What if light parties had 3 DPS instead of two?

[NovaLevossida]

Then you're more likely to have even worse dps. If you play dps and there's 2 dps then you can sort of carry the other dps but if content was tuned for 3 dps and the other 2 dps were trash, then you're boned.

The more people you put into a party, the more likely you will have garbage players. This is why 24 mans are painful because when you have 24 people, you're bound to have several dead weight players that drag everybody else down.

I don't really think this is a big concern. Expert roulette already has "garbage players," and I spent all of Heavensward being paired most of the time with DPS players who wouldn't AoE trash. I don't think you can really go too much lower since expert roulette has been designed with the LCD player in mind already. The only reason 24 mans are painful is because there is a harsher punishment for failing mechanics, unlike expert roulette.

[Rufalus]

I dunno was just a thought. I know it would be a massive headache to implement and balance but has this been brought up before?

For reference FFXIV is my first MMO so I'm sorry if I'm being incredibly ignorant/naive. Just been on my brain so I thought I'd ask people who know better

It's not a silly suggestion but you're right, a headache to implement. I think it's big enough of a headache that it can't ever happen, as we've got years worth of content designed around 4 players so the resources required to make the change are too great. Yes it has been suggested before, mainly for faster dps queue reasons.

[Okamimaru]

Do you think it's acceptable for this game to waste 30 minutes of your time before being able to enter an instance? Because I don't. YoshiP would have addressed this already if he valued his customers' time.

You do realize that the shorter dps queue mentality will then draw even more people to queue as a dps... half the reason people queue as tank and healer is for the shorter queues... so it will just balance back out to longer dps times again but with fewer tanks and healers

[giantslayer]

Real world poverty is a pretty big discussion that probably doesn't belong on this thread.

Back to the topic at hand, queues are better discussed using more basic economic concepts of supply and demand. Supply of DPS in 4-man content currently exceeds demand. Economics dictates one of two things will happen:
A. Price decreases until market reaches equilibrium.
B. Excess supply creates a surplus of unsold units.

Since FF14 doesn't really have mechanisms equivalent to "price" in economics, that leaves outcome B as the only result. This means DPS waiting in queue. The wasted time in queue is akin to surplus product going unsold in economics.

"Supply" is how many players queue into a specific role. Supply is determined by the players' choices. It is possible to influence supply with incentives, game design, classes made available to players (anyone remember DPS queues going to heck when Ninja was introduced?). The supply side is tricky to change and it is where most efforts have been focused.

"Demand" is an interaction between the Supply of all three Roles. On the one hand, demand for each role is based on supply of the other two roles. On the other hand, the formula for that interaction is set by the Devs: 1 Tank = 1 Healer = 2 DPS. If the devs were to change the formula to 3 DPS, they would be increasing the demand for DPS.

You can argue that it's not feasible to change the 4-man composition to a 5-man or that the current setup is better, but to say that it wouldn't make any difference on queue times is simply not correct.