Can something be done about alliance raids?

[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.