Please Reconsider MSQ Changes

[hydralus]

I dunno if it's been brought up already, but I think they could honestly shave off 20 minutes of these cutscenes and still have the same effect.

You PROBABLY don't need to see an airship flying up into the sky, or to see a generic mech walk out, or spotlights turning off, or the dozens of other 'filler' cutscenes they have. The ones where people actually talk I'd say they can leave those in, but that's only at the end of the dungeons. To me the vast majority of the 8-man dungeon cutscenes were painfully boring and not worth the wait. Heck even the spoken cutscenes are frightfully stiff and inexpressive, but at least something is being said.

To use another game as an example of expressive cutscenes, I refer to Blade and Soul. It has a fair number of cutscenes - not as many as FFXIV, but certainly more active. You've got people jumping all over the place, characters being sassy or jokey or downright silly or even threatening and imposing. It might not be everyone's taste, but I hope we can all agree that people moving around instead of standing there like a paper cutout is better.

[ebon]

Devs should program a temporary squadron to take new ppl through MSQ and take it off duty roulette altogether, time to move on!

[Kazgrel]

The way to skip the cutscenes now is to skip this roulette outright. I get more poetics than I know what to do with from 50/60 roulette, WT, alliance raid roulette, and hunting.

Whether that’s the intent of the devs, only they know. I would not be shocked that if turnout for MS roulette drops off bad enough, they’ll find a way to shoehorn people into running it.

[Skivvy]

1. You do not force people do something. You give them a choice. Making people watch cut scenes because a select few do not know how to communicate should not be happening. That is extreme babying and pretty insulting in my view.
2. You do not make a change that harms the majority because of a few outspoken minority, I do not see forced changed on PotD, a place that has higher frequency of complainants of "speed running"
3. You do not make a change half baked, it clearly was in the fact it had on the inn and pf/unsync/ premade groups
4. Lack of contamination by development. Are they keeping silent because they do not want to admit of making a change that had a "positive" effect on the select few? there is even new players that do not want to sit there and have to watch these. I bet you they outnumber the people that care about the CS too, but you are not going to hear about them because in the past, there was nothing effecting them in a negative light.
5. they stated the rewards would compensate for the time spent, they don't. You want vets to help out while having to watch these things? give 200 current tomes, otherwise those that care how their time spent is not going to bother.
6. If they really wanted to address this problem (if one really existed on a mass scale, and it clearly doesn't since this small change happened 2 expansions later) they would make it solo instance with squads or something.
7. This change harms everyone, longer queue times because less people are willing to do it.

People that care about these CS is clearly a minority because look how many threads are made on that issue? and the fact most runs went without issue? esp with talking to people? the fact it was changed after all this time? I think there is lot of circumstantial evidence that points this was a hasty change based on the minority. Saying "we have no real proof" is not going to change my mind, not with how many times I ran that.

Also I think it deserves to be noted not only by my personal experience, or this coming from that, it is also coming from others I know, and one of them leveled 50-60 DRG off purely in it during HW, then again 60-70 in SB before this change. Along with running it daily to help other jobs.

My thoughts:

1. SE obviously felt it was important enough to change their game to make those 2 instances in particular more-friendly to sprouts. Force-feeding the CSs was a bit of a shock to most people, but at this point we get the choice of whether or not the MSQ roulette is still worth the effort. I personally think it's OK- at least while I'm still leveling up jobs - as it does give a nice chunk of XP. Once I'm done leveling, I'll probably never touch it again.

As I mentioned earlier, I think as long as the queue for DPS can remain at around 20 minutes, that's really not too bad. I just don't know how long that will hold up, and obviously if it increases, only the sprouts will suffer.

2. We don't know if this is harming the majority of players. People are (currently) still running it, and so the MSQ roulette is still functional. The point of that was to lure Veteran players into incredibly outdated content to help get new players through the MSQ.

3. Again, this is a decsion call by SE. They have all the data. Nothing about those two dungeons are ideal. They've gone from one bandaid to the next. Unless they change it to a solo instance, it's never going to have a fantastic solution

4. Communication with the NA players has always been ....not great. Do wish they'd bump up their community representation, because as it is, there is just a lot of stewing going on.

5. This is a matter of opinions. I am actually content with the XP rewards. The tomes, I couldn't give a rat's ass about, but the XP is nice. As mentioned, I will probably only run the roulette while I am leveling a job. I do agree they could have done something better with the tomes reward - maybe switch this to the highest tomes. It feels like SE is a bit out of touch with the tomes. They practically force feed us Poetics, and it's really only good for Relics / level 50 ironworks gear

6. I agree. A solo instance would have been fantastic. And they've implemented AI for some of the lower dungeons - wish they would have made the effort to do the same for CM/Prae.

SE doesn't seem to want to have to rework a lot of things when it comes to coding/server issues. XIV has made them bank, and it feels like they are fed the tiniest budget to attempt to get things to work. Boggles the mind.

7. While it does obviously affect everyone's time, it's not necessarily harming everyone. It's just a matter of deciding if the extra time is worth the XP/tomes bonus. Some people try to maximize every last second of their time in game - others do not. For those people who do try to maximize, you have other avenues that you can take advantage of for your exp/tomes. I actually had a lot of fun in my first Prae run. People were chatting almost the whole time, and that was nice for once.

Now again, if queue times shoot up dramatically, once the newness of the change wears off, that is definitely an issue - but for better or worse we will have to wait to see how that plays out. It's far too early to claim this is harming everyone.

