Idea Bag: How to get players to unlock older content (eg Raids)

[Snorky]

That's pretty much what I suggested in one thread. Treat it similar to the Expert Roulette, where you need to have unlocked the next dungeon(and done it) to gain access to that roulette. I'm sure they can find a way to code it so that once your character has completed the first quests where you are able to unlock the expansions raid quests, then you have to unlock those to get access to the AR again.

Honest question what about the people who have unlocked things, but decide to start a whole new character? It maybe a bit discouraging for those of us who have alt alt-aholic syndrome. Seriously though it's a bit to punishing for my tastes.

[kaynide]

Honest question what about the people who have unlocked things, but decide to start a whole new character? It maybe a bit discouraging for those of us who have alt alt-aholic syndrome. Seriously though it's a bit to punishing for my tastes.

This is my big thing; on my alts I’m just not interested in doing the void Ark storyline again. Or manderville for that matter. If there was something useful I could get out of it…might be a different story.

And when friends try out the game and ask wha they should try next, the later raids are almost always last on my personal list when compared to (imho) better storylines in Eden/Alexander…and yes even Manderville. Nier would be my absolute last recommendation of things to unlock.

[Jeeqbit]

Problem: even with ilvl fix, CT is still gonna get pulled in roulette because of people like me. How can SE motivate people like me to unlock other raids so people (like you, maybe) don’t keep getting CT?

Make them required for MSQ. But that makes the MSQ longer and it's long enough already, so that is the problem with doing that.

Things they have tried:
3.x series (along with 4 lords) unlocks Tataru’s Grand Endeavor. This is just story afaik, so not worth on alt, and maybe not so interesting for a new player when 7.0 or 8.0 comes along.
4.x series eventually unlocks Bozja, which is relic stuff; ultimately skins.

I know that Bozja worked. It made people do the HW and SB alliance raids and they came up in the alliance raid roulette all the time in Shadowbringers. But probably doesn't help as much now that Shadowbringers isn't current and the relics no longer matter for stat purposes.

I don't know if Grand Endeavor worked or not because I haven't done the alliance raid roulette since those quests released.

What I would suggest is core things that you “wouldn’t want to be without”.

AKA blue quests, that players recommend new players do.

[NekoMataMata]

Nerf all the roulette's experiences and then make it scale by how many duties in that roulette you have unlocked. With all duties unlocked it'll be the same rate or even slightly better than what it is now. With the bare minimum it won't be nearly as rewarding. Make it public knowledge by making it similar to how mentor roulette shows uncompleted duties in its tab(but don't prevent people from queueing even if they don't have them). Each roulette shows your duty completion(X/X duties), with a list of unfinished duties that you'd need to complete to get the maximum reward.

It's such a simple idea and it makes too much sense though.

It's not really just alliance raids experience that's insane with just CT. Even levelling is really good with just the first two duties in the game unlocked. The alt that I have attached to my forums profile(same character I got to level 30 for the Dynamis freebie) got to 50 from just logging in daily and doing leveling for a week and a half, despite not even being at the level 20 MSQ spot.



For anyone that thinks this is way too out there, I want to point some things out. Leveling up a secondary job is not necessary for the MSQ. The MSQ will level one job(sometimes more with road to 80) to level cap easily.

This wouldn't even lock you out of roulettes and some roulettes would still give really good bonuses even with just the MSQ duties finished. For example, the majority of levelling duties are MSQ, with the exceptions being a handful of ARR/HW/SB dungeons, since ShB/EW don't have non-MSQ X1-X9 dungeons. It's really not that big of an ask.

[Iscah]

Make the Roulette require everything you can unlock (based on level and progress through the raids) to be unlocked, even if it is just the first raid and alliance raid of each expansion.

"Just the first raid of each expansion" sounds like a terrible requirement, and would likely skew the roulettes even more in favour of maybe coming up quicker but rarely being anything but that first duty, because it only takes one person to drag it down there.

I know that Bozja worked. It made people do the HW and SB alliance raids and they came up in the alliance raid roulette all the time in Shadowbringers.

I've said before, I think they handled the "incentivise HW/SB alliance raids" step of the Bozja relics really poorly.

The pacing is dreadful. You have to do it all in a rush, six of each raid series, before you can progress to the next step of the relic – and then you never touch it again for subsequent relics.

It also gave equal weight to all three raids in the series, giving people no incentive to unlock beyond the first and easiest raid of the set. Result: endless Void Ark and Rabanastre. (Likewise for the eight-man raids, where the frequency of duties suggests that a lot of people never unlocked beyond #3 of 12 – probably not coincidentally, the first of the series that will give you the second type of tokens.)

It could have been handled so much better.

ARR had already shown a better way, with unique tokens dropping from each of the three alliance raids for Gift of the Archmagus. This could have been done for the Bozja relics: require collecting a set of three tokens from the three raids, one complete set required per relic. People then do less runs at once, more slowly over time, and have to unlock and run all three raids equally.

Likewise for the eight-man raids. Drop unique tokens from the final raid of each tier, and force people to unlock all twelve raids to get the tokens. No alternate sources, just straight up "if you want your relic, you need to have unlocked all optional content in the game".

In short, create a grind that encourages a width of content being unlocked, and benefits those who put in the work earlier. Not just incentivising a single duty that can be run over and over while neglecting the rest.

[CaptainLagbeard]

"Just the first raid of each expansion" sounds like a terrible requirement, and would likely skew the roulettes even more in favour of maybe coming up quicker but rarely being anything but that first duty, because it only takes one person to drag it down there.

