Alliance Raid Now iLvl Locked, Why??

[PyurBlue]

The objective of roulette is to fill whatever needs to be filled. Removing CT from queue would just create long queues for whoever specifically queues for it. The same goes with further fragmenting roulettes and blacklisting duties. You’d just wait much longer for raids to fill up with 24 people.

CT wouldn't be out of roulettes entirely, it would just have its own. I'm very doubtful that there would be any shortage of players either given its natural popularity. The only thing that might cause a player shortage is the redistribution of rewards across the alliance raids, but even then CT would remain the lowest effort raid and attract the people that just want to mash one button while tabbed out to something else half of the time. Also remember that attracting players to the roulette only helps fill the goal of reducing wait times. If people are avoiding your roulette because they don't like one of the potential outcomes, limiting the occurrence of that outcome can be a net gain. The prevalence of CT did causes at least some player to avoid the roulette.

There is a possibility that giving control over roulette outcomes leads to unpopular raids, but it's not a given. A good sign is when the population is divided in preference, such as over CT. A black list option would have worked in alliance raid just because you had two groups that would choose opposing options. If CT is separated, it's less clear if that would still be the case, but SE could just look at the numbers or ask for feedback to help make the decision. And, while it's not quite the same thing, before CT was mandatory it was actually possible to blacklist the 50 raids by not unlocking them. I actually did this on some of my characters, but I don't know how common this was, so it's hard to use it as any kind of proof that blacklisting is viable.

We can also consider other arrangements of roulettes, such as splitting alliance raid into beginner and Expert. The former could hold all the lower difficult raids and not just CT. Or CT could go into the MSQ roulette if you really wanted to keep the number of roulettes down. Actually come to think of it even if CT was removed from normal roulettes completely, it would still be a part of the mentor roulette, though that might be going a bit too far in reducing the player pool queueing for that content.

This is going to be “fun” when 7.0 comes out and people end up being locked out of Alliance roulette doing their MSQ with no MB option to gear up for a while…and when the first craftable gear is released, it will be at outrageous prices (plus it’s even more absurd when you think that this early craftable gear is primarily aimed at getting into the new savage tier and not to clear old low level ARs).

It certainly will be a lot of fun. Most of the "just get gear" arguments right now are hinging on the fact that it's late in an expansion. Crafted gear becomes even less accessible early in the cycle.