Quote Originally Posted by Avatre View Post
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").