Idea Bag: How to get players to unlock older content (eg Raids)

[Jojoya]

Instead of throwing more rewards at things, wouldn't it be better to find out why so many players don't want to do the content in the first place and then address that problem?

You don't improve player game experience by forcing them into content they don't like for a reward they feel is necessary to have.

[Windfire]

Wow lotta people with blinders on, you try and force them to do something they don't want so you can get what you want, they won't do it. Instead they'll give you a huge middle finger and either not run ARs or they'll leave the game. As for my answer, there's NOTHING they can add as an incentive to run them until they fix whatever causes the "akshully you were totally in bad lul, enjoy the floor", when on my screen I moved in plenty on time.

[NekoMataMata]

Instead of throwing more rewards at things, wouldn't it be better to find out why so many players don't want to do the content in the first place and then address that problem?

You don't improve player game experience by forcing them into content they don't like for a reward they feel is necessary to have.

I'm actually curious about this. Just unsure of how to figure this out. You'd have to ask a large base of people on this game like r/FFXIV which would probably be hostile to the topic itself.

[kaynide]

As a serious glamourer, shared models are rarely a valid substitute for each other, because different colour schemes work for different purposes. They'll have different undyeable colours, gold edging instead of silver, all kinds of details that give them different uses. The marketboard copies can be fine to test out the fit and interactions with the rest of your glamour, but sometimes you really need the original.

I think the glamours alone are probably enough to entice the glamour crowd such such as yourself; rather I'm trying to get a better idea of what would entice people who for whatever reason aren't doing raids (like myself).

Instead of throwing more rewards at things, wouldn't it be better to find out why so many players don't want to do the content in the first place and then address that problem?

You don't improve player game experience by forcing them into content they don't like for a reward they feel is necessary to have.

I would say my target is not necessarily to get people to do the content regularly, but to unlock it/do it once in the first place. And why is it a lot of the players are (or aren't) doing those raids? I don't have the data, but I wager it's just new players doing the MSQ, and by the time they hit cap they want to do relevant endgame content which occupies a lot of time as is. Just a guess though.

Your point is important though- whatever a reward is should be enticing enough to get people to "do the thing at least once", but not so much that it causes spite.

Maybe just doing it once for the reward is fine though- something grindy might not be the way to go.

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I think Iscah's earlier comment about using the raid currencies more/better is a good start. (In that case, Gift of the Archmagus).

Perhaps something like 2 of each coin lets you pick ANY piece of armor that drops from ANY 4-man dungeon in the related expac? (so 6 runs, get that body piece you've been NOT getting for a million runs). Could be good for a glamour type. I'm still not sure it'd work on my monkey brain that just wants to see the XP/job numbers go up. It's a start though!



Lots of good stuff. I'll comb through it and put a summary of ideas in the first post as I get more time to properly read everything.

Thanks to all so far.

[VerdeLuck]

Why would there need to be more rewards? You don't do the content you don't get what comes from it.
Trying to entice people to stop being MMOs players and mindlessly doing whatever is the most "efficient" despite it being entirely unfun and boring isn't going to work, they're all going to find some other unfun, boring grind that takes a fraction of the time less to complete and go abuse that instead.
It's a losing battle with people who see the game as a job/checklist to complete and not as a source of entertainment.

[Myrany]

I am just going to post why I didn't unlock raids past CT until just the last few days. They were not obvious and the ARR experience had taught me that a lot of the blue unlock something quest symbols unlocked things I didn't have a prayer of doing like extreme or higher trials. I got in the habit of ignoring the symbols. Now 4 years later I am unlocking and doing the 3.0 alliance raids for the first time. It was actually something of a mess to figure out where the unlock quest starter was. I spent a good hour running around the sea of clouds to find there was no way out to the hidden floating island to start it and the actual starter was back in the city.

Being someone that plays alone for the most part I didn't have anyone to tell me there were more raids that were designed for people like me. I just sort of figured all the raids that were not CT were like coils and would never pop in duty finder so rather than wait in vain (I still have never seen all of coils) I just didn't look for the raids.

It was actually reading people complain about always getting CT that made me realize there must be other options to find. It was moogle event that told me the name of the raids I needed to hunt down. Then it was googling how to unlock them. Trying to find the questgiver. Finding out you had to unlock the questgiver. More googling to backtrack it all to the actual starting point.

My motivation to actually go back and unlock it? I am sick of doing Prae for Moogle event and there is so much I want off the vendor this time I was going to be ready to kill something if I had to do Prae that much.

[Toutatis]

Honestly unlocking all those raids + optional and extreme trials + NR + optional dungeons takes a lot of times nowadays for a new player. on top of the raids themselves quest lines can be rather long and you have to factor in the queue time too. I bought a character unlock plus story skip some months ago to play with friends on another DC which I can’t travel to and the amount of blue markers all over the map is insane (story skip only unlocks msq, not even retainers, glamours or chocobo fighting). If I’d have to wait to unlock everything for roulettes to be available, I’d just stop playing. I am still slowly unlocking things.

