Please Reconsider MSQ Changes

[Skivvy]

You do know that this is a thin ice you're skating on, right?! I am not one to use this method to skip the cutscenes...I simply don't enter the dungeons anymore...but there are legal reasons why Square is extremely unlikely to follow this route. Despite what some people may think, they cannot willy-nilly ban players without a reason. And if they will ban some players for a kind of offense (exploit) and ignore other players that make the same kind of offense (exploit) even when they KNOW about it (aka. they got reports) may lead to legal issues in respect to the bans validity. Selective enforcement of rules is against fair business practices in pretty much any country where a such a trifle is enough to be a problem for the people.

You see, the "skip soar" is an exploit. Even using the undersized party feature to skip mechanics is an exploit. The fights were meant to be done in full. Every time you outperform their expectations in a fight to skip a mechanic, you exploit it. Whenever you just stand there doing nothing half of the time, you exploit the fact that this games sync system and base difficulty is not very balanced and allows others to carry you through.

Definitions are general for a reason. There needs to be a certain amount of thought behind enforcing them, as people in higher positions are expected to be "fair". As such, they chose people to play the game how they wanted to, so long as they don't use actual cheats or heavy exploits that, for example, let you deal exponentially more damage or become invulnerable. Skipping some waiting time is not nearly enough to warrant it being considered significant. In the end, the person may end up getting nothing from it if not enough people do it. And even what he will get will be lessened by the fact that someone will still watch the cutscene, so the gain is decreased even more. In comparison, "skip soar" and similar give a very major advantage. They let you avoid a do-or-die situation that could have failed you. And if you manage to use that exploit, you ALWAYS gain that from it.

In the end, they cannot really ban people for "gameplay differences". They need to use their resources to make undesired gameplay differences impossible. If they want people to not waste time in dungeons, they need to put a system that boots them from the party with a penalty if their "up-time" is not high enough, for example. Or force an instant-kill if a mechanic is managed to be avoided, like you can do in Ifrit Extreme if you take him down too much without killing the nails first.

I'm not asking for people to be banned over this. However, I was trying to clarify that it is in fact an exploit, as some people are claiming it's not. People can defend using this method all they want, but it doesn't change what it is. That's all.

IMO, there are far better things to be wasting GMs time with than "this guy DC'd in order to skip a CS!".

[gahoo]

Has it been suggested for these duties to be broken into pieces (with the forced cut scenes)? That way, a roulette run would be doable in a reasonable amount of time, but new players would still get the full effect and could just run them in a row?

[BillyKaplan]

Has it been suggested for these duties to be broken into pieces (with the forced cut scenes)? That way, a roulette run would be doable in a reasonable amount of time, but new players would still get the full effect and could just run them in a row?

While a solid suggestion (veterans don't need to rot away during too many cutscenes, newbies still get their queues - arguably, they'd need several queues to pop now instead of the two before), I feel like that falls under 'too many changes' that they seem to shy away from. Breaking it apart would require effectively creating new instances to queue for, maybe even re-tuning the enemies. And as always, if they're already doing all of that, I'd prefer they made them into solo instances and spared all of us all of this.

Organise it through PF so you don’t get other people caught up in it.

It's almost like PF is the go-to solution both before and after the change, and the biggest drawback to it is how SE doesn't let people know it exists and maybe if they had we wouldn't have been in this situation we're in now :thonking:

You go into the roulette accepting that you will have to wait for people - and if more people had been patient with newcomers before this point, Square might not have felt obligated to force it upon everyone.

That's not even a strawman, it's just an unrelated point, especially when SE themselves have acknowledged that design was a bad idea by never again implementing it, two expansions later. Specifically the part in bold, reminds me of the expectations people have from Mentors and demand punishments if a person with a crown happens to bail on a duty - that's not written anywhere at all, especially when you consider the amount of people who don't even read patch notes. I mean, most likely SE didn't think they'd have to tell you to wait on the newcomers with the unskippable cutscenes, but the fact remains that they didn't explicitly tell anyone 'yo you need to wait on that person'. Vets are there to fill queues, not hold anyone's hand. So while my own original experience in the place was indeed horrid, the problem here is by design, not the people's reaction to it, necessarily.
At this point the thing I'm most curious about is what took them so long to make this change, and what happened to make them implement it now. Cuz after five or so years I'd have expected something more sturdy than this, so it makes me think they were under some sudden pressure.

[Akor]

I'm not asking for people to be banned over this. However, I was trying to clarify that it is in fact an exploit, as some people are claiming it's not. People can defend using this method all they want, but it doesn't change what it is. That's all.

IMO, there are far better things to be wasting GMs time with than "this guy DC'd in order to skip a CS!".

LOL if anyone want to ban ppl for exploiting things than they should start banning bot users first and than we can talk about banning exploiters.