Just some concerns about roulettes (read, rant)

[KuroMaboroshi]

Most people will always want to optimise rewards, whether they are doing it actively or without noticing. It's only natural, as we all have finite time in our day and in our lives.
Roulettes in particular are prone to falling victim to this, since that's their whole point: Do old content that probably isn't very interesting to you, and get an increased rewards for doing so.

Now, you can express the efficiency of every piece of content as a function of reward value divided by effort.
Effort itself is usually composed of both involvment, as in "how much do I have to do to clear this" and the time investment. The latter is not just the flat duration of the content, but also affected by whether you can do other things during the content. Basically, it's "time I lose doing this content".

This is where content differs widely, and since rewards don't scale to it, there is always an optimal way to go about farming your rewards. Praetorium takes longer than Castrum Meridianum, but has way lower effort required, even though it takes longer. On top of it, there's somewhat better rewards. People "lose" less time during Praetorium and get higher rewards, slanting the "efficiency" heavily in favour of it.

Alliance raids have the same issue: You will get the same rewards, but Crystal Tower raids can be finished much faster and more reliable than the others, so there is a clear incentive to do them instead (on top of wanting to avoid any reminder of the NieR raids existing). This second example also shows part of the problem as to why it is so difficult for Square to address this issue in a way that doesn't feel like selectively punishing players: They don't have too much influence on the "effort" part of the function.


There is the flat "time to clear", which can very widely depending on whether people are properly geared, using their correct rotations, and so on. This is also affected by whether the content is current or old, as with old content you can presume a higher number of players to be at maximum itemLevel for that content due to synching down from higher current gear. The older the content in question, the higher also the chance that a majority of people will have already done this content, making it much more likely that you can get a fast and clean clear. The best example of this is probably content like Delubrum Reginae Normal, where runs done by an organised, properly prepared party range around the 15 minute mark, while those unprepared or undergeared may well take up to an hour.
Now, of course Square Enix could balance rewards around the time it takes to clear, scaling them dynamically. But then, it becomes very likely someone will crunch those exact numbers and figure out new ways to break that algorithm. Let's say you scaled the amount of Exp awarded to the time you spent in the instance: Suddenly you have an incentive to clear up to the final boss of a dungeon, then sit there until the instance is almost timed out, wiggling your mouse every 5 minutes while doing something else, before killing the boss at the last minute for "optimal" rewards.
The same principle applies to all the other factors as well, and some, like skill, are very difficult to measure to begin with.

Trying to "fix" roulettes against exploitation for optimisation of rewards is a noble idea, but it's also a losing battle, as in order to fix it you need to introduce more systems that in turn would be exploited.

What about a "brute force" method then, such as forcing people of a certain level to queue with a certain iLevel of gear against the Alliance raid queue optimisation or locking people out of the roulette for that day if they abandon? In the former case, we already see what would happen when we look at Castrum Meridianum: People will try to queue and fish for something they want, otherwise leave. And if leaving locks them out of the roulette for that day, they'll just calculate that into their reward/effort calculation. You're only always gonna shift where that tradeoff math happens, no matter what you do, unless you were to literally force people to keep playing somehow.