Rename the game to the Crystal Tower?

[Aidorouge]

I'm back with more pointless info from my anectodal data. In the 2 weeks I ran alliance roulette, I got the in need bonus almost every day. I think it was only like twice that I didn't have it.
All as DPS.

That's surprising honestly, I've been playing for years and I rarely ever saw DPS-in-need.

But even if it was common, it still wouldn't be enough to make me queue up because the rewards aren't worth it to me.

[Kewitt]

I can't recall the last time I got a Crystal tower raid in AR routelle

[AlliciaCapulet]

I don’t actually think I’ve ever posted here before, which is impressive considering I’ve been playing for five years.
So please, for the love of all that is fun and good in this world — fix the daily roulettes.

Crystal Tower alliance raid. Every. Single. Day. Weeks on end.

With all this potential content in the game, it’s truly inspiring that I get funneled back into a level 50 raid from 2013 over and over again. Variety is overrated, I guess. Why play anything new when we can relive the same nostalgia trip indefinitely?

And it’s not like there’s already little enough to do in the game these days or anything.

Oh — and while you’re at it, make sure we still get slapped with a 30-minute queue penalty when we finally snap and leave.
Oh wait.
That already happens. Perfect!

I’ll admit that I get Crystal Tower more often than any other alliance raid, but it’s not the only one that pops.

That said, my main complaint isn’t simply getting Crystal Tower. In my opinion, the real issue is how incredibly low the difficulty has become and how overgeared we are for that content.

When I queue for an Alliance Raid, I expect to spend around 30–45 minutes there. I want at least some level of engagement — mechanics to pay attention to, things to execute properly. Right now, especially with the ARR raids, they’re cleared in 15 minutes with almost no thought required.

The ARR alliance raids are the perfect example of this problem. They’re extremely easy, bosses melt instantly, and most mechanics can be ignored entirely. There’s no tension, no risk, and no sense of coordination needed.

Playing a game with zero pressure or engagement becomes boring very quickly. Maybe the solution would be to enforce item level sync closer to what the raid originally released with, and possibly revert some of the heavy nerfs so that these raids feel more like they did when they were current content.

I don’t understand why “old content” needs to be stripped of mechanics and challenge just to be cleared faster. Many players never experienced these raids at their intended difficulty. And even if the content is old, when I queue for something, I still expect at least a minimum level of challenge.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

I haven't queued much into AR roulette in recent weeks. Times when I did queued in, collectively it's probably half CT pops and half non-CT pops. 9 out of 10 times I just insta-bail the CT pops.

I don't think there's much change happening for years because the time it took for me to get any pops when I queued those Ivalice/NieRs manually are still almost always longer than 20-30 minutes. Sometimes up to hours even because any players that bailed or did not accept the commence prompt would mean that there's a good chance those 23 other players will be siphoned away, putting me back to square one once more. The least they could've done here is to allow backfilling like Frontlines does. The wait time is just beyond silly at this point.

[MikeCake]

The last 15 AR I spammed for Aetherwells were all the 3 CTs, just a bad streak of luck, but it should be obvious that the most unlocked content is where the players get funneled into.

[Aidorouge]

I don’t understand why “old content” needs to be stripped of mechanics and challenge just to be cleared faster. Many players never experienced these raids at their intended difficulty. And even if the content is old, when I queue for something, I still expect at least a minimum level of challenge.

Crystal Tower isn't easy because it's old, it's easy because it's mandatory. Square-Enix pretty much CAN'T make it hard otherwise it would roadblock countless people from ever getting out of ARR.

If Square-Enix hadn't forced people into doing it because they wrote themselves into a corner, the roulette options would probably be more varied because Crystal Tower isn't the "only one" the people queuing it have unlocked, and though the queues would probably be slower, at least most of the people doing it would be those who actually WANT to do alliance raids as a whole instead of being a bunch of new people "only there for the MSQ" and veterans being made to escort them for the umpteenth time.

[AlliciaCapulet]

Square-Enix pretty much CAN'T make it hard otherwise it would roadblock countless people from ever getting out of ARR.

I don't think this is necessary true. Every 24 man dungeon can be carried with some dead weight in the team. It's true for current content, and was true back then too.

A lot of players are bad and can't access harder content because the game doesn't allow them to learn on the mandatory stuff. This is one of the biggest issue.

Back in ARR, we didn't had loads of content. I started on Jenova when it opened on 2.2 on April 04 2014. Back then, we only had Ifrit, Titan and Garuda. We had few dungeons. We had the first step of crystal tower. And the first steps of coils of bahamut. So, of course to keep us challenged and engaged in the game, everything had a chance to wipe us. Even the early fight of Garuda/ifrit/Titan could wipe us back then, I'm not talking of the hard mode or extreme, but the normal one. Because we were only 4 in it, if the healer was going down, the team was going down. But peolpe managed anyway to get pass everything. Dungeons were unique, had mecanics to do, and again, were wipable. The moment you had a bad tank or bad heal, it was a wipe. But what I did like of the community back then, it's that most of the people were trying to help people to improve and clear the content.

But yeah, you are right on the fact. SE have been taking the "easy road" for mandatory stuff, at least since Shadowbringer, making everything before the current expansion super easy. And I don't get it. I mean, if I were a new player, I wouldn't be in a hurry to "catch up" the current expansion, I'd enjoy everything the game have to offer before. And I'd like to be challenged for that content too. Because let's be honnest, a new player is, in a way, in a better situation than most of us are : They have lots of new content to explore, while the majority of people on the current patch "waits" for new content to comes out.

[Aidorouge]

I don't think this is necessary true. Every 24 man dungeon can be carried with some dead weight in the team. It's true for current content, and was true back then too.

A lot of players are bad and can't access harder content because the game doesn't allow them to learn on the mandatory stuff. This is one of the biggest issue.

But yeah, you are right on the fact. SE have been taking the "easy road" for mandatory stuff, at least since Shadowbringer, making everything before the current expansion super easy. And I don't get it. I mean, if I were a new player, I wouldn't be in a hurry to "catch up" the current expansion, I'd enjoy everything the game have to offer before. And I'd like to be challenged for that content too. Because let's be honnest, a new player is, in a way, in a better situation than most of us are : They have lots of new content to explore, while the majority of people on the current patch "waits" for new content to comes out.

Not everyone enjoys being "dead weight" though, I know I don't, that's why I actively avoid a lot of content, including normal stuff like alliance raids, and pretty much can't do other roulettes anymore due to Stormblood and Shadowbringers content being in there.

I do not in fact like spending most of my time on the floor having to be dragged across the finish line, I don't learn anything by dying to stuff I couldn't identify/was too fast to react to, and I certainly don't like having to deal with other people thinking I'm a waste of space and better off being kicked, as the case was when I kept trying to get through Ivalice before giving up and doing it all unsync because I wasn't good enough for it otherwise.

While I'm not against allowing more tools to learn, that only goes so far. A lot of people, myself included, will never be as good as you and the other players around here who claim to yawn over the normal content, and it's never been encouraging to be told such content is "brain dead" or "baby mode" only to die and fail at it constantly. Quite the opposite actually, it's discouraging to realize too late that this game is not, and never was, casual friendly and I've been playing the wrong MMO this whole time.

And if you ask a lot of veteran players here "trying to get their friends into the game" it sounds like there's TONS of new players that really do want to just rush to endgame and sit in Savage PF all day, and that's why we apparently need level 100 skips for people playing the game for the first time I guess. Which isn't comforting either to be told there's people who have never played the game before who are already skilled enough to do endgame hardcore content while I'm over three years in and can't even beat a lot of normal content while synced.