Speaking of minorities - the people who post on the Official Forums are actually a minority. Just because we have threads about X, Y, Z does not necessarily mean that the whole playerbase feels that way as the majority of the playerbase is NOT represented on the forums.

Anyway, we're all allowed to have our own thoughts on the matter - people just need to chill with the insults and antagonizing.

[Vstarstruck]

-snip

fair thoughts cept for the exp gains, PotD gives higher gains and still gives poetics if you are 50+, and if for some reason you are running it at 70, will give you all 3 types. MSQ does not even do that for you. Even if you are on an alt job, you can run PoTD till 60, spend the potics you get on the way, buy MB gear and or farm ARF to bridge the rest, this is important to gear as you get 61 since 61+ you want to do at level dungons for best gains. MSQ roulette gives no benefit.

Also:
https://i.gyazo.com/e775550a5ec4a94c...9b3f45309a.png
this was around 10 min wait t be at number 15, people are clearly not running it like before 4.2

You only get fast queues as tank or healer like anything else but DPS queues are def suffering already from this change.

But yeah I want to restate the point of giving pennies for putting money in the game, boggles my mind as well. I am well aware forum posters are also a minority, from someone's signature, had some bar graph showing like 4% of the user base polled posts on here or something. It is why I can only go off with what I personally ran into MSQ and my friends. I mean things are different when you attempt to talk during runs, not speed run and ignore all chat (most seem to do)

[Skivvy]

fair thoughts cept for the exp gains, PotD gives higher gains and still gives poetics if you are 50+, and if for some reason you are running it at 70, will give you all 3 types. MSQ does not even do that for you. Even if you are on an alt job, you can run PoTD till 60, spend the potics you get on the way, buy MB gear and or farm ARF to bridge the rest, this is important to gear as you get 61 since 61+ you want to do at level dungons for best gains. MSQ roulette gives no benefit.

Also:
https://i.gyazo.com/e775550a5ec4a94c...9b3f45309a.png
this was around 10 min wait t be at number 15, people are clearly not running it like before 4.2

You only get fast queues as tank or healer like anything else but DPS queues are def suffering already from this change.

But yeah I want to restate the point of giving pennies for putting money in the game, boggles my mind as well

For sure, I definitely wouldn't complain at a bump up to the exp / tomes (switch this to endgame tomes, c'mon SE!).

I know when I first heard about the change, I figured it was an instant-death for the MSQ. The queue has slowed down, but it's still at a fairly decent time. If it gets worse, well, then we can all tell SE 'we told you so'. Just gonna have to wait on that part though.

[CazzT]

This change is bad for new players. Fewer people are going to queue when the dungeon takes so long. Which means longer queue times for new players. And the longer the cutscenes remain unskippable, the more people are going to opt out of running MSQR. Which means longer queue times. It will get to the point where a new player will be waiting over an hour just to progress the story. This is going to run off new players. Which means a loss of revenue for SquEnix. And they're going to tell their friends "It's a good game up until you need to run this one dungeon. You can't get a group for it. I had to wait two hours when I tried to run it and I eventually just gave up." Which means less new players.

Objectively, this change is bad for the game and new players. I don't know what the best solution was for the problem, but I can objectively say this was far from a good choice. It is objectively bad for the game.

[Krotoan]

This change is bad for new players....
Objectively, this change is bad for the game and new players. I don't know what the best solution was for the problem, but I can objectively say this was far from a good choice. It is objectively bad for the game.

You keep saying "objectively". I'm not seeing an objective observation here, I'm seeing a biased preset opinion. The fact you play this game and have already passed the ARR MSQ very likely biases your opinion.

The queue is currently far below 2 hours, and the change has been live for a little less than a week. Before we make any sweeping statements about how it's killed or helped the queues, we need to wait. I've seen very few new people complaining about the change, and mostly people who either were used to using the MSQ as xp/tome runs or are concerned about alts running through it.

Oddly enough there are a lot of new accounts showing up on the forums but with established characters. That could be indicative of an issue affecting the newer crop. None of them seem to be complaining about their first run though, just subsequent runs.

[BillyKaplan]

None of them seem to be complaining about their first run though, just subsequent runs.

To be fair, that's still a playerbase who deserves to be heard and that's still content SE should want people to run. The fewer people with established characters running it, the worse it is for newer players, that's why the roulette was established in the first place. I agree with you about needing more time to see how this will really affect things, though I also agree with anyone who said we're likely to see a decline in participants.

[Krotoan]

To be fair, that's still a playerbase who deserves to be heard and that's still content SE should want people to run. The fewer people with established characters running it, the worse it is for newer players, that's why the roulette was established in the first place. I agree with you about needing more time to see how this will really affect things, though I also agree with anyone who said we're likely to see a decline in participants.

There will DEFINITELY be a decline. No doubt there. Subtract the speedrunners and the xp/tome crowd and you by all accounts have less players running it. Whether it falls to unmanageable levels is where the rub is. The original reason it was instated goes back to the pool that there was to draw from: individual servers. Now we have datacenter pools instead, this may be manageable now. As you've said though , time will tell.

They do deserve to be heard , as all players do. But when you have people complaining about something that was never really made for them, it just took advantage of them (this sounds bad I know but it seems to be what was done) it's kind of silly. BUT, there is the matter of the solo/unsynched runs having the limitations, which is dumb. That I'll argue was a really bad oversight or decision.