Never Make Your Players Have to "Find the Fun"

[Alahra]

Duty Finder let's you queue for content whenever you want, not play the content whenever you want. That relies on being matched with a group. Loot restrictions remove players from the pool of people you could be matched with. And incentives determine whether players are willing to add themselves to the pool of possible players to be matched with. SE could improve matching by removing restrictions and/or adding incentives.

In all probability, the impact that having no lockouts would have on queue times would be fairly small, as queue times are far more impacted by data center populations and overall role distributions than they are by the fact that people can only get 450 Esoterics per week. The weekly tome lockout was originally 300 per week, and queue times didn't lessen by any noticable margins when they increased it to 450, nor did they noticeably improve when the cap was 900 tomes of Poetics toward the end of ARR.

The reason for this is largely that the population of players who would farm content for tomes/etc beyond the lockout to any particular degree is a pretty small subset of the overall population. There are probably more players who already don't cap tomestones every week than there are players who would farm 1000 or 2000 of them a week simply because the majority of the playerbase doesn't play that much.

But what they don't realize is that gameplay will improve in almost every way with lockouts removed.

This isn't necessarily true. Even with content locks as they currently are, the latter half of every raid cycle already sees a drop off in player engagement, lengthening queue times for everyone. If content were all lockout-free, more players would be finished with the available content sooner, and thus engagement would taper off earlier in a raid tier's life cycle, which would increase increase matchmaking times except in the early stages of a raid tier. You can see this pretty clearly with content where we can farm to our hearts content: namely Hunts and EX Primals, which have massive engagement early on in their cycle of relevancy and largely die out not long after that.

The only way to get around that would be more rapid production of content, something we're not likely to see anytime in the near future since the development team for the game is already strapped for both manpower and time.