The Alliance roulette is unbearable

[BigHoffie]

I think her point was more, "Pretty much everyone in this thread who has admitted to ilevel cheesing to ensure they get Labyrinth of the Ancients has said they do it because they just want out as quickly as possible with their roulette rewards."

Thus, by their own admission, no one engaging in this seems to be doing it because they think the Crystal Tower raids are fun, just that they're the fastest things to run in that roulette.

(Edit: Also, unrelated, I must high-five you on the First Law reference for your character name there. You see eight billion Kiritos and Sephiroths and other names around, as well as a solid number of references to the Wheel of Time or even the Stormlight Archive, but I think you're the first I've seen referencing Abercrombie's excellent series.)

Oh, by no means do I think the raid itself is fun... however, maybe I need to quickly level a role to raid with my friends; which I would consider fun. Or maybe I'm working on old relics (not my idea of fun but maybe somebody's) Either way, I think fun is relative and whether its doing the raid on it's own merits or using it to get to what they actually think is fun, he doesnt get to say what is or isnt.

(Thanks, most characters end up being named after what I'm reading at the time of creation. Some are boring like your generic WoT references, but I have a Rincewind tooling around on WoW too)

[Dewslam]

lmao, people so mad they're getting the most common raid in the game they're talking about falsely reporting people.

[Packetdancer]

I mean your talking to someone who leaves WoD because there is no one new to the duty and thinks it means people are queueing nake.

Lots of new players who only have unlocked CT? Nope its the bloody ilvl cheeser ruining my day.

CT being mandatory and lowest entry level vs optional raid? Nope still the bloody ilvl cheeser ruining my day.

To be fair, I think this thread has gone a bit off the rails; we're conflating two potential problems as the same thing.

Problem #1: The roulette is not functioning as intended because people queuing directly for later raids frequently must wait an inordinate amount of time.

I don't know if this is due to the (obvious) prominence of the Crystal Tower raids as the only MSQ-required raids (and one of only two raid series the free trial players can unlock). Nor do we really know the innards of how the roulette party creation logic works; is it just matching people into whatever group it can fill the fastest, or is it taking folks who can do the later raids and putting them into the later party piecemeal?

There's a lot of ways this could go wrong. But the fact that the stated purpose of roulettes is to backfill parties for people queued for specific content so they don't wait forever in the queue (in exchange for daily rewards), and yet people can queue for specific content and wait forever in the queue? That does sort of by definition mean this particular roulette is not working as intended, regardless of the reason.

Problem #2: People are admittedly manipulating the queue to get specific duties.

Leaving aside whether this is cheating or just "being clever", it definitely runs counter to the stated purpose of the roulettes. And while we have no proof that it is making the situation worse with regards to the roulettes, we can fairly definitively posit that it is not making it better.

After all, if it was always going to just dump the majority of people in Crystal Tower anyway, then ilevel cheesing changes nothing. If the number of people getting Crystal Tower is increased by ilevel cheesing, it makes the problem worse. Either of those is possible. But there is no situation in which people who can get later raids manipulating things to get specifically Crystal Tower makes it easier for the roulette to pop the queue for folks queued for later raids.

Sure, Problem #2 does not do anything towards solving Problem #1, so it can be at best a non-factor, and it could well contribute to it. However, they are separate problems and really should not be conflated as one when discussing "the alliance roulette system appears to be broken", because we have zero concrete proof that Problem #2 contributes to Problem #1.

( Though, we also have zero concrete proof that it does not make it worse. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )

[Scaramouche]

To be fair, I think this thread has gone a bit off the rails; we're conflating two potential problems as the same thing.

Problem #1: The roulette is not functioning as intended because people queuing directly for later raids frequently must wait an inordinate amount of time.

I don't know if this is due to the (obvious) prominence of the Crystal Tower raids as the only MSQ-required raids (and one of only two raid series the free trial players can unlock). Nor do we really know the innards of how the roulette party creation logic works; is it just matching people into whatever group it can fill the fastest, or is it taking folks who can do the later raids and putting them into the later party piecemeal?

There's a lot of ways this could go wrong. But the fact that the stated purpose of roulettes is to backfill parties for people queued for specific content so they don't wait forever in the queue (in exchange for daily rewards), and yet people can queue for specific content and wait forever in the queue? That does sort of by definition mean this particular roulette is not working as intended, regardless of the reason.

Problem #2: People are admittedly manipulating the queue to get specific duties.

Leaving aside whether this is cheating or just "being clever", it definitely runs counter to the stated purpose of the roulettes. And while we have no proof that it is making the situation worse with regards to the roulettes, we can fairly definitively posit that it is not making it better.

After all, if it was always going to just dump the majority of people in Crystal Tower anyway, then ilevel cheesing changes nothing. If the number of people getting Crystal Tower is increased by ilevel cheesing, it makes the problem worse. Either of those is possible. But there is no situation in which people who can get later raids manipulating things to get specifically Crystal Tower makes it easier for the roulette to pop the queue for folks queued for later raids.

