Can something be done about alliance raids?

[Saraide]

Okay, I also get a pretty decent spread of normal raids too. What counter do you have to that?

Also no offence but I didn't really ask your opinion on whether the raid is worth doing for other people. My point was that roulettes are supposed to fill slots for people queuing for duties but when I do roulettes I get CT with no new people and when I queue for anything that isn't CT it takes hours no matter what time of day it is.

None of the normal raids are msq required so there is no difference between them.

None taken but people not unlocking nier raids because they dont care about them absolutely matters for your point. This isnt my opinion, that's how it is.

[Doozer]

None of the normal raids are msq required so there is no difference between them.

Exactly. I keep getting excuses about how people who don't have things unlocked, are on a job that isn't a high enough level, etc. all skew the results and yet I get an even spread of one type of duty but not alliance raids. Obviously lower level duties will come up a bit more than others but it's not helped by people who force it on purpose. There are people who load into anything that isn't CT and say "ugh this" and there's a 50/50 chance they'll just leave because it's not their favourite brain-dead raid.

With how hard you're defending it, it makes me wonder if you're one of those people, but I suppose it's not worth currently exploring.

And again, roulettes are supposed to fill slots for people queuing for things. So why does that not work in alliance raids that aren't CT? Anything above (and including) Dun Scaith takes forever. Something needs to be changed.

[Seraphor]

Exactly. I keep getting excuses about how people who don't have things unlocked, are on a job that isn't a high enough level, etc. all skew the results and yet I get an even spread of one type of duty but not alliance raids. Obviously lower level duties will come up a bit more than others but it's not helped by people who force it on purpose. There are people who load into anything that isn't CT and say "ugh this" and there's a 50/50 chance they'll just leave because it's not their favourite brain-dead raid.

With how hard you're defending it, it makes me wonder if you're one of those people, but I suppose it's not worth currently exploring.

And again, roulettes are supposed to fill slots for people queuing for things. So why does that not work in alliance raids that aren't CT? Anything above (and including) Dun Scaith takes forever. Something needs to be changed.

I don't think you understood my reasoning at all.
Alliance Raid Roulette is a perfect storm of all of these factors, and in particular when it comes to job level, it's a particularly good roulette for levelling other jobs.
Even I do it, when I'm leveling another job, I will jump into Levelling roulette, Alliance Raid roulette, and maybe MSQ roulette if I'm feeling masochistic, because they're good sources of EXP. The other roulettes I will save for my level 90 jobs, because they're better sources of tomestones. Hence Raid and Trial roulettes will tend to be more balanced in terms of level distribution.

The way duty queue seeding works, you only need to have a handful of players at a lower level, and it will prioritise filling those lower level queues. If you have 50 people queuing, and just 2 of them are below level 60, then there's a good chance it will prioritise CT for all 48 potential slots, with each of those <60 players seeding a new CT exclusive queue, depending on when they each queued.

This is not an excuse, it's math.

[Saraide]

I don't think you understood my reasoning at all.
Alliance Raid Roulette is a perfect storm of all of these factors, and in particular when it comes to job level, it's a particularly good roulette for levelling other jobs.
Even I do it, when I'm leveling another job, I will jump into Levelling roulette, Alliance Raid roulette, and maybe MSQ roulette if I'm feeling masochistic, because they're good sources of EXP. The other roulettes I will save for my level 90 jobs, because they're better sources of tomestones. Hence Raid and Trial roulettes will tend to be more balanced in terms of level distribution.

The way duty queue seeding works, you only need to have a handful of players at a lower level, and it will prioritise filling those lower level queues. If you have 50 people queuing, and just 2 of them are below level 60, then there's a good chance it will prioritise CT for all 48 potential slots, with each of those <60 players seeding a new CT exclusive queue, depending on when they each queued.

This is not an excuse, it's math.

Ideally a bunch of them will be grouped together but it will cause a ton more runs. 1 Person is enough to force CT but it needs 24 people to not force CT to get a different one. Normal raid roulette on the other hand lacks this heightened interest in the lowest raids specifically and also only needs 8 people to get a group together. SE could change the roulette to only be available if you have unlocked all of the araids contained (with ilvl cheese prevented) but I suspect they predict that if they did that less people overall would do araid roulette making queues longer for everyone.

