Can something be done about alliance raids?

[Raven2014]

If all you can be moved to do is brainless 10 minute instances where all people do is watch YouTube and mob the boss I can’t help you. No one can.

What make you think I need your help or anyone? Now you're just speaking off your ego.

I think the punishment will encourage those who still want to do things to stay in the roulette.

Are you aware you're talking on a gaming forum, and not trying to play manager in an Amazon warehouse?

This is why SE never gonna implement these idea btw, because I think for the most part they know they're a game developer, especially Yoshi-P. Too many time I came across people on this forum that makes me wonder "do you think this is a job?"

[Ath192]

What make you think I need your help or anyone? Now you're just speaking off your ego.

Beats me why you want to play an MMO designed around people helping each other lol. But you do you.

[Bad_Luck]

OTOH, I tend to get a variety of all Alliances except for Euro :/

[Bad_Luck]

I never unlocked puppets bunker nor tower at paradigms breach.

And I never will if I can help it.

The bosses are HP sponges and the people that run them have the fewest braincells I swear.

Your loss, and for such stupid reasoning too.

[Raven2014]

Beats me why you want to play an MMO designed around people helping each other lol. But you do you.

What ... does that even have anything to do with what discussing? What exactly are you offering to help me? Like ... your response doesn't even fit into any context that have been said in this thread, including yours. Only thing that make sense is that you're trying to help me from my "brainless" activities. That kind of help isn't need, 'cause that's just your ego stripping, you're helping yourself.

Also, the answer to your question is very simple: I play the game because I enjoy it. And your comment is a bit ironic too. I'm someone who seemingly enjoy the game as it is, that's why I rarely find thing to complain about or demand the dev to change to suit my taste. In fact, beats me why people want to play an MMO where they keep find things in the design that they want to change ... A bit rich coming from someone who is adocating beating the player with sticks and punish them into playing content.

Are you sure you're not the one who needing my help to enjoy the game more?

[Ath192]

Are you sure you're not the one who needing my help to enjoy the game more?

xD trust me I’m good. I don’t feel like dodging alliance raids until we get Crystal Tower or even less stripping naked with a stranger so we can cheese our way into it.

[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.

[hynaku]

Why even complain about alliance roulette. I thought main purpose of roulettes was to level jobs and help new players out. If CT is needed for MSQ then every time you run it, you're helping out a new player. Every time I get a CT raid there is always a bunch of new players running it for the first time. Maybe they should add expert alliance raids for raids above lvl 50.

[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.