Can something be done about alliance 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.

[Ath192]

Well there you go folks. It’s CT or nothing. And god forbid it’s anything else because they WILL dodge.

So GL op.

Devs: keep rewarding these players please. Also don’t bother releasing anything that isn’t CT again for future alliances.

[Greyhawk]

The problem with roulette for Alliance is people don't do it anymore for 'fun'. They do it because CT is easy to get through, and they don't want to spend anymore time doing the roulette than they 'have to'. I have to agree, CT should be in it's own MSQ roulette. I personally do Alliance Roulette as my last Duty Finder for my day of playing. If I get CT, I just leave so I don't have to worry about a stupid cooldown timer. If I don't get it, then great, I carry on with the raid.

It could of course be completely avoided if people weren't actually forcing everyone into CT by devaluing themselves and dropping the item level requirements down to CT levels. If you want CT so badly, then just queue for it, and people will go. If you want an actual roulette, then stop being shallow and keep your damn gear on your character and queue. Stop being afraid to do something other than craptastic repeating content and forcing others into it. SE doesn't give any incentive to change this behavior, and they don't implement restrictions when doing so on a high level character. So, it must be by design by that logic. If that's the case, then people should just abandon the roulette and/or don't bother with it any longer.

[Boblawblah]

I'd be curious to see (A). what percentage of players have all the raids unlocked, and (B). what percentage of players regularly raid. I have a feeling that might account for how hard it can be to get some raids to pop. CT is obvious, it's required for the main story, so if someone wants to see the story, they HAVE to do CT. The others? Not so much.

And before someone suggests "well, just make everyone do the raids then", CT is notoriously easy, I assume partly to let the story people get through it without a fuss. I can't imagine people want all the raids being as easy as CT.

[Ath192]

I'd be curious to see (A). what percentage of players have all the raids unlocked, and (B). what percentage of players regularly raid. I have a feeling that might account for how hard it can be to get some raids to pop. CT is obvious, it's required for the main story, so if someone wants to see the story, they HAVE to do CT. The others? Not so much.

And before someone suggests "well, just make everyone do the raids then", CT is notoriously easy, I assume partly to let the story people get through it without a fuss. I can't imagine people want all the raids being as easy as CT.

The problem is also that CT wasn’t even an easy raid (well certainly not this easy). It needs the MSQ revamp/unreal treatment so people actually experience what the raid was about. People would be trying to exploit it a lot less as well.

This is truly on the Devs for not caring at all about the raid and making it mandatory on top of it.

This is the rhytatin of alliance raids.

[BRVV]

What would you guys think of the solution that once your job hits lvl X0 you can only que for AR if your ilevel is >= minlevel of the X0 level alli raids? And you have to have at least one Alli Raid unlocked of your level range and all under.

[Aravell]

I think the best solution they can do is simply add echo to the NieR raids. I personally drop my ilvl just enough to dodge the NieR raid series when I queue for alliance raid roulette because the NieR raids take as long as or even longer than Aglaia/Euphrosyne, those bosses have no reason to have that much HP yet they do. If they tuned it better, maybe people wouldn't dodge it as much.

[Mr_Gyactus]

What would you guys think of the solution that once your job hits lvl X0 you can only que for AR if your ilevel is >= minlevel of the X0 level alli raids? And you have to have at least one Alli Raid unlocked of your level range and all under.

I think the more you try to force something on people, the less you obtain. In this case a lot will simply avoid AR at all --> longer queue FOR the same CT.

Use a bait, for example an useless megashiba ring for 100x mogutomes, and everyone will queue 12 times a day.

[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.