Can something be done about alliance raids?

[Avoidy]

Just wanted to echo how bad things are when you queue basically anything past Crystal Tower.
5pm EST on a Friday afternoon on Crystal. Wouldn't even know we had a roulette to help with this, it's so bad. Was even worse last night when I went and did Ivalice.

[Saraide]

Y'all are the reason I get nier raids all the time in alliance roulette.

[Avoidy]

Y'all are the reason I get nier raids all the time in alliance roulette.

If only. I have to straight up manipulate the queue by asking people to queue with, or forming parties and then going in. It's so bad. Here's what a first timer trying to do Tower at Paradigm's Breach gets to deal with on a Friday evening on a 'congested' datacenter queued as a healer. No end in sight.

I wouldn't even argue that ilvl cheesers are the primary problem, though they do obviously contribute to it. A larger issue is there's no real reason to unlock these in the first place. Maybe if unlocking the alliance raid for a given expac was required for moving past it, that might help. That combined with fixing the ilvl cheese issue would at least ensure that people who queued up and had beaten the msq would be able to help with any alliance raid in the game. I can't imagine trying to spam this shit for a glam; I'm just trying to do it once on my alt and it's taken all evening.

edit: popped after 50 minutes lmfao

[Gemina]

Enlighten us, what do they do? This is gated content behind the fight being too casual. I am afraid I will never be able to witness it.

nvm I found it on youtube, too bad I'll never get to experience it first hand. It looks really cool

Ozma apparently casts Doomsday. Not that I would know from personal experience. I've never even seen the countdown come up.

[ICountFrom0]

There's one solution, it has a few parts, and your not going to like it.

1. Mandatory unlock. Either lock alliance roulette at completion of an expansion until the raids are unlocked, or automatically unlock all raids at that point (but don't complete the quests, let folks do the quests when they want them, latter).
2. Mandatory Ilvl. Alliance roulette has to require the ilvl of the highest dungeon possible at all times.

Without both it'll still be possible to force folks into crystal tower.

Why care? Because every time somebody forces crystal tower, that's one or two parties of people that might be doing what alliance roulette was meant for, to get people unstuck who need to do alliance raids. Without people doing the cheese, crystal tower raids will show up more often due to there just being more players at that level range, and that's okay, it'll at least not be 8 to 12 hours in que waiting for a raid to happen in PF. I've seen coils go faster in PF.

[Fyrebrand]

I feel like they need to come up with a system that increases your roulette rewards based on how much content you have unlocked and are qualified for on your current job. If you only have Crystal Tower unlocked, then you get a nice experience point boost for job of level 50-59 perhaps. But if you're level 60+ and only have Crystal Tower, or you're trying to cheese the system by rigging your iLevel, then you get a paltry reward that isn't worth the effort. They could do a similar thing with tomestones, but they might also need to adjust the prices of tomestone-purchasable items based on the expansion. ARR gear and items cost a small fraction of what it does now, but an ARR-exclusive roulette reward would give you a much smaller prize. Once you get into further expansions, the cost of tomestone items increases, but so do the roulette rewards as long as you keep caught-up in viable content. This would make exploiting the roulette system unprofitable, while also keeping roulettes a good way to level or gear jobs in all content.

I know they already give better rewards in roulettes for jobs who are at max level, but it's an all-or-nothing approach and doesn't impact Alliance Raid roulettes at all. They need to get more granular with this, and hone in on more degrees of rewards with a gradual curve up through the game.

[magitekLuna]

there no "nice and easy" fix to this problem. on one hand lots of players WANT the later dungeons/raids from the roulette (i got to the point where if i get tower i leave and never go in to leveling roulette if i don't have a party of 4 players over level 60). on the other hand there legit low level / new players that need the help as well. so what to do?
one thing that can help is if this community start to act as what the believe they are. the most nice and helping community in mmo history. as let be real if you ask people for help most of the time you hear "just use DF if fast" .
second is separate the low level content in to a different roulette that give X3 times the gil and exp. all the content hat is under 50 be there.
the real PROBLEM is yoshi pushing this game to be a solo game. you cant get a party but why not use the legal bots we give you for the dungeon/ soon for raids as well.

