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

[VerdeLuck]

The problem isn't a player being lazy or that they need to "stop acting like that", it's that there really isn't a pull for a certain demographic to do the alliance raid series (including storyline). In other words, after finishing the main course and given all the options of desert, they choose not to take the perfectly good cake and instead go for the ice cream. Or a cookie. Or a brownie. So how do we encourage more people to try the cake, even if just once. More so for people who don't really like cake. We just want them to try it.

Then the answer is no, if you're just looking to cut corners and need to have some prize sent your way to actually engage with the game and play it then no, You don't encourage people looking to grind the max xp per hour into playing the other alliance raids because they're always going to find the one duty with the max xp per hour and spam it.
The only thing wrong with the roulette system was it could be cheesed to avoid ever getting a hard duty. There is no change needed to appeal to people who are just going to go path of least resistance and then dip to other games.

[Avatre]

Make the Roulette require everything you can unlock (based on level and progress through the raids) to be unlocked, even if it is just the first raid and alliance raid of each expansion.

That's pretty much what I suggested in one thread. Treat it similar to the Expert Roulette, where you need to have unlocked the next dungeon(and done it) to gain access to that roulette. I'm sure they can find a way to code it so that once your character has completed the first quests where you are able to unlock the expansions raid quests, then you have to unlock those to get access to the AR again.

[Snorky]

That's pretty much what I suggested in one thread. Treat it similar to the Expert Roulette, where you need to have unlocked the next dungeon(and done it) to gain access to that roulette. I'm sure they can find a way to code it so that once your character has completed the first quests where you are able to unlock the expansions raid quests, then you have to unlock those to get access to the AR again.

Honest question what about the people who have unlocked things, but decide to start a whole new character? It maybe a bit discouraging for those of us who have alt alt-aholic syndrome. Seriously though it's a bit to punishing for my tastes.

[kaynide]

Then the answer is no, if you're just looking to cut corners and need to have some prize sent your way to actually engage with the game and play it then no, You don't encourage people looking to grind the max xp per hour into playing the other alliance raids because they're always going to find the one duty with the max xp per hour and spam it.
The only thing wrong with the roulette system was it could be cheesed to avoid ever getting a hard duty. There is no change needed to appeal to people who are just going to go path of least resistance and then dip to other games.

I don’t think you are picking up what I’ve been putting down.

The goal (again) is to get people to engage in the system, ideally sooner than later. As is, there are many who would just not engage to begin with for whatever reason including just being new and engaged in other content. Your suggestion of looking down or calling such players lazy (especially if they are new) does nothing to increase the number of bodies doing/trying raids.

The goal is to have things like Nier not take 30 min to pop for people who actually want to do it. The ilvl fix will help, but ultimately will do very little as you still have people just not unlocking the raids.

[Daeriion_Aeradiir]

I don't mean ONLY the first ones... But for example, when someone reaches 70, they'd need to unlock Rabanastre and Deltascape V1 to before they can do Alliance Raid and Normal Raid roulette respectively... And after beating those, either by doing them specifically or getting them through the Roulette, they would then have to go unlock Ridorana and/or Deltascape V2 to do the roulette again.

Easy circumvention: Unlock the first raid & alliance raid, instant leave if you get them in the roulette ever to make sure they're never completed, allowing someone to bypass your requirement trivially. Made even easier by the fact that even post ilvl cheese fix, CT is still going to be so heavily biased in the roulette that you can leave anything but it and you'll have a very high % of seeing it on the next go anyway.

If you want an airtight solution, you cannot ever give the end-user an inch. Because history has shown they will take any inch and drive it out over a mile. For something like Alliance roulette, it would have to be an all or nothing in terms of forced unlocks.

