any plans to fix DF wait times?

[SickSoul]

so i just got done with trying to beat Garuda for the first time, i waited 45 minutes with an average wait time of 17 minutes, got a terrible group who tried over 10 times to beat it. the healer didn't know what he was doing, as much as i'd LOVE to wait 40 minutes more to get into another group that might fail and all to just progress the story? are there any plans to fix the wait times on DF? who knows maybe the expansion will have some kind of fix for it, but all just to progress the story :/ which you have to do, i hear it gets worse with wait times up to 2 hours for end game raids, yikes what do people do while they're waiting? as i'm not a big fan of crafting in games I have fun other ways but that seems to be the only thing to do while waiting. (all of my FC friends on aren't high enough level).

[Amnesia]

What would you consider a "fix"?

The wait times for the duty finder are determined by individual players deciding to queue up as certain classes.

[KisaiTenshi]

so i just got done with trying to beat Garuda for the first time, i waited 45 minutes with an average wait time of 17 minutes, got a terrible group who tried over 10 times to beat it. the healer didn't know what he was doing, as much as i'd LOVE to wait 40 minutes more to get into another group that might fail and all to just progress the story?

Two things:
1) Don't blame the healer. If you think you can do better, then you should have picked healer as a class/job. If you are just griping about the queue time, switch to a tank build.
2) The non-hard primals are part of the low-level duty roulette.

The queue times for Healers and Tanks tends to be under 5 minutes for light parties, and under 15 minutes for full parties.
And having just tried Labyrinth of Ancients for the first time, about 20 minutes, of which the last 2 minutes was waiting for one more tank.

[KittytheSheGeek]

Don't blame the healer. If you think you can do better, then you should have picked healer as a class/job.

To be fair, I've seen some REALLY crappy healers. I did a WoD run with a Scholar who decided he would rather DPS than do his job, and we wiped on the final boss three times because of him. The other healer just couldn't keep up, especially because we had a Monk who spent most of the raid dead. So yeah... sometimes you can blame the healer. Sometimes people are just bad at the class they are playing. I don't know what the case is in this instance, but neither do you.

[Vidu]

Like Amnesia already said: How would you "fix" those queuetimes? Should SE pay people to play tank&heal?
If you're saying the healer didnt know what he was doing my advice would be: Visit the mrd-guild in Limsa and get your scholar-job-crystals - maybe YOU know how to heal that fight? Garuda NM isnt as easy as all the stuff you were doing before and its some sort of a test - I advice you to ask around in LS/FC or maybe even Pf to find some decent people to kill her.

Regarding your concern that this is getting even worse in endgame: Its getting better because people actually doing endgamecontent. NO one would queue for Gardua NM if it isnt for the story or hes getting it by story roulette - still even in endgame healers and tanks are having faster queuetimes. So that would be a fix for you: playing one of those jobs instead of complaining about people who are doing that already... I know its annoying to get a bad healer or a bad tank... but before you really judge that: try it yourself please... I've seen healers with an ilvl of 90+ struggeling there :P

[Niwashi]

NO one would queue for Gardua NM if it isnt for the story or hes getting it by story roulette

This is one issue that SE could look into. It's common to all the story mode primals. They did take one step to make sure groups would continue to form for them when they added the Roulette system, but that's still the only incentive that exists.

The story dungeons get far more traffic than story trials. A lot of that is people leveling up (whether initial leveling or leveling additional classes/jobs). Dungeons give fantastic XP and some great loot, whether you're doing Roulette or not.

Trials, on the other hand, give people virtually nothing unless they have a Roulette bonus. Killing a primal nets you no loot at all and less XP than killing a single open-world trash mob, and that's something that SE could fix. Give primals some loot rewards like regular dungeon bosses get and an XP reward that's actually commensurate with how much time/effort it takes to kill it, and maybe people will stop avoiding the trials when they're dungeon farming. It wouldn't completely eliminate the DF wait time issue for DPS jobs, but it could certainly improve it.

[JimboTCB]

Trials, on the other hand, give people virtually nothing unless they have a Roulette bonus. Killing a primal nets you no loot at all and less XP than killing a single open-world trash mob, and that's something that SE could fix. Give primals some loot rewards like regular dungeon bosses get and an XP reward that's actually commensurate with how much time/effort it takes to kill it, and maybe people will stop avoiding the trials when they're dungeon farming. It wouldn't completely eliminate the DF wait time issue for DPS jobs, but it could certainly improve it.