Sure, Problem #2 does not do anything towards solving Problem #1, so it can be at best a non-factor, and it could well contribute to it. However, they are separate problems and really should not be conflated as one when discussing "the alliance roulette system appears to be broken", because we have zero concrete proof that Problem #2 contributes to Problem #1.

( Though, we also have zero concrete proof that it does not make it worse. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )

The roulette works perfectly fine whenever its your turn you're thrown wherever there is a party ready to go.


As for people using ilvl cheese first who cares. Second thanks to them its one less spot to a ARR raid.

[Seymour_Rainecourt]

ilvl cheesing for "fast exp" is the dumbest excuse I've ever heard. If you really want fast exp at the expense of fun, go to Bozja. Don't drag everyone else down with you.

No. Also, I do not want to go and manually grind exp in Bozja. If players wish to conquer specific raids, they can specifically queue for them. I use the Alliance Roulette for quick exp and/or tomes and I will never look back...unless I forget to unequip my gear before queueing, in which case I'll leave if it's Weeping City/Ivalice/Nier. If players instead wish to acquire tomestones or their daily exp from this roulette without being biased in favor of the lower level raids, they should understand that they won't always get the raid they wish for before they queue.

It burns down to both sides of the coin doing or not doing. Those who strip their IL before queueing can either: not queue up, queue up as they are, or decide to queue up normally. Those who don't strip their IL before queueing can either: not queue up, queue up as they are, or decide to queue up with having stripped IL.

The players who see a system functioning as it does- as it always has- and decide to try their luck against what they know to presumably not be in their favor to begin with should have no grounds to become angry at the system, but only themselves for once again falling for it. You can only accept that the system is the way it is, and decide once more whether to press your luck or simply not use it for the hassle. Poor analogy, and reaching, but if I were to continually buy scratchers and lose, would it make sense for me to become irate and disdainful of the scratchers themselves? The machine cabinet? No, it wouldn't, and I'd kick myself for allowing myself to believe any thing or any one was at fault other than myself.

[Packetdancer]

The roulette works perfectly fine whenever its your turn you're thrown wherever there is a party ready to go.

We do not actually know that for certain. To try to sketch this out as a rough logic problem...

Let's say that Albert queues for the Ridorana Lighthouse, because he's just unlocked it and is eager to do it. Betsy queues into the roulette and has all the alliance raids unlocked, so gets put into Albert's pending 'blob' of users (since he's, let's say, the only waiting party).

Charlie, Diane, Edmund, and Ferdinand are in a party together and queue into alliance roulette. Three of them have the Ivalice raids unlocked, but Edmund's never bothered with them and only has the Crystal Tower raids unlocked. Because they're in a party, they can't be put into Albert's; they get shuffled into a new pending party for Crystal Tower. This will happen regardless of anything else; they cannot be sent to Ridorana because of Edmund.

Gertrude queues up, and has all the alliance raids unlocked. This is where it gets nebulous at best. Does it put Gertrude in Albert's pending alliance raid because she can run that raid, where others can't? Or does it look at Charlie et al's group and say "Oh, hey, this one has more people; it's going to pop faster, let's shuffle enough folks in there to get them out of the queue right away"?

Moreover, if it gets to the point that the Crystal Tower group is very close to popping, does it go "Well, let's get this over with quickly" and yank Betsy from Albert's group, stuffing her into finish out the Crystal Tower folks and get them out of the queue?

We genuinely don't know the logic here as they've never detailed it anywhere (so far as I know), and there's multiple possible algorithms they could use to sort people into groups, both standardized ones and countless custom ones they could've concocted.

But if Gertrude decided to equip Ironworks gear on her level 90 red mage, she can only get Crystal Tower. Now, if the roulette would have sorted her into the Crystal Tower anyway (because there were more people in that, so it was 'weighted' more highly in whatever algorithm they use), her ilevel cheesing has precisely zero effect on how fast Albert's queued Ridorana pops; she was going to the Crystal Tower with Charlie and the others regardless. If, however, the roulette would've sorted her into Albert's group -- because she has the raids unlocked, and it's a higher level and thus a smaller potential population, so it weights that factor more highly -- then her ilevel cheesing directly impacts Albert's ability to run his newly-unlocked Ridorana Lighthouse.

We genuinely do not know how the roulette works behind the scenes, which is why I say we cannot possibly know which of those two situations is true. In one case, the ilevel cheesing changes nothing. In the other, while the problem of "many people only have Crystal Tower unlocked in the first place" would still exist and skew the queue regardless, Gertrude's ilevel cheesing does nonetheless actively make the problem worse.

