What could go wrong it they put CT in MSQ roulette?

[Voidmage]

Labyrinth of the Ancients and Crystal Tower are designed to be easier so people get used to the massive number of players in one setting.

I actually agree with this part here.
Crystal tower is the very first true raid for new players and taking that would probably do more damage imo.

I think the best solution, outside of ilvl adjusting, would be to rework those three raids and "modernize" them.
The mechanics are old and teach wrong things, some parts are clunky and even if a run took longer, there are some kinda obscure mechanics.
If we turn it into a four man then the whole raid feeling will get lost.

If it was redone partly to be more in line with SB raids nowadays then it would be better.
Players would think twice of using it as a cheap daily, new players would actually learn something and the whole thing would be more interesting.

Of course, my personal favourite would be to simply make all raids mandatory for story potential alone but I am probably alone with that one.

No matter what, those raids are a problem imo and I really hope that after the duty support of old dungeons is done, they look into this topic next.

[Azurarok]

Of course, my personal favourite would be to simply make all raids mandatory for story potential alone but I am probably alone with that one.

I also want them to either make more raids either mandatory or at least write stories assuming the player has done them at the time. If leaving them optional at least note that it's recommended they play those prior

[Appleboops]

Yknow .. I just stopped doing the Alliance Raid roulette for this reason O.o problem solved
But yea, I have a similar "qualm" with the fact that the Infrit, Garuda, and Titan low-level fights are in the "Leveling" roulette .. those are "Trials" as well but they're 4-man content so they can't go into the Trial roulette. I wish they could because they're tedious to get so often but it is what it is. I see the Roulette as a job at this point, a grind where the cost is time spent assisting lower or newer players, and the reward is Tomes and a big XP chunk.

[vincexorcized]

I also want them to either make more raids either mandatory or at least write stories assuming the player has done them at the time. If leaving them optional at least note that it's recommended they play those prior

I’m all for it too!

[Appleboops]

Similarly I wish they'd put the Heavensward and Stormblood final MSQs into the MSQ Roulette .. just to vary it a bit more O.o
Though that would mean they'd need to make the cutscenes in those runs unskippable, eh I'd still prefer it that way though

[Aidorouge]

Yep, but as Gullis pointed out, it's a 4-person. If CT was put into MSQ roulette, Porta, Cast, or Prae would fill and pop before CT got anywhere close, leading to CT having abysmal to impossible queue times.

I loathe CT as well, but sadly, putting it in MSQ roulette isn't a fix unless they completely revamp how the queue system works. At least they made it a bit better by addressing the ilvl cheese?

Not to mention that MSQ roulette barely pops as-is because a lot of people (especially veterans) actively avoid it. Case in point, I imagine the reason why most people here ACTUALLY want Crystal Tower shifted over to MSQ roulette is because they don't queue for it anyway, so nothing is lost for them.

For that matter, people showing up in roulettes is entirely dependent on them having unlocked the content in the first place. Contrary to popular belief, a LOT of people never bother to unlock Mhach and beyond, so Alliance Raid roulette would probably take longer to pop without Crystal Tower in there. It's also the same reason Normal Raid roulette is far slower than Trial roulette despite requiring the same number of people; It's entirely optional and a lot of people don't want to do it/don't know it exists.

In fact, I'd almost bet money that if Crystal Tower got removed, people would just end up seeing Void Ark over and over again from the people who unlocked it, tried it, found it beyond their skill level/not fun and promptly abandoned the rest of the questline. Lord knows I didn't have fun with Mhach, or Ivalice for that matter, and regret unlocking them at all because now they've "polluted" that entire roulette and I would sooner skip the rewards than get pulled into them synced ever again.

Incidentally... "unlock cheese" to make sure someone's alt ONLY gets Crystal Tower is very much a real thing. Ever wondered why the first two Alexander fights are also the most common? Same thing. Unlocks Normal Raid roulette, but drastically limits the options to some of the easiest fights while still yielding the same rewards. I imagine the same happens with any other optional dungeon or trial not tied to unlocking flight in a zone.
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Of course, my personal favourite would be to simply make all raids mandatory for story potential alone but I am probably alone with that one.

Oof, no bloody thank you. Crystal Tower alone already bottlenecks a lot of sprouts into giving up on the game, or at least that's been a frequent occurrence on Dynamis where you have new people (or alts of existing players) having to beg others to help them get through the MSQ because of CT alone (with Labyrinth of the Ancients being the worst because you still need to find 11 other people even when unsync). Hell, personally if you told me I HAD to do Nier to get out of Shadowbringers, I would just stay stuck in Shadowbringers forever I guess.

A better solution would just be to remove Crystal Tower as being mandatory, thus you don't end up with it being the the "only" Alliance Raid that some people ever unlock. At this point any concerns over "plot confusion" about G'raha are meaningless when he shows up in promotional material all the time and him being the Crystal Exarch is hardly some mind-blowing revelation. I would say Coils of Bahamut holds more story significance, but Square-Enix not only doesn't make it mandatory, but they purposefully keep it out of Normal Raid roulette even if you do unlock the whole thing.

[Astronis]

That will never, ever happen.

Queues are separated by the number of people that are queueing in.

Expert only has 1 tank, 2 dps, 1 healer
Trials only has 2 tanks, 4 dps, 2 healers
Alliance has 3 tanks, 15 dps, 6 healers

You can't mix-and-match. That's not how queues work. That's like asking a trial to be in MSQ.

Labyrinth of the Ancients and Crystal Tower are designed to be easier so people get used to the massive number of players in one setting.

Just enjoy that it's a no-brainer and you're getting EZPZ tomes. Why is this even an issue?