[Seraphor]

There's one solution, it has a few parts, and your not going to like it.

1. Mandatory unlock. Either lock alliance roulette at completion of an expansion until the raids are unlocked, or automatically unlock all raids at that point (but don't complete the quests, let folks do the quests when they want them, latter).
2. Mandatory Ilvl. Alliance roulette has to require the ilvl of the highest dungeon possible at all times.

Without both it'll still be possible to force folks into crystal tower.

Why care? Because every time somebody forces crystal tower, that's one or two parties of people that might be doing what alliance roulette was meant for, to get people unstuck who need to do alliance raids. Without people doing the cheese, crystal tower raids will show up more often due to there just being more players at that level range, and that's okay, it'll at least not be 8 to 12 hours in que waiting for a raid to happen in PF. I've seen coils go faster in PF.

Mandatory unlock is a no go. You would have to play through 14, soon to be 15 different Alliance raids (with massive queue times because so few can run the roulette) before you yourself get the option to run the roulette.

The problem with no. 2 is that would prevent people from queuing up for Alliance Roulette on alternate jobs.
If you've unlocked Euphrosyne, well now you can only queue for Alliance Roulette with an ilvl of 595. So if you cleared the MSQ on tank, but want to run Euphrosyne on a dps for shorter queues, tough.
If you have any jobs below 90, or a 90 job that isn't fully geared, the entire roulette is locked off for them, just like Expert roulette.
If you have no level 90 jobs geared to ilvl 595, then you can't run the roulette for tomes in order to gear up to get ilvl 595.

Both of your suggestions together relegate Alliance Raid roulette to the same status as Expert roulette only those who are up to date on everything, on their most geared jobs, can run it.
All of these complications limit the number of players eligible to queue for the roulette, in turn extending queue times for all alliance raids. Which completely defeats the point of the roulette, to fill queues for those running the raids for the first time.

The only way around this would be some kind of dynamic ilvl restriction. Where it adjusts the ilvl requirement for the level of the job you're on, set to the lowest ilvl of that particular tier, with an aditional check that you've unlocked that tier.
So if you're level 90, it requires an ilvl of 565 (ilvl of Aglaia) and if you're level 70, it requires an ilvl of 305 (ilvl of Rabanastre). But if you're level 70 and you haven't yet unlocked Rabanastre, then it requires ilvl 235 (Dun Scaithe)

The question is, how complicated would this be for them to implement, and, is it worth it?
When players are queuing up on legit level <60 jobs anyway, ilvl cheesing doesn't have any impact. It's a problem, but it probably doesn't have the level of impact people seem to think it does. Even if this was fixed, you'd still get CT raids the vast majority of the time anyway.

[MaxCarnage]

Just wanted to echo how bad things are when you queue basically anything past Crystal Tower.
5pm EST on a Friday afternoon on Crystal. Wouldn't even know we had a roulette to help with this, it's so bad. Was even worse last night when I went and did Ivalice.

To be fair, even when Copied Factory was the only Nier raid out and you needed it to upgrade your tome gear, I waited over an hour and a half pretty much every time I queued for it. Even when Puppet's Bunker came out, I would still have hour long queues. The content wasn't popular back then and it is still unpopular now, especially after the EW stat squish made even the most effective runs take 45 mins. A lot of people find that boring.

Not saying it doesn't suck for the people who want to run it. I feel your pain. This has just been how it is since the Nier raids came out.

[magitekLuna]

To be fair, even when Copied Factory was the only Nier raid out and you needed it to upgrade your tome gear, I waited over an hour and a half pretty much every time I queued for it. Even when Puppet's Bunker came out, I would still have hour long queues. The content wasn't popular back then and it is still unpopular now, especially after the EW stat squish made even the most effective runs take 45 mins. A lot of people find that boring.

Not saying it doesn't suck for the people who want to run it. I feel your pain. This has just been how it is since the Nier raids came out.

what you even talk about? the content was supper popular when it was new. thing is now even if people want to do the older raids they barely can as the wait time is to much. mot all even have 1h to play so lets not start on wait it.