Quote Originally Posted by Altena View Post
Eh? If the system remained similar, it would still prioritize 1 melee, 1 ranged, and 1 or 2 others. From my understanding the system tries to avoid matching with double of the same job and that should retain as the DPS queue still has a large pool of DPS players, it just lets more through the door.

Honestly if you were able to get 5-10 min queues instead of 20-30 min queues in exchange for a slight decrease in chance for picking up a piece of gear or 2 for your job that may or may not drop anyway? I would personally prefer faster queue times. The marketboard is there for "fill in" slots. You're not likely going to get fully geared out in the 6-8 runs of a dungeon anyway.. At least I am not in my current levelling climb for my off jobs. If it wasn't for stored gear for the loot I had greeded on other jobs during my climb I wouldn't have much gear at all..

RNG is always going to be RNG. Dungeon drops are a bonus but you shouldn't rely on them.
It doesn't technically have to be, though. WoW is only one example, and a later one at that, of "personal" loot, wherein each player loots from their own loot table, or "party" loot, where possible drops are limited to those that are not already possessed by each member who can use them. Similarly, there's always currency, for which we still have almost our entire "key item" space to hold, if SE would just finally transfer non-tradeable currencies to that section. Or there's internal RNG normalization, wherein your character data stores a hidden counter for loot chance, increased with each failure and decreased with each usable drop received, weighted or not according to that item's strength.

Quote Originally Posted by Altena View Post
Oh I definitely don't think it's impossible (apologies if I actually said it was as I didn't mean it literally). I would be all for scaling content, and think it would be fantastic if it were fairly easy to do - however we had a very tough time getting "true" scaling FATEs when we asked for them for the "years" and still haven't recieved anything remotely close to what we wanted in my opinion. I feel like it would be another story for dungeon content as dungeons require mechanics to be scalable which may limit the ability to design some of them. Mechanics such as having to jump into a bubble when a limited number of bubbles pop in order to avoid a big AoE come to mind. I mean I am sure they could add more bubbles in this case, however it wouldn't exactly be the easiest thing to implement I imagine.
FATEs have a few disadvantages that dungeons do not. They spawn in waves, and therefore can only check player count and/or composition accordingly. Chances are, early leavers will do so at the tail of a wave, but not so quickly as to remove their contribution to the next wave's "sync". Etiquette itself does little to prevent that, but as relative party contribution required for a gold has been decreased it shouldn't be a necessary issue by any means.

Further, they provide few opportunities for assessment. You could, for instance, (this bit irrelevant to player count scaling) have a dungeon mechanic that increases in speed with each failure to damage the party and lasts until someone screws up in order to provide increased rewards, but FATEs, as with most open-world content, have tended towards a slightly more zero-sum idea of rewards. It would take time to remove those habits completely to allow for more detailed cooperative play.

And the last of course is that open world parties rarely function as such. Even in instanced 24-man raids, there's little expectation of per-party positioning coordination until they would be lethal to each other, smaller benefits be damned. This also works contrarily to the 'join freely' concept of FATEs, for which only parties have access to AoE heals, etc., making it difficult to tailor healing needs to the healer count involved, because their hps could be tripled or cut to a third just depending on whether they are in a party, and of how many people in range.

In dungeons, however, you can make benchmark assessments of DPS, etc. in order to alter later content (and its rewards) accordingly because you have a more or less set party. A portion or degree of these would have to be scrapped and returned to normal should a player abandon, and be replaced by a player of any or the same role, respectively, but on average you are free to tailor.

The only real design limiter I can imagine is that either boss arena sizes would also have to be scaled, which still has a mild additional impact on (especially melee) uptime, or player-marked AoEs and the like would have to be scaled smaller to allow for the same level of safety possible as in a 4-man party in the same limited area, which also may impact uptime.

I will address your 2nd point with my first one. Similar story - I think it would be great if we could scale them, however I think it would be more challenging to do, rather than a flat increase in the number of DPS slots.

Either way, that comes back to scaling the dungeon difficulty based on this new composition. If that were an issue then sure, it would likely be looked at in terms of balancing that difficulty.

I imagine it would be easier to balance unreleased content then it would be to go back and attempt to balance existing content with a new system like this..

Lastly, yes it is unlikely that this will happen - however it is honestly a way to improve the queue time for DPS. Not just for Stormblood but for beyond.
I truly believe any opportunity they can take to work towards a long-usable intuitive design now is entirely worth its effort, so long as they don't drop into the red, content-release-wise (and even then, if something like this refreshes enough content, such as by being temporarily framed into random daily bonus dungeons, perhaps even for different player counts, it would still absolutely pay off). Composition-based scaling, allowing for, say, greater avoidable damage and swap-mechanics in the case of an all-DPS party, as to make it highly challenging but technically survivable, or giving reason to use 2 tanks in a 5-man 2/1/2 party, may not be worth designing for the time being, but allowing at least for an inflated DPS count, with slightly increased requirements on heals and tanks indirectly atop greater mob and boss health, due count safety mechanics, targeted AoEs, etc., should be an amazingly strong QoL increase in the early days of the expansion, and with lasting benefits.