There is exactly one roulette that does mix-and-match on duty sizes and allows parties to queue into it--Guildhest. And you will never, EVER, randomly end up in Solemn Trinity.

I expect the same thing would happen if an Alliance raid was added to a roulette that otherwise only had four-man duties in it--the Alliances would never pop and queueing into them outside the roulette would end up taking 45-90 minutes to fill the way Solemn Trinity does.

Mentor roulette is its own thing, and even in that...despite the requirement of doing damned near everything queueable in the game in order to unlock it, I can't even remember the last time I landed in an Alliance Raid via Mentor. There are too many other, smaller groups that need one person to fill them.

[RedLolly]

A better solution would just be to remove Crystal Tower as being mandatory, thus you don't end up with it being the the "only" Alliance Raid that some people ever unlock. At this point any concerns over "plot confusion" about G'raha are meaningless when he shows up in promotional material all the time and him being the Crystal Exarch is hardly some mind-blowing revelation. I would say Coils of Bahamut holds more story significance, but Square-Enix not only doesn't make it mandatory, but they purposefully keep it out of Normal Raid roulette even if you do unlock the whole thing.

That this was the original intent during Shadowbringers! You didn't have to have Crystal Tower completed when ShB was still new!

There are several moments that initially lacked dialogue options if you hadn't completed CT because you hadn't met G'raha yet. You couldn't "Call him by his name" or say "Happy to see you awake," as the dialogue options just weren't even there. The hidden scene with the Wind-Up G'raha Tia minion made the Exarch extremely uncomfortable verses a little chuffed that you had a minion of him without completing CT, too. Those were all treated as bonus moments for players that had already built a friendship with G'raha, but it was changed because they needed him in the tower on our timeline to get him into our main crew, and it made way more sense to know him beforehand anyway.

[Aidorouge]

There is exactly one roulette that does mix-and-match on duty sizes and allows parties to queue into it--Guildhest. And you will never, EVER, randomly end up in Solemn Trinity.

I expect the same thing would happen if an Alliance raid was added to a roulette that otherwise only had four-man duties in it--the Alliances would never pop and queueing into them outside the roulette would end up taking 45-90 minutes to fill the way Solemn Trinity does.

Mentor roulette is its own thing, and even in that...despite the requirement of doing damned near everything queueable in the game in order to unlock it, I can't even remember the last time I landed in an Alliance Raid via Mentor. There are too many other, smaller groups that need one person to fill them.

Aye, and Guildhests is another fine example of content that people regularly don't queue for, either because they're vets who find it boring/unrewarding, or because they're new players/alts who don't care about/don't know about it being required for Mentor roulette.

Every roulette issue ultimately comes to down whether someone unlocked it to begin with, and even if they did, if they care to run it. Personally I don't run any roulette but Guildhest and Frontlines anymore, because Stormblood and Shadowbringers did a doozy on me regarding my confidence in being able to run later dungeons, trials, and raids that it's literally better for everyone else if I don't show up at all and they wait for someone better. Even Heavensward had me taking penalties for the first time instead of running the content. (Mhach and Aetherochemical Research Facility were instant-leaves.)
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That this was the original intent during Shadowbringers! You didn't have to have Crystal Tower completed when ShB was still new!

There are several moments that initially lacked dialogue options if you hadn't completed CT because you hadn't met G'raha yet. You couldn't "Call him by his name" or say "Happy to see you awake," as the dialogue options just weren't even there. The hidden scene with the Wind-Up G'raha Tia minion made the Exarch extremely uncomfortable verses a little chuffed that you had a minion of him without completing CT, too. Those were all treated as bonus moments for players that had already built a friendship with G'raha, but it was changed because they needed him in the tower on our timeline to get him into our main crew, and it made way more sense to know him beforehand anyway.

Which is fine for those who did Crystal Tower to have those moments if they wanted them, but not all of us are going to care as much, and while I likely would have unlocked and tried Crystal Tower anyway, it doesn't hold the same significance to me. Personally I spent Shadowbringers being highly annoyed at G'raha for endangering mine and the Scions lives every time he made us blackout (the time I almost got done in by "Zenos" being the last straw), to say nothing of the dubiousness of basically "kidnapping" us where in the case of the Scions specifically, he basically forced them to live for years on a doomed world.

I don't consider myself buddy-buddy with the catboy (my least favorite Scion even), and never missed a moment to scold him for his actions and giving him exasperated sighs and "if I really have to..." style dialogue options the whole time I was on the First. Shadowbringers has definitely been the most frustrated and frowny I've seen my Warrior of Light in cutscenes and I blame all of that on G'raha, lol.

I will say its interesting they added any scene related to a minion though, as I just always assumed every NPC ignores whatever, or whoever, you have following you around.

[Striker44]

Isn't this a straight up lie? Mentor roullette does exactly this.

It's disappointing to see not only such a comment toward a fellow forum-goer, but people actually "liking" it, when it's straight up false. No, mentor roulette does not do that. Mentor roulette takes the people that queue into it and then feeds them into *other* instances that need people. It does not form its own groups like other roulettes. For example, if 1 tank, 1 healer, and 2 dps join Mentor, it doesn't take those 4 mentors and put them together in their own group - it sends them to other groups that need each of those roles.

Unlike said mentor roulette, every other roulette forms groups directly from its own queue. If you tried putting Alliance raids in MSQ, it would never pop, because every time you had 1 tank, 1 healer, and 2 dps in the queue, it would group them together and generate a 4-person instance from the relevant MSQ options. You would never get the 3 tanks, 6 healers, and 15 dps you need for the Alliance raids.

And we wonder why this forum has the reputation it does...