Suggestion: Clear Duty Finder selections whenever a new duty is unlocked

[Kanjita]

I just watched it play out for the millionth time on YouTube: a new player goes to queue into a duty they've just unlocked, but they had already run a roulette earlier in the same session, and that roulette is still checked. Clicking on the new duty, they don't notice that it did not become checked, and they click Join, causing them to rerun the roulette instead of entering the desired dungeon.

Automatically clearing the Duty Finder selections is something to be done with a light touch, because there are a wide variety of situations where players do want to queue the same duty or duties over and over again, whether for leveling, mount farming, chocobo racing, or progging an ultimate. Any suggested change must not disrupt these extremely common circumstances.

So what I would like to suggest—and have been meaning to suggest for a long time—is that your Duty Finder selections should automatically be cleared whenever you unlock a new duty.

There are rare use cases where someone would want to run a duty several times but also did something in between those runs which unlocked a different duty which they do not intend to run right away. In even those rare cases, the negative impact of this change would be minimal, as they would only need to re-check their desired duty. Conversely, the case where someone unlocks a duty and intends to run that duty right away as their next activity is many orders of magnitude more frequent, and the negative impact of being put into the wrong duty is far worse.

I believe and hope that this is a change that everyone wants. Veteran players are the least troubled by the current system and may have forgotten that we ever had a problem with it because, well, other than the first day of a patch we practically never unlock new duties, whereas a sprout may unlock a new duty or two on a daily basis.

[Rongway]

Your UX arguments are fine and your suggestion is one way to make it harder to make the mistake that prompted you to write this; but to be honest I don't think it covers enough cases, and if we're going to fix some of the cases let's fix as many of them as we can. Your suggestion addresses the subset of player errors where someone unlocks a new duty and queues for it while still being erroneously queued for another duty, yes. However it doesn't address the subset of player errors where someone does not unlock a new duty and still makes the same error anyway (for example, when someone parties up with a friend to do a duty and forgets to uncheck what they were doing earlier). I would instead address two things:

1. There is no feedback when a player clicks a checkbox that cannot be checked. When you successfully check a checkbox, the checkbox gives both visual and audio feedback--it lights up and makes a system sound. However, when you click a disabled checkbox, it makes no sound. Clicking on an uncheckable checkbox should print an error message and make a sound to draw attention to the checkbox not doing what the player expected it to do. This would cover the roulette holdover cases.

2. The next thing the player would click after the checkbox is the Join button. This button should make it clearer when a player who is expecting to be queued for a single selection is actually not queued for a single selection. To that end, I would suggest that the Join button should prominently indicate the number of duties selected if that number is more than 1. Putting the selection counter right onto the button makes it harder to overlook.

2b. To be clear, because sometimes the UI team makes bad decisions like the one I'm about to say to avoid: do not put (1) on the Join button if only one duty is selected. One duty is what people expect to be queued for and it does not need a special indicator. Putting (1) on the Join button when one duty is selected is just going to encourage people to ignore it, making it less effective at indicating when the duty count is (2) to (5). Only indicate the number of duties if it is greater than 1.



These two things together would handle many more cases of erroneous duty selections than just clearing the selections upon unlocking a new duty.