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