[Seraphor]

Ideally a bunch of them will be grouped together but it will cause a ton more runs. 1 Person is enough to force CT but it needs 24 people to not force CT to get a different one. Normal raid roulette on the other hand lacks this heightened interest in the lowest raids specifically and also only needs 8 people to get a group together. SE could change the roulette to only be available if you have unlocked all of the araids contained (with ilvl cheese prevented) but I suspect they predict that if they did that less people overall would do araid roulette making queues longer for everyone.

Restricting the roulette to only those who have unlocked all available raids at their level wouldn't really be viable. The instant you hit a level cap, be it 60, 70, 80 or 90, you would suddenly be locked out of the roulette entirely until you go and complete up to three raids, with hours worth of quests involved. That's not a reasonable expectation, especially if you need to run the roulettes to gain the exp/tomestones needed to gear up for it. Besides, locking people out of the option to run the roulette isn't going to help people queue up for the higher level raids, is it?

In order to make it truly balanced like the other roulettes, there's several things that would need to change.

1. Dynamic ilvl restriction. Running the roulette should share the ilvl requirement of the highest Alliance Raid you have unlocked and meet the level requirement for. Both factors need to be taken into account, otherwise you won't be able to use it for levelling alt jobs. However this doesn't prevent people not unlocking the raids to begin with.

2. Incentivise unlocking the raids. Ivalice already has the incentive tied to Bozja, Mhach and Nier need similar relationships to other content or rewards. Mhach could be simple enough to tie into other content, perhaps a custom delivery in the Red Bills or something like that. Nier would be a little more difficult due to it being a cross over, but not impossible, again maybe a custom delivery NPC in Komra.

3. Incentivise running the raids. CT is simply too time efficient, which is why people ilvl cheese it. Even if you force people to queue in at the correct ilvl, there will be people who drop out if they get anything other than CT, or simply refuse to run the roulette, which would also extend queue times. The higher level raids need to reward more EXP/Gil/Tomestones. Each level brakcet giving an additional +10% should be good enough, so that Nier would give +30% more than CT.

4. Incentivise running the raids on max level jobs. None of the above will make much of a difference if everyone uses Alliance Raid Roulette to level up their lower level jobs. Increase the Tomestone rewards and/or slightly reduce the EXP rewards. That said, it already has the highest Tomestone rewards due to the length, and accounting for time investment only Expert beats it. So the previous point about modulating rewards based on level, would probably do this job better if it also applied to tomestones.

If any one of these is neglected, then you won't see much of a change in queue times for the higher level raids.

[PyurBlue]

Another problem with the various suggestion of somehow exclude CT seem to have this assumption that the players will just let themselves goad into whatever direction you want to push them. For example, do you think removing CT from Alliance roulette will make someone like me go "oh, guess I have to go unlock the other raid I hate so much now"? No, the most likely outcome would be I just decide to ignore Alliance roulette altogether.

This isn't goading anyone. Goading would be trying to force the CT at all cost players into other raids. Removing CT is about giving players more choice so they aren't discouraged from queueing. Right now at this very moment I ignore Alliance Roulette altogether, and will forever do so until CT is removed, because the existence of CT ruins the entire thing.

Every player doesn't have to like every single piece of content, that's totally fine. However the larger the pool of content is for a given roulette, especially if two totally different types of content are included (super casual CT artificially boosted in encounter rate by being low level and required vs all other Alliance Raids) the more likely it is that players will be forced to put up with something they don't want to do.

With the roulettes split, everyone who tries to force CT will go for the CT roulette. If they don't queue for the new Alliance Roulette, that's not a problem. The people that like Alliance Raids will. If they do queue for the Alliance Raids because now there is more reward for participating, then great more people for the roulette. Whatever they choose to do, at least they won't be dragging unwilling players into dull content.

Or it becomes Void Ark roulette and people come here to complain about always getting that.

Also this. People would be relieved for maybe a year at the most, and then they'd start complaining about getting Void Ark constantly.

I don't see that happening necessarily. CT is mandatory, a set of three raids vs just one, and almost devoid of the need to know how to play the game. This makes it more common in roulettes and is the causes of the attempts to manipulate the roulette. Void Ark won't be nearly as common. It has 1/3 the chance of showing up vs a CT raid in the first place. Some people won't even have it unlocked, and as time goes on it might actually become somewhat rare as players who do have it unlocked stop playing while new players may favor newer content.

