Crystal Tower has to go

[Boblawblah]

This is also easily solved by making the final raid of a series a requirement for MSQ progression. This will get players such as yourself into those raids, and make more of them available to all players in the queue with you should you choose to use the roulette.

When you think about it, SE exacerbated this issue the moment they made CT a requirement for MSQ progression as that damn tower became such an integral part towards the story. And now they have done the same thing with Mhach. Orbonne and Paradigm will also need to eventually follow suit. Easily done with Ivalice and eventually Aglaia, but I honestly have no idea how they could integrate YoRHa into the story.

In any case, player's unwillingness to unlock content is not a viable reason to continuously reduce the number of instances available to the players. Otherwise there is no point to having the alliance raid roulette.

And now they have done the same thing with Mhach

That is mandatory for msq progression?

Also, "easily done" is an odd statement, when they've been moving AWAY from forcing msq players into group content, not towards.

[Gemina]

The suggestions mentioned here multiple times about increasing the rewards for non-CT raids and making it so the roulette automatically syncs you to your highest unlocked content seem like the easiest and possibly best solutions. One rewards players for doing these raids, and the other removes the ability to ilvl cheese.

This approach is definitely an easy solution for the dev team, but I believe the devs know that this can't be resolved correctly through a shortcut. It needs to be addressed at the root of the problem, not the foliage. There is already a bonus to exp and gil to compensate for the gap between character and level of the duty. Unfortunately this does not apply to tomes, but even if it did, you would just get more poetics. The rewards for this roulette are already quite high, which is what incentivizes players to cheese the roulette.

I also don't think that redesigning them, or pulling them out and giving them the solo duty treatment are necessary. The raids are already chockfull of mechanics a lot of players have never seen. Making players weaker through ilv sync isn't necessary either, and will very likely be ill received. All they have to do is tune these up, and it fixes everything.

[Gemina]

That is mandatory for msq progression?

Also, "easily done" is an odd statement, when they've been moving AWAY from forcing msq players into group content, not towards.

My error. The quest "A Red Bill Farewell" is required for "Tataru's Grand Endeavor." which is a sidequest. I had it confused. Likely only a matter of time though considering where the MSQ is headed.

[Iscah]

When you think about it, SE exacerbated this issue the moment they made CT a requirement for MSQ progression as that damn tower became such an integral part towards the story. And now they have done the same thing with Mhach.

They haven't done the same with Mhach at all. CT didn't become required as soon as it was tangentially relevant to MSQ, but when they wanted to build on specific events and characters involved in it.

The current void storyline is only relevant as far as involving voidsent, really. Shadow of Mhach dealt with a specific set of voidsent characters who already made their way to the Source centuries ago. There's no need to involve them in this plot, and if they really wanted to they could make something up about voidsent splitting their essences or something. The Diablo Armament in Zadnor seems to have paved the way for that already.

You'd only need to make Mhach mandatory to bring the sky pirates into it, and they don't seem useful for the current quests at all.

[kaynide]

This is also easily solved by making the final raid of a series a requirement for MSQ progression. This will get players such as yourself into those raids, and make more of them available to all players in the queue with you should you choose to use the roulette.

When you think about it, SE exacerbated this issue the moment they made CT a requirement for MSQ progression as that damn tower became such an integral part towards the story. And now they have done the same thing with Mhach. Orbonne and Paradigm will also need to eventually follow suit. Easily done with Ivalice and eventually Aglaia, but I honestly have no idea how they could integrate YoRHa into the story.

In any case, player's unwillingness to unlock content is not a viable reason to continuously reduce the number of instances available to the players. Otherwise there is no point to having the alliance raid roulette.

A solid no thanks on required MSQ progression. Especially because they are generally side stories/FanFiction (Ivalice; Nier I especially want to believe the canon is that it was all just a fever dream of the character).
Aside from experiencing the story on my main, I have zero interest in ever doing any of the raids again. Just not my thing. No hate on people who like them.