I don't think that would help much at all... if anything it'd mean that tanks/healers only ever queued specific for trials, as it means an instant queue and about five minutes effort (unless you get a failgroup, and in those cases they'd probably just quit and re-queue later instead of wasting time trying to actually help people learn). Trials take a matter of minutes to do compared to 30+ for a low level dungeon, if the rewards were anything more than trivial it'd make them overwhelmingly attractive compared to real dungeons and you'd probably see even fewer tanks/healers in the general dungeon queue.

The real issue IMO is that even as an adventurer in need, the rewards for doing roulettes after the first one are a joke, you're much better queuing specific for the one dungeon at the top of your level range, which does absolutely nothing to help alleviate the queues for every other dungeon. Purely by virtue of how long you spend at each level, you end up queueing for higher end dungeons much more than lower ones, so low level people queuing specific for storyline dungeons are largely reliant on synced players queuing under roulette which they only do once a day anyway.

[SickSoul]

uuuuuuhhhh... lemme see i'm not a professional so i wouldn't know how to fix it and if you read the entire thing i'm not only "griping" about the times... peace, no need to come back here you defensive fanboys/girls. quit acting like i personally attacked you... my god...

[ChameleonMS]

Unfortunately for you, the timing is bad, with the Gold Saucer dropping yesterday, a significant portion of the player base is doing that instead of queue for daily roulette.

The only fix, is has been to encourage more players to queue for these as tank/healer, SE has increased some rewards for playing as those classes but definitely not enough to spur true migration.
One daily low level roulette as an "In need" class (Tank 85% or Healer 14.9% or DPS 0.1%) only provides additional 7500 Gil and 219 GCs to that player. Since Gil and GCs are so easy to come by, this is not enough incentive for people bother. The roulette, pays SOL, Poetics and GCs bonus regardless of class.
Roulette In Need Bonus

A true incentive change for the In Need bonus would be adding more SOL, Poetics, Allied Seals or MGP. A better incentive would be to allow the bonus more than once per day.
This is not done because SE does not want end game characters just farming the Low level roulette for these currencies, which currently must be achieved via other higher game content.
The In Need bonus does provide extra Gil multiple times but as I have already stated, this is a very poor incentive to an end game content player.

My best advise is to find a Free Company that will help you out with those choke points in the story.
FYI, in the older days before the roulette and bonus, queue times were 2-4 hours for what you got in 45 minutes. As you can see from this, the existing roulette bonus did improve the queue times. They just are not good enough yet for everyone to be happy.

[Garlyle]

uuuuuuhhhh... lemme see i'm not a professional so i wouldn't know how to fix it and if you read the entire thing i'm not only "griping" about the times... peace, no need to come back here you defensive fanboys/girls. quit acting like i personally attacked you... my god...

They didn't, but you quickly resorted to defamation and the internet version of plugging your ears and going "lalala not listening".


The argument about queue times is not us going "no SE's perfect" but rather "no MMO has successfully solved the queue time issue". The only ones that ever haven't had that problem haven't had an auto-matching system - if you wanted a tank for a party you'd have to go hunt one down yourself. Building a party requires players in certain roles, and the reality is that there are roles that just straight up are less played than others. This is persistant across almost all MMOs - either there's far too few tanks, or far too few healers (and always too many DPS). There is no magic patch for this.

Be glad Duty Roulette and other incentives do exist already to get players returning to older content. If you thought 45 minutes for Garuda HM was bad - which to be fair it still is - you would've never survived waiting 3 hours to get into Stone Vigil in 2.0. Only to fail because few people were actually good at the game.


As for the stuff about healers? People step up to defend healers because frequently healers get shit on - frequently undeservingly. It's entirely possible the healer actually did suck at their job, in which case, yes, I know your frustration. It does happen. ...and it's also entirely possible (and, in <50 content, honestly really likely) that they simply weren't able to carry everyone else that hard. Because healers regularly are tasked with doing exactly that - carrying people through content, kicking and screaming, despite their best efforts.