[Raven2014]

This isn't goading anyone.

It is

Goading would be trying to force the CT at all cost players into other raids.

No, that would just called forcing directly.

Right now at this very moment I ignore Alliance Roulette altogether, and will forever do so until CT is removed, because the existence of CT ruins the entire thing.

Yes I know, you had said so before. Here is the quesiton: between the people who don't run AR because of CT, and the because who run AR everyday because of CT, which number you think is bigger.

Every player doesn't have to like every single piece of content, that's totally fine.

That also applies to you though ...

With the roulettes split, everyone who tries to force CT will go for the CT roulette. If they don't queue for the new Alliance Roulette, that's not a problem. The people that like Alliance Raids will. If they do queue for the Alliance Raids because now there is more reward for participating, then great more people for the roulette. Whatever they choose to do, at least they won't be dragging unwilling players into dull content.

And I already state what will be the potential problems for this. Additional, how would you balance the reward between a CT roulette and an Alliance Roulette?

- If the roulette offer the same reward as it is now, people will still flock to the CT one and ignore the AR. Nothing will change except now people don't even to ilvl cheese to get into it. If people willing to queue in to an actual AR for the same reward, you wouldn't have the current issue to begin with.

- Buff the reward on the AR to make it worthwhile for people to choose it over CT? The issue is Ivalice/Nier are just outlier that you will have to skew the reward greatly to incentize people into running it. And it happens and majority decide to abandon CT roulette in favor of AR ... SE will NOT allow that to happen.

I think there are 2 things people tend to overlook here:

- Roulette - as a system - heavily bias toward the lower level. That's not player driven, it's by designed. And CT raid is more or less the holy grail for two reason: it's mandatory to the story + it's a gateway for prospective new players. New players receiving fast queue on all the roulette relevance to them (lvling, trial, alliance) is a great advertisement for the game's health and SE will not risk that perception.

- Another element is a problem with the Ivalice and Nier raid itself. Most actually won't mind getting into the Void Ark raid. And tell you what, once this expansion is done I wouldn't mind getting the current 24 tier in my AR either. Ivalice had a brutal difficulty spike that's well beyond what's reasonable for a 24 raid, while Nier is just a ridiculous HP sponge. YOu said you don't want CT 'cause it bore you out of your mind? Guess what, that's exactly why many of us don't want to step back into Nier. Until SE go back and do something to these two raid, they will continue to poison whatever pool they are a part of.

[TaleraRistain]

2. Incentivise unlocking the raids. Ivalice already has the incentive tied to Bozja, Mhach and Nier need similar relationships to other content or rewards. Mhach could be simple enough to tie into other content, perhaps a custom delivery in the Red Bills or something like that. Nier would be a little more difficult due to it being a cross over, but not impossible, again maybe a custom delivery NPC in Komra.

3. Incentivise running the raids. CT is simply too time efficient, which is why people ilvl cheese it. Even if you force people to queue in at the correct ilvl, there will be people who drop out if they get anything other than CT, or simply refuse to run the roulette, which would also extend queue times. The higher level raids need to reward more EXP/Gil/Tomestones. Each level brakcet giving an additional +10% should be good enough, so that Nier would give +30% more than CT.

For point 2, they've tied Void Ark into Tataru's questline so they're already implementing this more carrot approach to encourage participation in this optional content.

For point 3, I'm not sure increased rewards are going to fix the issues with Nier. Because they have such damage sponge bosses, you know you're in for 40 minutes minimum even with a high dps raid that knows mechanics. It's hard to make that ever palatable when even if someone isn't fishing for CT they can bail and get VA or Ivalice and still spend a lot less time with a lot less irritation.

[Seraphor]

For point 2, they've tied Void Ark into Tataru's questline so they're already implementing this more carrot approach to encourage participation in this optional content.

For point 3, I'm not sure increased rewards are going to fix the issues with Nier. Because they have such damage sponge bosses, you know you're in for 40 minutes minimum even with a high dps raid that knows mechanics. It's hard to make that ever palatable when even if someone isn't fishing for CT they can bail and get VA or Ivalice and still spend a lot less time with a lot less irritation.

Well my point 3 was fairly simple, even if my idea for it was more specific.
Incentivise running those later raids. If that incentive comes in the form of reducing the amount of HP the bosses in those raids have, then by all means.