Duty Roulette - low level - same dungeons???

[CianaIezuborn]

Did some dirty numbers to support what I was thinking in my head and came up with this, I did not include ifrit/garuda/titan trials in the calculations so it's not quite right but the point remains the same.

If you as a level 50 join the duty roulette and get matched with 3 other roulette users of evenly distributed levels between 15-50 and then the roulette finder chooses a dungeon at random from the available content to your groups level range your chances of getting each is as follows:


31.10822386% - Sastasha Seagrot*(level 15 - 18)
23.00422866% - Tam-Tara Deepcroft*(Level 16 - 19)
19.1772825% - Copperbell Mines*(Level 17 - 20)
12.380729% - Halatali*(Level 20 - 23)
6.964491002% - Thousand Maws of Toto-Rak*(Level 24 - 27)
3.742611716% - Haukke Manor*(Level 28 - 31)
1.846464025% - Brayflox's Longstop*(Level 32 - 34)
1.000454325% - The Sunken Temple of Qarn*(Level 35 - 37)
0.491677318% - Cutter's Cry*(Level 38 - 40)
0.206612161% - The Stone Vigil*(Level 41 - 43)
0.065794259% - Dzemael Darkhold*(Level 44 - 46)
0.011431184% - The Aurum Vale*(Level 47 - 49)

Note that this is only the case from your personal perspective and when all 4 members joined through roulette.

If I added Ifrit to the equation it would have the same chance as Halatali and steal percentages from all the other content further pushing the 90% of groups to sub-24 content. Other trials wouldn't do much considering their higher level.

First thing you could do to improve this is to have the roulette automatically choose the highest level content that's valid for your group. That would improve the distribution to be more along the lines of this(again trials would skew it some more):

Sastasha - 8.103995199%
Tam-Tara - 7.653892318%
Copperbell - 20.38966049%
Halatali - 21.66495199%
Toto-Rak - 16.10939643%
Haukke Manor - 11.37688615%
Brayflox's Longstop - 5.922067901%
The Sunken Temple of Qarn - 4.070216049%
Cutter's Cry - 2.56558642%
The Stone Vigil - 1.408179012%
Dzemael Darkhold - 0.597993827%
The Aurum Vale - 0.137174211%

Still suffers from the lowest level dictating content, which hurts percent chance of later instances, but it's not nearly as skewed as it currently is.

The other thing that needs to be done is ensuring that 4 random roulette people are never placed together when there is an option of placing them with people that have already directly queued for content. I don't know if it's doing this, I feel like it was supposed to do this, I believe if it is it isn't doing it well. Obviously I don't have any proof of this, but it would be nice to have assurance on it.

[Melinia]

I think they should split them up and only award bonus exp for doing one of the three per day.

The problem is, that would more or less defeat the purpose of having the Roulette in the first place. As players level up their jobs, people will start to focus exclusively on the higher tier roulettes, leaving new players (who still need to clear the low level content) with no party.

[Melinia]

31.10822386% - Sastasha Seagrot*(level 15 - 18)
23.00422866% - Tam-Tara Deepcroft*(Level 16 - 19)
19.1772825% - Copperbell Mines*(Level 17 - 20)

Doesn't the Low Level Roulette become available at level 20? Ergo, all three of these should probably all be the same percentages.

[seraseth]

Doesn't the Low Level Roulette become available at level 20? Ergo, all three of these should probably all be the same percentages.

It becomes available at level 16, when you have 2 dungeons open so it can be 'random'.

[CianaIezuborn]

It becomes available at level 16, when you have 2 dungeons open so it can be 'random'.

Forgot about that, thank you! I was considering joining the roulette at 15, so you won't have any random level 15s and Sastasha and TamTara will actually be a more even split over about 27% each. It'll also slightly effect all percentages, I might recalculate it later.

Point remains, the fact that your limited to dungeons the lowest level member can enter in your random choice statistically pushes roulette groups towards the lower level dungeons.

[Akuha]

The most irritating part of it all is when I, once again, get thrown into Sastasha, and upon looking at the party list, see that everyone has advanced to their respective jobs meaning everyone is at least 30. Why...

[Viridiana]

It's somewhat telling, that, according to the odds you've posted, one has only a ~10% chance of being in a dungeon that allows use of jobs, if that. At least your proposed solution appears to bump it up to ~25%, which would be much, much better. . .

[Mhaeric]

I should point out that the probabilities in his post are just estimates of the actual probabilities of getting a given dungeon, and only if all 4 members accessed it through Duty Roulette. The most obvious reason they're not accurate is that they're based on the assumption that DF queues have an even spread of levels from 15-50. The actual spread is more likely high at level 15 with a gradual dropping off to low numbers at 49 with small spikes at levels with a multiple of 10 and a sudden huge spike at 50, similar to this graph of server population from the official census done in September. I assume that non-legacy worlds currently have populations more similar to the legacy worlds in that chart, since there has been several months to catch up now.


I'm not industrious enough to do the same probability calculations he did with this data myself, so perhaps he could re-calculate with an assumed population distribution that's a better estimate based on populations that actually exists in game?

All that said, it's still a very good illustration of why random dungeon lots are distributed the way they are and high level dungeons are seemingly impossible to get. And in reality the numbers are even more skewed towards lower level dungeons because of other considerations.

The one major thing it doesn't take into account is the fact that people entering through Roulette are also paired up with people entering through Finder, and given the actual population distribution coupled with the different motivations to queue for people of different levels (low levels queue because they need a specific dungeon, higher levels queue because they want the bonus xp) the percentage of people queuing for specific lower level dungeons will be much higher than people queuing for specific higher level dungeons. Also, lower level players will be more likely to queue for specific dungeons, while higher level characters will be more likely to queue for random dungeons. This will even further skew the numbers toward lower level dungeons beyond what is illustrated in this thread.

[CianaIezuborn]

This will even further skew the numbers toward lower level dungeons beyond what is illustrated in this thread.

Yeah, the numbers above were done in a kind of "perfect world" situation where level distribution is evenly distributed among everyone using the roulette to show that in the best case scenario 73% of the time you're gonna get sastasha, tam-tara, or copper bell. The inclusion of reality that there's a bigger percentage of the population in the 16-20 range than other ranges and the fact that lower level players are more likely to direct queue probably pushes this chance to upwards of 90%.

No way I'm doing actual numbers based off that chart, statistics based off non evenly distributed numbers is likely to give me a brain aneurysm!