As is, there's no reason for a new player to do the raids aside from the story itself since the gear is largely useless.

IMO, the easiest thing to do would be the following:
1) Decrease the iLVL sync for CT to be where the mechanics matter (fights take longer), but not so much that there will be wipes (mechanics deal less damage?). Just enough to show that Raids have a little more oomph, but not enough to scare people off.
2) Buff XP given in roulettes based on the expansion; something like CT giving what it does, 3.0 giving +20%, 4.0 +40%, 5.0 +60%. I would be very happy doing Nier for +60% XP.
3) Make it so if you leave the instance because you got what you didn't want, you forfeit that roulette for the day entirely. All or none. (This would avoid the inevitable that we saw with Castrom/Prae where people dip out to get more XP)

[Absurdity]

This is also easily solved by making the final raid of a series a requirement for MSQ progression. This will get players such as yourself into those raids, and make more of them available to all players in the queue with you should you choose to use the roulette.

When you think about it, SE exacerbated this issue the moment they made CT a requirement for MSQ progression as that damn tower became such an integral part towards the story. And now they have done the same thing with Mhach. Orbonne and Paradigm will also need to eventually follow suit. Easily done with Ivalice and eventually Aglaia, but I honestly have no idea how they could integrate YoRHa into the story.

In any case, player's unwillingness to unlock content is not a viable reason to continuously reduce the number of instances available to the players. Otherwise there is no point to having the alliance raid roulette.

I wouldn't make it an MSQ requirement but simply an Alliance Roulette requirement. Once you hit the max level for a specific expansion (60, 70, 80, 90, etc) the roulette will be updated and require you to unlock all the alliance raids available for that expansion.

[angienessyo]

I hope someday they just go back and update the CT raids to make them actually a bit more fun. They don't have to make them Orbonne hard or anything, but even Prae/Castrum are at least somewhat interesting now even if they aren't hard. WoD is decent but ST/LoA is horrible. I wouldn't mind constantly getting the CT raids if they were at all mechanically interesting. I doubt they're even a good experience for a sprout as they'll be a down grade from the other updated level 50 content.

[Deceptus]

Because even after the number squish...it's so brain dead easy and extremely boring.

News flash: It's not the number squish, it's the ilvl sync that has always been the problem

When your max ilvl is damn near twice what the minimum is, of course people steamroll through it. Drop the max ilvl to 20-30 above the min and it'll be a different beast completely.

[Xerkrosis]

I've stopped doing alliance roulette because of CT. Great part, because it's a stupidly boring content, which is no fun at all because you're downsynced to lvl 50. But what makes it annoying the most are the ilvl-cheaters, who dress down to lowest ilvl they can get to force CT.
There needs to be a scalable minimum ilvl, like each time you hit an expansion's max-lvl, the minimum ilvl increases.

I very much enjoy the ivalice and nier-raids, but there's not much motivation to do them without a reward.

[Gemina]

They haven't done the same with Mhach at all. CT didn't become required as soon as it was tangentially relevant to MSQ, but when they wanted to build on specific events and characters involved in it.

I know. I should have double checked before making the statement. The latter part of your statement though is why I say that they could make Mhach a requirement in the future, and because it still is a requisite for progression, albeit a side story questline, it has me lean that way.

The current void storyline is only relevant as far as involving voidsent, really.

That's pretty relevant. Like really relevant. They are the only life forms we are currently aware of on the 13th, with the exception of Azdaja and Zero. We are also made to assume that Golbez is a voidsent as well. The dev team even went as far as to not create a plot hole with the voidsent we encounter in the WoD dying after learning they can't die during our venture to the 13th this patch. Interestingly enough, they changed the death animation of the enemies in the WoD to match those in Troia.

I'm not saying that they should definitely make alliance raids a requirement for MSQ progression, and I just saying it is one they could tackle the ilv cheese as not meeting level requirements will also reduce the number of instances available in the roulette.