I don't mean ONLY the first ones... But for example, when someone reaches 70, they'd need to unlock Rabanastre and Deltascape V1 to before they can do Alliance Raid and Normal Raid roulette respectively... And after beating those, either by doing them specifically or getting them through the Roulette, they would then have to go unlock Ridorana and/or Deltascape V2 to do the roulette again.

[Daeriion_Aeradiir]

I don't mean ONLY the first ones... But for example, when someone reaches 70, they'd need to unlock Rabanastre and Deltascape V1 to before they can do Alliance Raid and Normal Raid roulette respectively... And after beating those, either by doing them specifically or getting them through the Roulette, they would then have to go unlock Ridorana and/or Deltascape V2 to do the roulette again.

Easy circumvention: Unlock the first raid & alliance raid, instant leave if you get them in the roulette ever to make sure they're never completed, allowing someone to bypass your requirement trivially. Made even easier by the fact that even post ilvl cheese fix, CT is still going to be so heavily biased in the roulette that you can leave anything but it and you'll have a very high % of seeing it on the next go anyway.

If you want an airtight solution, you cannot ever give the end-user an inch. Because history has shown they will take any inch and drive it out over a mile. For something like Alliance roulette, it would have to be an all or nothing in terms of forced unlocks.

Back to the topic, If I were to target this issue from my own experiences as a former game developer, I would analyze and target the exact reason why they only want to do CT in the first place - the time/exp efficiency...along with the issue that quite frankly, a lot of people may not even realize these raids exist due to the fact they're out of the way (not everyone looks up guides/side content recommendations on the internet). Move CT out of alliance roulette and into its own roulette/MSQ roulette, don't touch its rewards. Instead of punishing these players, offer an incentive to unlock the rest by making a new roulette that required all other alliance raids unlocked (that your current level & MSQ prog can do) so that they could not be cheesed in any form. Give a very large reward for this roulette, so that the time/exp efficiency ratio easily matches CT's, if not outpaces it. If the other raids are 2x longer when looking at them as a whole, give them 2.5 times the rewards.

Players can be easily bribed, especially MMO players, the genre that is the king of skinnerbox and reward-based player habit control techniques. Even the devs of FF14 know this, as their mega buff to MSQ roulette showed.


To tackle the 2nd issue of visibility, While not making them forced by the MSQ, I would naturally push players towards them - I think the weapons series in SHB was well executed in this fashion, where the introduction to the sidequest happens near an MSQ point and is mentioned in a cutscene. Spawn a new NPC next to Tataru in the Rising Stones that is something like "Scion Emissary". At the end of each of the .1x patch series for that expansion's MSQ (or at the beginning of it) have Tataru specifically namedrop this NPC in an unskippable cutscene, focus on them, and tell the player this NPC may have some grand adventures in store with them when they have time. Mark them in blue quests and have them give info blurbs about the upcoming alliance raid series the player accepts the quest for, then redirect them to the NPC that gives the alliance raid quest proper. I would also give one of those 'I understand what I must do' info blurbs about alliance raids, specifically mention glamours, gear, rewards and the unlocking of a new roulette with major rewards for completing all of them so the player has an endgoal in mind when completing them instead of wondering what completing these quests will ultimately reward them with or if it'd be worth their time.

This creates a nexus point where all of the same content can easily be located instead of having to search high and low throughout the world to find which blue quests may unlock this same sort of content, along with pushing it close to the MSQ so that the other alliance raids have much heightened visibility.

[kaynide]

Scion Emissary.

This is solid, but I’d say put one in each town, and also have them trade in all the older endgame niche currencies (so raiders coins, the craftable item trade in thing, totems). If not actually a shop, then telling people where to go to spend the currency.

[CaptainLagbeard]

Easy circumvention: Unlock the first raid & alliance raid, instant leave if you get them in the roulette ever to make sure they're never completed, allowing someone to bypass your requirement trivially. Made even easier by the fact that even post ilvl cheese fix, CT is still going to be so heavily biased in the roulette that you can leave anything but it and you'll have a very high % of seeing it on the next go anyway.

If you want an airtight solution, you cannot ever give the end-user an inch. Because history has shown they will take any inch and drive it out over a mile. For something like Alliance roulette, it would have to be an all or nothing in terms of forced unlocks.

There is no perfect solution to the issue, maybe to limit people leaving the raid they could extend the penalties for leaving the Alliance Raid Roulette... From 30 minutes to 1 hour, and the penalty hits anyone who leaves before the first boss rather than just the first person to leave... That way there's more incentive to stick with the raid as it will take less time to finish the raid than waiting out the penalty.

[UkcsAlias]

My suggestion, something as big a deal flying in 2.x like…

Flying is helpful in some cases, but i would not be surprised if most will still not care.
4 man mounts doesnt help solo players at all
Alliance raids are rarely beneficial for xp as they are at the level cap of the expansion. Even normal duties suffer here, and adjusting that sounds like a bad idea to me. Only its roulette should benefit here (and simply bump up its requirements there)

And exactly for that last one simply demanding players to have them unlocked to unlock that roulette is fine. The system already exists for mentor roulette. And to allow even more xp: split the roulettes to f2p and paid, giving 2 xp boosts (f2p is what we have now with only a lvl 50 requirement while being able to do 60 - and soon 70, while paid excludes the f2p raids - or maybe also include 70, but using a diffirent name)

A lot of players are VERY lazy, if any glam feature is locked behind a tedious thing to them, they simply wont care or do it over a very long time.

Having a roulette locked however constantly does push that in their face, motivating them to unlock it eventualy.