What if light parties had 3 DPS instead of two?

[Zojha]

Make friends with people and that problem ceases to exist.

Except it doesn't, just like poverty doesn't stop existing just because you marry a rich guy. Even if every DPS were to make friends with a tank/healer, there would still be a massive overhead of DPS left out and the tanks/healers would have to pull overtime to compensate, because the numbers simply don't add up.

[Mavrias]

That's a workaround and not a solution to the underlying problem. What exactly is it you're advocating there? No friend / FC mate wants to run leveling at the moment, so just don't bother leveling?

There is no solution to the problem of there being an overabundance of dps players. Everything suggested is a "workaround." Your friends dont wanna do leveling roulette right now? Wait til later or queue solo, not that hard.

[NovaLevossida]

There is no solution to the problem of there being an overabundance of dps players. Everything suggested is a "workaround." Your friends dont wanna do leveling roulette right now? Wait til later or queue solo, not that hard.

You know that "there is no solution" is blatantly false when it comes to reducing queue times, so I don't think there's anything to be gained in further discussion when you have no imagination for how a developer could solve a basic problem such as this.

[Mavrias]

You know that "there is no solution" is blatantly false when it comes to reducing queue times, so I don't think there's anything to be gained in further discussion when you have no imagination for how a developer could solve a basic problem such as this.

/eyeroll
theres no reasonable solution to reducing dps queue times. 3 dps per dungeon is not going to reduce queue time by any substantial amount and most people would rather dev time go to new content rather than rebalancing old dungeons.

[Mavrias]

Except it doesn't, just like poverty doesn't stop existing just because you marry a rich guy. Even if every DPS were to make friends with a tank/healer, there would still be a massive overhead of DPS left out and the tanks/healers would have to pull overtime to compensate, because the numbers simply don't add up.

Poverty is solved however by proper payment to workers, and redistribution of wealth to systems that need it among other things. And, as foolish as comparing real world economics to queue times in a video games is, theres no way to "redistribute" time, so your analogy falls flat.

[Zojha]

Poverty is solved however by proper payment to workers, and redistribution of wealth to systems that need it among other things.

More precisely, the underlying issue of poverty is the constraint of resources - You can only procure so many goods from the planet and distribute them. And if some people are taking more goods in that distribution, others naturally will have less to compensate. Thus, poverty comes to be.

And that is the exact same issue with queue times. We have a constraint of role slots in a party. Tanks and Healers take a disproportionate large place in them, which leaves DPS yearning for slots. Thus queue times happen.

The difference lies in the fact that role slots do not have to be limited and thus, overpopulation is not an issue you need to concern yourself with.

[Mavrias]

And that is the exact same issue with queue times. We have a constraint of role slots in a party. Tanks and Healers take a disproportionate large place in them, which leaves DPS yearning for slots. Thus queue times happen.

The difference lies in the fact that role slots do not have to be limited and thus, overpopulation is not an issue you need to concern yourself with.

First of all, the underlying issue of poverty is greed.
Role slots is not the limiting factor here, but rather dev time. Theyve made it abundantly clear that for every bit of "something new/ drastic changes" something else has to be sacrificed. This is why there was only one dungeon this patch.

Rebalancing mechanics, outgoing damage, mob health, etc for, what, 50+ dungeons, is not just an hours worth of work. So what would you trade off to get it?

[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.