Post-LL Interview: MSQ Abolish: Castrum and Praetorium to Leveling

[Gemina]

I enjoy prae for it's chattiness. While most other dungeons are very silent, Prae is a nice chatty place where people just let their hair down.

I will miss it for that. Outside the rare exception, the community is oft too petrified to seem to want to openly talk anywhere else.

But still, it's a long, long way off. More than enough time for a bajillion threads about it's rewards, or how Nero smells bad, or something these Forums are wont to do.

I actually really enjoyed Prae for the chat. Regular dungeons will never be like that because there are no forced cutscenes. Everyone is all about get in, and get out. There is the rare Tank or healer DC, and people will sit and chat while waiting. But yeah, a bit of a bummer this is likely going away. Would be interesting if they throw in Gaius' Terminus Est mechanic early on as whatever it is Yoshi cannot mention haha!

[Remnar]

Instead of a complicated change to the MSQ, why not give us the option to skip it, with a 100% requirement? That way it's fair to those who havn't seen the cut scenes yet, but if every one has, we can all skip it. Easy to program, no need for complete redo.

[Conundrum]

It sounded like both dungeons were getting a pretty significant rework as they're transitioned to 4 man, including story adjustments.

Since they'll be Trust compatible when released, I suspect cutscene skipping will no longer be an issue. Those who want the full experience with whatever cutscenes will be able to do that by using Trust or queueing with friends. Those who don't care can queue normally.

I thought about this...maybe they could keep the cutscenes unskippable and still keep MSQ roulette and good rewards. (you have to do something to balance the rewards with the time investment, so yes...still unskippable).

[Jeeqbit]

Instead of a complicated change to the MSQ, why not give us the option to skip it, with a 100% requirement? That way it's fair to those who havn't seen the cut scenes yet, but if every one has, we can all skip it. Easy to program, no need for complete redo.

It does seem like this is the plan for 6.1 or by 7.0 (because of a new MSQ being made).

[Jijifli]

Instead of a complicated change to the MSQ, why not give us the option to skip it, with a 100% requirement? That way it's fair to those who havn't seen the cut scenes yet, but if every one has, we can all skip it. Easy to program, no need for complete redo.

The reason why they weren't doing that before was simple. Someone says no because they wanna see the cutscenes, so someone throws a vote kick up it passes, and now everyone leaves without penalty, INCLUDING the kicked player. Leaving the vote blank on who said no does nothing either, because whoever gets voted out doesn't matter.

You would have to change a lot about how the game's leave penalty and kick systems work. Or, you can actually try to make cast and prae an actual experience, seeing as sprouts still suffer the problem of not getting to participate much when the boss's die in literally 4 seconds, or don't know about the skip cheesing strat everyone just normally does so they get stuck at the start, and it hurts their experience.

[Daeriion_Aeradiir]

Instead of a complicated change to the MSQ, why not give us the option to skip it, with a 100% requirement? That way it's fair to those who havn't seen the cut scenes yet, but if every one has, we can all skip it. Easy to program, no need for complete redo.

Because there's several major issues with it:

1) With how lightning fast Prae can be completed without watching cutscenes, it is unironically faster for someone to leave Prae, wait out the 30mins, then get another Prae and get a group that is willing to skip them and it'd still be faster. When many people already have little issues waiting out 30mins for leaving castrum to fish for Prae, giving people another excuse to ditch more roulettes wouldn't be helping. Or even faster, someone initiates a vote kick so that everyone can leave without penalty 5mins in.

2) Because it's going to create grudges and not create a positive atmosphere knowing that someone has just artificially added 35-ish minutes to the run. Not to mention how easy it is to determine who the person might be even if you hide who declined, just gotta look for the sprout + low ilvl gear and there's a very good chance you'll have the culprit. This also ignores the other issue of someone deciding they want to troll the group by declining, even if no one is new.

That's why the devs went salted earth with current MSQ roulette. It's an eternal staple of game design that if you give your userbase even the slightest inch, they'll drag it out for a mile. For something like current MSQ roulette, the only solutions have to be all or nothing, no choice, as anything less than it is open for exploitation. Hence why they've ultimately decided to go the much friendlier route and re-tooled the dungeons to squash out every remaining issue with them in one fell swoop.

[Iscah]

Instead of a complicated change to the MSQ, why not give us the option to skip it, with a 100% requirement? That way it's fair to those who havn't seen the cut scenes yet, but if every one has, we can all skip it. Easy to program, no need for complete redo.

On top of the issues with the duty itself, as outlined above, keeping the current dungeon and implementing the ability to check who has done it and dynamically allow or block skipping cutscenes might require them to completely redo parts of the underlying system instead – and then we'd still have a widely disliked dungeon at the end of it all, and newbies either being abandoned by their party or being made to feel bad about dragging people through this.