Back to the topic, If I were to target this issue from my own experiences as a former game developer, I would analyze and target the exact reason why they only want to do CT in the first place - the time/exp efficiency...along with the issue that quite frankly, a lot of people may not even realize these raids exist due to the fact they're out of the way (not everyone looks up guides/side content recommendations on the internet). Move CT out of alliance roulette and into its own roulette/MSQ roulette, don't touch its rewards. Instead of punishing these players, offer an incentive to unlock the rest by making a new roulette that required all other alliance raids unlocked (that your current level & MSQ prog can do) so that they could not be cheesed in any form. Give a very large reward for this roulette, so that the time/exp efficiency ratio easily matches CT's, if not outpaces it. If the other raids are 2x longer when looking at them as a whole, give them 2.5 times the rewards.

Players can be easily bribed, especially MMO players, the genre that is the king of skinnerbox and reward-based player habit control techniques. Even the devs of FF14 know this, as their mega buff to MSQ roulette showed.


To tackle the 2nd issue of visibility, While not making them forced by the MSQ, I would naturally push players towards them - I think the weapons series in SHB was well executed in this fashion, where the introduction to the sidequest happens near an MSQ point and is mentioned in a cutscene. Spawn a new NPC next to Tataru in the Rising Stones that is something like "Scion Emissary". At the end of each of the .1x patch series for that expansion's MSQ (or at the beginning of it) have Tataru specifically namedrop this NPC in an unskippable cutscene, focus on them, and tell the player this NPC may have some grand adventures in store with them when they have time. Mark them in blue quests and have them give info blurbs about the upcoming alliance raid series the player accepts the quest for, then redirect them to the NPC that gives the alliance raid quest proper. I would also give one of those 'I understand what I must do' info blurbs about alliance raids, specifically mention glamours, gear, rewards and the unlocking of a new roulette with major rewards for completing all of them so the player has an endgoal in mind when completing them instead of wondering what completing these quests will ultimately reward them with or if it'd be worth their time.

This creates a nexus point where all of the same content can easily be located instead of having to search high and low throughout the world to find which blue quests may unlock this same sort of content, along with pushing it close to the MSQ so that the other alliance raids have much heightened visibility.

[kaynide]

Honest question what about the people who have unlocked things, but decide to start a whole new character? It maybe a bit discouraging for those of us who have alt alt-aholic syndrome. Seriously though it's a bit to punishing for my tastes.

This is my big thing; on my alts I’m just not interested in doing the void Ark storyline again. Or manderville for that matter. If there was something useful I could get out of it…might be a different story.

And when friends try out the game and ask wha they should try next, the later raids are almost always last on my personal list when compared to (imho) better storylines in Eden/Alexander…and yes even Manderville. Nier would be my absolute last recommendation of things to unlock.

[Saidosha]

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.

This is the truth, and a truth that a certain subset of MMO players are unwilling to accept.

The reasons why people won't raid, do harder content, or feel at all incentivized by grind are numerous. The typical cop out is that MMOs just aren't for these kinds of players, but I'll vehemently disagree. It's largely the Role-Player vs. Roll-Player dilemma, but the former is the woefully under-served demographic despite their not-insignificant presence. The latter tends to think banishing them to housing, cosmetics, or "that one server where noobs RP at" is all that's required, but when you stop to think about what content is aimed at them specifically, it's actually pretty sparse and unrewarding in its own ways despite the potential of user-generated content outshining anything and everything devs could hope to produce.

Being all, "HeY gUyS wE hAvE tHe StUfF yOu WaNt" while forcing them into the types of content they're disinterested in does not guarantee long-term interest or goodwill. They'll want in and out as quickly as possible. It's not even about a path of least resistance or people being lazy. Sitting in long queues then wiping repeatedly to fights for reasons outside your control is rarely the definition of fun. For some people, once you've seen something once or twice, that's it. The charm's gone, never to return.

