Crystal tower raid fights could use a rework

[Illmaeran]

In their current state, I don't believe the Crystal Tower raids are "accessible." As a new player, there is still enough going on that you get a sense that there are mechanics, but no one bothers to explain them, and everything goes by so quickly by virtue of sheer force that you don't really learn them. You can get your clear, but there's no sense of accomplishment.

They didn’t make the arr dungeons non accessible after the revamp. I see this take come up every time, just because a player may be new that doesn’t mean the game should be brain dead for them because then, otherwise, how are they having fun? Being accessible doesn’t mean it needs to be boring. In fact I’d argue that handholding new players is more of a negative than a gain for the community.

I'll reply to you both since you seem to have the same point. You're 100% correct. Accessible doesn't mean (or need) to be brain-dead easy, nor does it mean unenjoyable.

Accessibility, to me, and in the context of what you're responding to, may have better been said, is Ease Of Access. Since people queue for the Alliance Raid roulette in large numbers, people needing them for MSQ progression are likely to get a group relatively quickly. If you move them to the MSQ roulette, since fewer people (I'm assuming here) queue for that they will be less accessible, meaning they're less likely to get a group for them [quickly], than they are in the AR category.

I can see both sides of the argument regarding, them being fun, skill needed, and skill gained through the current CT raids. Are they fun? That's subjective; I think they are but it seems you don't. As far as skill needed; I'd say having a low skill threshold for required content is generally more of a positive than a negative. Optional things like Void Ark, Ivalice, and Aglaia should be more challenging since the people seeking them out are generally seeking more of a challenge with their gear farm. Speaking to gaining skills; every time a person goes through CT they learn and/or improve on the skills needed to make it through that raid. I've run them all more times than I know and I'm still improving, even if it's only in tiny increments by now.

One of these days I'll have a 100% perfect run. Until then, I'll be glad they come up in the roulette so often so I can keep practicing.

[Ameela]

They didn’t make the arr dungeons non accessible after the revamp. I see this take come up every time, just because a player may be new that doesn’t mean the game should be brain dead for them because then, otherwise, how are they having fun? Being accessible doesn’t mean it needs to be boring. In fact I’d argue that handholding new players is more of a negative than a gain for the community.

This exactly.
For those of us who started this game early on we fell in love with it and its content as it was on release, but by now everything has become so easy and standardized I don't think I would have as easy of a time getting into it as I did back then. Stuff like FATEs becoming functionally useless and there being no incentive to ever level alternate classes would have made it really tedious alongside the super casualized dungeons and raids for me.
It'd be one thing if this was something like WoW where the game's rushing through leveling and just expecting you to reach the end ASAP, but this is a game that asks you to do every single main story quest and all dungeons and raids associated with them to get you to the endgame, which is well over 500 hours of playtime on average. If I'm doing little more than going from place to place clicking on NPCs and then occasionally getting to a dungeon where I can clear it being only half awake I don't know if I'd be able to get even 1/5th of the way there.

[Sweetness]

I'll reply to you both since you seem to have the same point. You're 100% correct. Accessible doesn't mean (or need) to be brain-dead easy, nor does it mean unenjoyable.

Accessibility, to me, and in the context of what you're responding to, may have better been said, is Ease Of Access. Since people queue for the Alliance Raid roulette in large numbers, people needing them for MSQ progression are likely to get a group relatively quickly. If you move them to the MSQ roulette, since fewer people (I'm assuming here) queue for that they will be less accessible, meaning they're less likely to get a group for them [quickly], than they are in the AR category.

I can see both sides of the argument regarding, them being fun, skill needed, and skill gained through the current CT raids. Are they fun? That's subjective; I think they are but it seems you don't. As far as skill needed; I'd say having a low skill threshold for required content is generally more of a positive than a negative. Optional things like Void Ark, Ivalice, and Aglaia should be more challenging since the people seeking them out are generally seeking more of a challenge with their gear farm. Speaking to gaining skills; every time a person goes through CT they learn and/or improve on the skills needed to make it through that raid. I've run them all more times than I know and I'm still improving, even if it's only in tiny increments by now.

One of these days I'll have a 100% perfect run. Until then, I'll be glad they come up in the roulette so often so I can keep practicing.

If what we are worried about is queue time, I suppose they could work Crystal tower into 5/6/7/8 roulette. Regardless people still have to make party finders all the time "please help me clear this trial or raid" no matter what piece of content it is.

[Cach]

The objective should be to make the raids take the same time than the rest, this will discourage the ilvl cheese.
Making iLvl more strict and/or redesigning some fights should do the trick.

As far as new players go... dunno, I'm against singelplayerizing the mmo too much. It took me a while to get over my fear of doing raids, but I really like it now.

One of the things I liked about Aglaia's first days was that it was hard enough to make half the raid constantly die, but easy enough that the more experienced half could drag the others kicking and screaming to the finish line. Perfect tuning if you ask me, lol.

[xbahax92]

Its time to turn them into solo dungeons, preferbly with the scions. Time to move on from CT roulettes into Void Ark ones!

[Packetdancer]

In hindsight, I should have said similar, and not the same. Make it so that based on your level, so 50-59 you only need CT, then 60-69 need Mhach as well, 70-70 Ivalice, 80-89 Nier, and then 90 the current series. If they can do that, while also making it so that the ilevel cheese doesn't work, then it would be better and not "sleep roulette"

I just tend to think that queuing for Alliance Roulette should require me to be in gear of sufficient ilevel for at least the the first of the highest-level alliance raid series I've unlocked that I could do on the job I'm queuing as. So if I queue in on a level 73 job and have the Ivalice raids unlocked, I should have to be in sufficient gear to be placed in Rabanastre, otherwise it says I don't meet the ilevel check for the roulette.

The Crystal Tower raids are always going to dominate the roulette, there's nothing we can do about that. Everyone must do them to continue on to Heavensward these days, meaning everyone has CT unlocked. The Mhachi raids at level 60 are not required content for anything, so even free trial users don't always unlock them. The level 70 Ivalice raids are required for Bozja, but free trial users can't unlock them (as they can't go past Heavensward). The level 80 YoRHa raids are not required by anything; I know people at endgame who have not unlocked them. Etc.

This is a recipe for a good chunk of the playerbase -- especially free trial players -- to only have Crystal Tower unlocked, meaning they can't get anything else in roulette. The fact that you also need to run the CT raids for Shadowbringers relics did not help things, as people would sometimes queue for them directly as well.

I'm not sure it should force people to unlock later alliance raids to do the roulette -- I'm of two minds about that. But demonstrably the roulette isn't quite working. The roulette is meant to give you XP and/or tomes in exchange for "put me where I need to be to keep the queues moving", but people who queue deliberately and specifically for the Ivalice raids can wait an hour or more for the queue to pop, especially if they're on tank. Meanwhile, there are people who can get the Ivalice raids (in terms of having them unlocked and being of sufficient level) but who deliberately exclude themselves from the selection (via ilevel cheese).

Now, we can't really know for sure if ilevel cheese makes the situation worse. There's many algorithms to handle queues, and we don't know which SQEX uses, and given the way CT is going to naturally be the most common raid series anyway, some of those algorithms would funnel people towards the CT raids so readily that the ilevel cheese would be basically meaningless noise within the statistics. And some, of course, would absolutely be affected by ilevel cheese.

But even if we can't say if ilevel cheese makes the situation worse, we can absolutely know that it does not make the roulette work better (or, y'know, at least "more like intended").