as intended, even if it's functioning according to the way it's currently designed.

Something we have seen in the past is that the developers -- somewhat understandably -- tend to take the JP playerbase's cultural behavior into account more than the NA/EU playerbase. Witness that we have the Raid Finder, which is functionally never used in NA or EU; we use PF to pre-make parties for high-end content, including reclears, while the JP playerbase tends to use PF to make practice parties and then uses Raid Finder to queue for reclears. Similarly, high-end duties (i.e., extreme trials) that have an associated questline will put up a quest goal as something like "Use Duty Finder to complete <whatever>", just like with dungeons; in the JP playerbase, that's something which is in fact done, but in NA/EU, people are always like "all you will get that was is unhappy mentors via Mentor Roulette, go make a party in Party Finder."

I don't know offhand how alliance roulette works, culturally, in the JP playerbase. But if folks are not ilevel-cheesing or otherwise manipulating it there, I wouldn't be surprised if the devs aren't really viscerally aware of just how often people get specifically Crystal Tower in alliance roulette here.

Now, as I said earlier in the thread, even without ilevel cheesing coming into things, the Crystal Tower raids are going to skew things disproportionately in their favor, since I know many people who literally don't have the other alliance raids unlocked. But ilevel cheesing definitely doesn't improve the situation. So arguing that "yes, I want the rewards for agreeing to be put into whatever alliance raid needs me, but I also should be allowed to say it's only these alliance raids which are much simpler" seems disingenuous at best.

Maybe, honestly, it would be better to split the roulette into two: Crystal Tower roulette (with, say, half of the current reward you get for alliance raid, but where you can only get one of the three Crystal Tower alliance raids), and Advanced Alliance Roulette (with slightly more than the current reward, consisting of all the other alliance raids in the game, and a much more stringent ilevel check -- that last to avoid people doing the same sort of ilevel cheesing shenanigans to manipulate the second roulette and get specifically the Mhachi raids rather than the Ivalice, YoRHa, or upcoming level 90 ones).

That way, folks who only ever want to do Crystal Tower would be able to queue for specifically that (but with a reduced reward, to represent that they're explicitly queuing for a much smaller set of content and probably doing so knowing they're going to just faceroll through it), while folks who enjoy the other alliance raids can queue into Advanced Alliance Roulette and get placed wherever they're needed without being dragged into Yet Another Crystal Tower run, thus ensuring folks trying to actually do the Ivalice raids or whatnot don't sit in queue for an hour or more. Then everybody wins.

[Packetdancer]

Getting newbies happens all the time during the rare experiences where we actually get to do something other than Run #295 of Syrcus Tower. It rarely results in a wipe, and if players were actually, y'know - occasionally required to do them - the "speed gap" between these and CT would dramatically decrease. I would posit the main reason why "higher level raids take longer" is because 20% of people in the thing spend half the instance floor tanking or with a damage debuff. This isn't their fault, either. This happens because they never actually get to learn the content, because they never get any exposure to it because *PEOPLE KEEP FORCING THEM INTO SYRCUS* because they want to netflix and press 1-2-3 and get oodles of xp for it.

I'm also gonna point out that I've observed a non-zero intersection between "people who want to queue only for Crystal Tower" (and also "people who always tell folks to just run older content unsynced with higher-level friends") and "people who complain in endgame content that no one seems to know all these mechanics 'that have been around forever'."

"Why doesn't anyone know how Pyretic works?" Who on earth even sees Pyretic in this game anymore prior to Bozja or Seat of Sacrifice? (Yes, "Extreme Caution" and "Acceleration Bomb" are functionally the same thing as Pyretic, but a lot of people aren't familiar with those either.)

If you only run the oldest content, or run things unsynced, such that people faceroll through it without needing to worry about mechanics (and often without mechanics even happening due to the speed of kills, and when -- as I've often seen -- people will go "nah folks don't need to know these mechanics, we can still clear with a lot of deaths" and just try to faceroll even later stuff (i.e., Mhach et al), then I strongly feel that you have absolutely no grounds to complain that people getting to endgame don't know those mechanics.

Like, if you want to never have Orbonne show up in roulettes and only ever want to do Crystal Tower because it's an easy faceroll, then I'd argue you have absolutely no right whatsoever to complain that half of the group doesn't know how Mustadio's dumb shield mechanic works (marking the weak sides is the most visually unintuitive telegraph this game has ever introduced) when they decide to try Delubrum Reginae's savage variant and the same thing comes up during the gunner's portion of the Queen's Guard fight.

[Kolaina]

That's why the solution is to nerf the rewards for ilvl cheaters. Anyone playing fair would still get the full reward when they are "lucky" to CT, but someone wearing below 130 gear when their character is high level should get a tiny sliver of xp that isn't worth queuing up for.

Punishment. Horrible idea

[RyuDragnier]

Punishment. Horrible idea

It's a good idea, as the only ones who would complain and have problems with it are the ilvl cheaters.