I was just chatting with a friend last night about how the mog tome event is a blessing for those who hate farming EX primals and the circumstances that surround them. The StB ones have lots of long transitions. Instant deaths are a thing even at 90. Low-manning is possible, but just how low starts mandating specific roles. You can PF a PUG, sure, but enter the whole "mouths to feed" scenario. You've got 5-10 minutes per run, maybe a 5-10% drop rate times 8 players. Ever been the person in the group who didn't get theirs by the time the party disbands? Ever be 2 hours into a fight and never want to see it again? Ever feel guilty about being an early acquirer but feeling bad for those whose luck is less fortunate? I can't even call the totems a failsafe here because they simply demand so many of them. Even if I may disagree with the way SE distributes tomes by "forcing people into old content" as some theorize, it at least expands the options somewhat into something either more preferred or less annoying. Those same 2-3 hours you'd spend forming a PUG and grinding against RNG can instead be spent on a sure thing, at leisure, without as much of a long-term commitment to others.

Smaller, bite-sized goals work even if we have a subset of the community that thinks something like relics should be long, arduous quests that essentially gatekeep the unwashed masses from their personal sense of prestige and superiority. This last batch falls in line with the mog tomes in that it's more about "just play" than "play this specific thing you might not like a lot" and I'd assert the community is better for it because they don't have to bow to the whims of those who think they know how to save MMOs by just repeating the same failures that have been perpetuated out of "tradition" for the past 2 decades now. Meanwhile, I'll just shake my head at dead open worlds or crafting always being second fiddle, as examples of said "traditions", because it's gotta be about the roll-players. Don't do anything else. Just give them more. More dungeons. More raids. More grind. It'll just magically solve everything that 80%+ of everyone else is tired of or didn't enjoy to begin with. Story in an RPG? How dare you~! You're not allowed individuality. You will wear the gear you're told and do the rotations mandated because that's what the dance demands. Like, barf much?

Cosmetics can't fix that. Making people level faster just to keep doing it on a different job can't fix that. Taking things away just to think folks will come around most definitely won't fix that. World firsts and all that drama can take a hike. Some folks just want to leave a mark on the game world by creating something beautiful, seeing the things others have made, and spending time with friends. And even then, I'm not really doing the demographic justice because no MMO ever really commits and the best we get are quarter-measures and incomplete systems. XIV may not be the worst offender of all the MMOs that have come and gone, but it's still afraid to embrace or even prioritize the role-player.

Reading fiction on more futuristic games has perhaps put unreasonable ideas in my head, but it still doesn't mean they aren't ideas worth striving toward. Thriving, organic, changing worlds with NPCs that react to us based on our actions while doing things we may not always anticipate due to the cumulative ripple of actions by other players and NPCs is something we'll never see as long as it's just more dungeons, more raids, more instancing. Discovery and steady progress can lead to new challenges for individuals and groups alike, with personal strengths and weaknesses playing into the mix. Maybe 10-20 years from now we'll be closer to this, including AI-generated content while devs continue specific threads and add new resources to work off of. Either way, the current MMO formulae need to change. Not to be harder, but to change and to invite variety and choice.

[LilimoLimomo]

I don't think the downsides of the solutions here are worth the minor upsides. Compelling players to do raids when not every player wants to do raids seems like a bad idea, especially when there are already plenty of incentives to do the raids, from glams to story to content like Bozja. Adding more to that stack just to twist a certain subset of players' arms feels needlessly hostile.

Furthermore, this may very from Datacenter to Datacenter, but at least in my experience, the Alliance Roulette is overwhelmingly Syrcus Tower; my interpretation is that this is because a large portion of players are specifically queuing for Syrcus Tower, presumably because it is the most braind-dead of all the raids. And if that's indeed the case, then pressuring players to unlock other raids doesn't actually address the core issue.

[kaynide]

Scion Emissary.

This is solid, but I’d say put one in each town, and also have them trade in all the older endgame niche currencies (so raiders coins, the craftable item trade in thing, totems). If not actually a shop, then telling people where to go to spend the currency.

[Musashidon]

the only solution that will ever work to get people to do the other raids is nerfing them into the ground and make them all basically CT equivalents.

small changes like rewards or forcing ilvl may get some of the people who just did it cause they could to accept how it is now but only a nerf will get most of the ilvl cheesers to not care what raid they get.