Please Reconsider MSQ Changes

[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.

[Vstarstruck]

Everything you said assumes numbers we don't know.
I'm not saying that anything COULD or could not have been done. Just that it hasn't and it's very unlikely it will be now.
Not knowing any numbers how can you be so sure of the amount of people quitting because of whatever problem? There could have been thousands of accounts that showed people played till ARR finale then immediately quit. But I also do not know these numbers so i cannot argue majority or minority, just what they've done and what is likely to get done based on the path of past changes.

It still needs changes, it's not good for everyone right now, but it seems that they're in the mind that new players WANT to be able to see those instances as originally experienced by others and the devs want this to be the default and not the exception. I'm not defending their choices (though I personally agree the way MSQ used to run sucked for new people interested in the story) , I'm trying to suggest things that they'd be inclined to change rather than ignore as fanciful pipe dreams.

If it was a big problem like you are trying to make it out to be, the would did something sooner. They did this change blindly to be doing so this late in the game. You know the evidence this is not a well thought out change? The fact it has the same effect in unsyc and playing them in the inn, like not having the dialog option n the inn, means they made a rushed decision and not thought out change. They prob did this from simply getting tired of listening to the outspoken minority, not realizing the majority would not be happy.

No, the impatient who forced the new people to "watch at the inn" or be kicked.

There's no need to worry about other dungeons, unless the complaints about those mount as well. So be kind to the new guys.

that never happened, people only kicked new players if they where being overly obnoxious in mouthing off to people about speed running when it is explained time and time again, a lot of people did it a 100+ times and that be a good idea to watch at inn or make a pf if they are that bothered that much over it. (even then some groups put up with it and cleared it anyway)

Most groups just let them watch the CS as people moved on fight to fight, most weren't bothered after communicating. What is next? they make you open every chest in PotD before moving on the next floor because of chest drama vs speedrun? personally I seen more drama there then in MSQ, since you HAVE to kick them to move on after you communicate the situation.

[Skivvy]

They prob did this from simply getting tired of listening to the outspoken minority, not realizing the majority would not be happy.

You continue to speak as if you know numbers, you don't. No one does. It really doesn't help anyone's cause to constantly throw out statements like this as they're quite easy to dismiss.

that never happened, people only kicked new players if they where being overly obnoxious in mouthing off to people about speed running when it is explained time and time again, a lot of people did it a 100+ times and that be a good idea to watch at inn or make a pf if they are that bothered that much over it. (even then some groups put up with it and cleared it anyway)

Also, I've been in a group that kicked a sprout, seemingly for nothing more than watching CSs. Was just once, but to claim it never happens isn't true.

What exactly is your complaint with the change? It's been lost in all the back and forth over these last several pages.

I solo queued as a BLM, and it was about a 20 minute wait. If that queue time can be maintained after this initial patch release, that's really not that bad. Sprouts will continue to get their MSQ done in a fairly timely manner.

My current complaint, after giving it a go myself, is that the CSs are unskippable in parties without sprouts and even PF groups. That is just a weird decision all around. I don't think CSs should be forced in either of those cases.

It would be nice for them to also implement a vote to skip the CS, but I can't see that working well with this community. If the vote failed, I imagine there could be hounding of the new player, vote/dismiss abuse, and spoilers thrown out just to spite whomever they think didn't vote "yes" to skipping.

[Vstarstruck]

Also, I've been in a group that kicked a sprout, seemingly for nothing more than watching CSs. Was just once, but to claim it never happens isn't true.

Ya ok, I never seen that happen outside once and it was not even for that. It was by the time you get in the middle of it, and the person did not move from the start point or said anything, it had nothing to do with watching cut scenes. What if you are assuming it was for that because of no communication?

What exactly is your complaint with the change? It's been lost in all the back and forth over these last several pages.

I been repeating it over and over again to those select few that keep defending this and it keeps getting ignored.

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.

[Beckett]

Yet the content is still steamrolled because of item level people are still going to mass pull everything burn everything the only difference is everyone has to now watch cutscenes.

There is a huge difference between participating in an easy fight, and completely missing a fight (or several fights!) because your party did them while you were still in a cutscene. A new player may be a bit confused by the mass pulls, but that's nothing compared to the confusion they'll face when watching a cutscene that says they're going to fight a boss, then as soon as the scene ends they immediately wind up in another cutscene congratulating them on beating the boss.

And there's obviously a huge difference between participating in easy fights and being outright kicked from the instance just because you wanted to watch the cutscenes.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.