One of the things I notice is that the quest givers are often out there in the middle of nowhere. Like the dwarf for Nier which has been placed out there at the furthest point of the Kholusia map. Someone new to the game wouldn’t even know that this quest opens a raid series (and it takes some questing before you get to an actual raid) and once done with MSQ, there is no real reason to go back to Kholusia and it’s easy to miss. Several new players do not know that there raids other than CT and even less how to unlock them.

The first thing would be perhaps to make it more user friendly by moving the initial quest giver to a main city or placing a messenger there and give them a different color marker (like red instead of the blue marker) to indicate that it is an alliance raid. Perhaps also provide an option through an npc you can talk to as well to unlock past raids and trials by series when you buy a story skip as going back to do all those old quests sort of defeats the purpose of buying a story skip (at least I can unlock a bunch unsynched to save time, something a levelling player can’t do).

The idea of special rewards is also a good idea, much better than the punitive approach which would become a deterrent. Another issue with the ARs is that there are huge discrepancies between the time it takes to clear them: some are quick like CT, some can take an hour if the party sucks. They should up the individual rewards given by longer raids.

[kaynide]

Why would there need to be more rewards? You don't do the content you don't get what comes from it.
Trying to entice people to stop being MMOs players and mindlessly doing whatever is the most "efficient" despite it being entirely unfun and boring isn't going to work, they're all going to find some other unfun, boring grind that takes a fraction of the time less to complete and go abuse that instead.
It's a losing battle with people who see the game as a job/checklist to complete and not as a source of entertainment.

So, the conversation so far-

The ultimate goal should be that, when a player has finished MSQ and is wondering "what should I do next", the raid series ideally would be high-ish on that list because it's satifying to as wide an audience as possible. That can be glamours, fun fights or a good story. Ideally, so that when they are later doing Roulettes to level other jobs they will have already unlocked all the raids because it was worth it (to them) to do them at least once.

I'm not even talking in a malicious way- if you had a new friend who came to this game and just cleared the MSQ and wanted to try other jobs/do other content, would you suggest Void Ark series over, say, Eden? Maybe yes, maybe no. But assuming they're doing their daily roulettes, how long for them to work through, say, Alexander, before they decide to give Void Ark a try? And what if they learned that by doing Void Ark they would forfeit an extremely easy source of daily XP?

There are a lot of potential post MSQ avenues- this is a discussion on how to maybe bump up the alliance raids in priority that people would actually want to do for whatever reason.

[VerdeLuck]

So, the conversation so far-

The ultimate goal should be that, when a player has finished MSQ and is wondering "what should I do next", the raid series ideally would be high-ish on that list because it's satifying to as wide an audience as possible. That can be glamours, fun fights or a good story. Ideally, so that when they are later doing Roulettes to level other jobs they will have already unlocked all the raids because it was worth it (to them) to do them at least once.

I'm not even talking in a malicious way- if you had a new friend who came to this game and just cleared the MSQ and wanted to try other jobs/do other content, would you suggest Void Ark series over, say, Eden? Maybe yes, maybe no. But assuming they're doing their daily roulettes, how long for them to work through, say, Alexander, before they decide to give Void Ark a try? And what if they learned that by doing Void Ark they would forfeit an extremely easy source of daily XP?

There are a lot of potential post MSQ avenues- this is a discussion on how to maybe bump up the alliance raids in priority that people would actually want to do for whatever reason.

There already are rewards for doing Alliance raids, they're fun. Just because someone wants to mindlessly spam whatever has the higher xp to time return doesn't mean they need to be catered to with extra prizes dangled over their heads to get them to stop acting like that.

[Iscah]

One of the things I notice is that the quest givers are often out there in the middle of nowhere. Like the dwarf for Nier which has been placed out there at the furthest point of the Kholusia map. Someone new to the game wouldn’t even know that this quest opens a raid series (and it takes some questing before you get to an actual raid) and once done with MSQ, there is no real reason to go back to Kholusia and it’s easy to miss. Several new players do not know that there raids other than CT and even less how to unlock them.

The first thing would be perhaps to make it more user friendly by moving the initial quest giver to a main city or placing a messenger there and give them a different color marker (like red instead of the blue marker) to indicate that it is an alliance raid.

While some additional grades of quest marker would be helpful, they are mostly already doing the "initial questgiver in a main city" part. Heavensward's major sidequests all start in either Ishgard or Idyllshire; Stormblood's in Rhalgr's Reach, Kugane or Doma; Shadowbringers mostly in the Crystarium and Endwalker almost entirely in Sharlayan. There are also quests from a variety of expansions placed in Mor Dhona where you are passing through regularly to get to the Rising Stones. Many of these questgivers are only in the city to suggest that you go somewhere else to follow a story lead.

The few exceptions, like the beginning of the Four Lords quest, are out in the middle of nowhere because (in that case) that where you were mid-MSQ when Soroban said "hey, I've got a thing I want some help with, come talk to me if you're interested". So the MSQ took you off in one direction and Soroban's quest could take you off in another, and if you picked it up immediately then you'd have it in your quest log for later.

The NieR quest is probably the worst of them for not having an obvious start, and the whole questline is pretty badly designed. (Helpful tip though: if you're trying to get to Komra, it's faster to fly up the cliff from Stilltide than all the way across from Tomra.)