[Sindele]

The players who see a system functioning as it does- as it always has- and decide to try their luck against what they know to presumably not be in their favor to begin with should have no grounds to become angry at the system, but only themselves for once again falling for it. You can only accept that the system is the way it is, and decide once more whether to press your luck or simply not use it for the hassle. Poor analogy, and reaching, but if I were to continually buy scratchers and lose, would it make sense for me to become irate and disdainful of the scratchers themselves? The machine cabinet? No, it wouldn't, and I'd kick myself for allowing myself to believe any thing or any one was at fault other than myself.

I'm glad you recognize it's an incredibly tortured metaphor.

1) It's a game under active development that makes adjustments to improve player experience all the time - because designers are fallible creatures and not even the oldest established systems are guaranteed to produce the desired results forever,
2) the point is that the results can be willfully manipulated by involved parties. Generally, this is something highly frowned upon when it comes to gambling and gambling regulations.

[kaynide]

Just want to say thank you to those discussing this without getting too heated.

I put myself out there to give a point of view on this, and will add a final thought mostly to help show my point of view. Of course it’s fine to disagree, just a bit of a stretch to call it cheating etc.

So, that final thought:

The main argument is that ultimately roulettes are designed to keep bodies flowing into older content with the intent to keep queue times down. I agree there.

However, Wondrous Tails and even relic quests like the 2.0’s books also keep people doing older content, yet you can unsync and pretty much solo them. The game allows this, and I doubt people would blink an eye over people doing this.

To me, being able to avoid the more troublesome raids is in a similar vein: the game allows this and I’ve never heard that I shouldn’t from official sources. I don’t see how this is so different from just not unlocking the later raid tiers entirely.

The best argument I have heard is that in the unlikely chance all 18 members are doing roulette and all 18 can do 60+, there is potential for one person to force the other 17 into CT anyway. While certainly possible, that seems a small chance considering trial accounts only have access to CT, and that CT is the only raid that is required in MSQ.

And again, there are people who don’t really like the raid content like my wife who only have CT unlocked. If I were to do roulette with her exclusively the results and intent would be identical. Would people still be upset over that?

[Sindele]

I just don't see the merit in debating endless potential edge cases. The problem is not whether other people bias it harder towards CT unintentionally for any of a quadrillion reasons, the problem is the people who do so deliberately; and several of the solutions discussed have already been precisely tailored towards curtailing the latter and not affecting the former.

It could be fairly argued that some people will just neglect unlocking anything other than CT for Alliance (or Alexander for Normal, I've seen that a few times) to bias it - but 1) you can't undo the unlock once you've done it, 2) that restricts considerably more content than a simple gear swap. I find that to be a much more severe self-restriction that far fewer people are willing to go through, and it's not a behavior that can easily spread through a community.

[IdowhatIwant]

(snipped)
■Prohibited Behavior in FFXIV

■Nuisance behavior
"Nuisance behavior" is speech or behavior that hurts others or obstructs their gameplay,

◆Obstruction of play
"Obstruction of play" all behavior in general that obstructs another person's gameplay. Below is a non-exhaustive list of examples of obstruction of play.

・Obstructing the activities of others
any kind of obstructive behavior that prevents the activities of another player.

You are not preventing or obstructing player activities. You are not stopping some one from joining a random 24 man alliance raid, because all of this is random from the party to the dungeon. Even if everyone was level 90 and no one manipulated Ilvl you could still end up in CT.

[B]Misuse of bugs
"Misuse of bugs" deliberate exploitation of a fault/error in FF XIV or manipulating a feature of FF XIV so that it does not function as intended, in order to obtain personal gain or cause disadvantage to someone else.

This is not a bug, or error. This is how the game functions which is checking Ilvl before you queue into something, the game will always have to do this as long as item levels are required for content. Item level will always be required for content to prevent players from entering a level 80 dungeon in level 2 gear and trolling. Also this does not cause a disadvantage to some one else. You entered a roulette dungeon and are getting the roulette rewards, every one is at an equal level on this. This whole thing is referring to things like exploiting bugs, errors, or features to get an advantage over other players. Example would be if there was a bug that allowed you to always gather 99 of an item per hit, this would be an advantage over others. Getting CT in a roulette is no way giving any player any advantage or disadvantage.

CT is also required for almost every relic quest in the game. Over all I think complaining about rolling what you don't want in something called roulette is petty because even if some one is cheesing to get in CT, it is still a roulette that you are even get partied with that person. Scaling the rewards isn't a realistic answer cause it's already scaled, you get more XP per boss in Neir raids than CT, but the roulette bonus is what is the big bang for your buck. There is little to change that as it is also scaled based on you level as a % of required xp. Same thing with the leveling roulette, if you get a level 81 dungeon you will come out with more XP gained then getting tam tara because of the xp per boss. Roulette bonus is the incentive for players to help others with older content.

Funny enough, I am not sure why people remain naked, as the queue takes in your current Ilvl when entering the queue and restricts what you can join based off that. Which is where it prevents you from entering dungeons you cannot enter, it Ilvl checks first, then queues.