Time Limit In Dungeons

[Lunasea]

The timer is purely just a griefing mechanism in its current iteration. There are two arguments for it, one being an elitist douchebag selfish perspective that punishes people who want to enjoy the game or simply aren’t great at these types of games. The other is an infrastructure standpoint, that no other MMO who has instancing in place through a queue system faces, and needs timers to force a queue progression.

1. People are new to a dungeon/mission. They watch the cutscenes. Wipe a couple times to each encounter figuring it out. You’re practically out of time by the last boss giving a couple wipes. Sure future encounters will go smoothly, but those people that were just thrown into your group through duty finder may not have experienced this. And may wipe again due to learning curves.

You can take the elitist attitude and say, well you should youtube the fight or research it ahead of time. I do this because I do not go into situations without knowing everything inside and out. As a tank, I can’t just wing mechanics. However a great deal of people who play these games (and lets be real here, the people who pay the bills for the servers, so the hardcore can keep playing) are casual players, who want to go in and be accepting of difficult challenges, and work through it. Imposing a time limit doesn’t help them learn any faster or be better players, it punishes them for playing the way they want to play.

Now god forbid you have people that want to experience the game as it was created and presented to them. Which means watching cutscenes. Reading story dialog. Well guess what, you better plow through that stuff or skip it because that timer keeps going. And you know what, those elitist jerks who joined with you will probably give you hell because you’re watching that cutscene. I myself haven’t seen the last several cutscenes because I know that if I sat through and watched them, I’d be harassed by the people in my own group (let alone outside sources, which some mechanics in this game are so retardedly designed to alleviate, but that’s a totally separate rant).

So the people who realistically pay for the game to be in service, need to submit to being berated and harassed and skip content in the game, or endure harassment and being berated for watching those cutscenes.

2. This brings up some of those horribly designed missions, such as Praetorum (sp?). if you did watch all the cutscenes, and were a normal group that wiped once or twice learning some of the fights, you’d be pretty much out of time by Ultima Weapon B. That’s if you even had enough time to learn all the mechanics of Ultima Weapon A.

Once again, the system punishes, it doesn’t solve any problems other than to grief players.

3. FFS let us be able to open our social window, and invite friends/company/linkshell members to our group, who can then teleport to the mission and continue. Why for god sakes are we absolutely forced to wait through the duty finder for pugs, when we have ready, willing and able friends who could fill the spot. You know. While the time is running out.

The whole system of no communication while in instances was sound in theory. Prevent harassment from players. But it doesn’t. It just hurts them. Harassment is coming from other party members. It’s coming from your timers. It’s coming from your engineering decisions. Square, your restrictions are hurting players and in no way are helping like you intended.

4. Let people queue with their chocobo for runs in progress. I can queue for a dungeon normally, but can’t join one in progress and hopefully get through the queue faster because I’m trying to rank up my bird or clear my hunting log? This is absurd. Just remove him or suppress him when the queue pops. Really. You made a came of this complexity, and it’s simple engineering decisions like this that make you all look like buffons (really, all the limitations imposted for being mounted, or having a companion out did that already, but lets leave that for another thread).




So you, Square, are absolutely hell bent on keeping the timer in place. Lets see who you are hurting:

1. People who wait long times in the queue. They could very well deselect the option to join a run in progress, but that limits the chances of getting into an instance. Turning it on, they get put into a dungeon with only a few min left, get kicked out, and wait a long time in the queue AGAIN.

2. The people who want to enjoy a game you worked so hard to make. Your timer punishes players for watching cutscenes and reading dialog. Plain and simple, hardcore fact. You are punishing them because the timer keeps going.

3. Everyone who isn’t end game geared, or 100% affluent in the content of a mission. Look at Praetorium. That place is massive. And if you’re not in full darklight, if you haven’t ran it and know every fight inside out, or if you even want to watch the badass story that occurs; then the time limit just punishes you for making it to some awesome fights, but not enough time to finish them.



You want to keep the timers in place. Here are who you are supporting:

1. The elitists who will jump on and troll this post. They think the game is easy, they thing the game needs a challenge, they thing players should be punished for going slow. Those selfish jackoffs account for the smallest of the small percentage of subscriptions. These are the people who berate others for not being overgeared for content. These are the people who queue up for these 8 man missions and zone in and start the run with “GO QUICK RUN, PULL, GO NOW, SKIP THE MOVIES, WATCH THEM IN THE INN, GO, GO, GO, GO”.

Does how other people play the game hinge upon your enjoyment? Sure, you’re awesome, you plow through and the timer has no impact on you. So if it was removed. What impact did that change make on you? None, that’s right, absolutely none. No, stop, just shut up. You’re an a$$ if you try and argue that point. That is an irrefutable fact. If it had no impact on you while it’s there, it has none on you while it’s gone.

2. Let’s go ahead and jump to your side and take this road. Let’s argue that the timer system is a means of progressing the queue to keep the instance servers from being overloaded. This timer system benefits everyone who plays this game and joins dungeons through the duty finder. This also is a glaring point to poor infrastructure design. Let’s not go into several other bad engineering decisions; and focus solely on how, every other MMO with an instancing system, doesn’t have timers, and doesn’t have this problem.




I’ll let that sink in for a bit.




TL;DR
1. Timers hurt people who want to enjoy the story.
2. Timers hurt people who are new to content.
3. Timers hurt people who wait in the queue only to have no time and put back into the queue.
4. Timers benefit griefers and trolls who want to sound elitist.

/rant

[Solragor]

lots of ranting snipped

Several of your points are simply not true.
I have watched every cutscene in Castrum, and read every bit of story dialogue and we still had well over an hour left after finishing. ( And I was in queue with two healers who also watched the cutscenes, so no just running ahead was not really an option for this group )

I have never ordered people to not watch the cutscenes in the instance, and as I mentioned before, had never had any problems with the timers provided that there's no excessive wiping (5 times and upwards on ONE boss) going on.
So let's do this again.

Let's assume that everyone is in the instance for the first time. Let's also assume that this is a random pug. With these points established, I can safely say that if you're not completely unable to recognize and learn encounter mechanics there is no reason in this game to wipe more than a few times to any one boss.
Yes, there are the bad apples, yes there may always be that one boss that one particular person doesn't play well with, but in general even with watching every cutscene and 1-3 wipes on every boss there is more than enough time to finish the dungeon.
Even if you would remove the timer, bad players would still be bad players and you would not finish the dungeon even if you had four hours available.
Every other mmo that doesn't have timers encounters other problems, namely that on peak times instance servers have the nasty habit to be full. Full why? Because people wait in the dungeon, people go afk in the dungeon for extended periods of time, people roleplay in dungeons (which is not per se wrong) and take up space on the servers without being removed from it if necessary.
In a game where there is limited capacity serverside (which exists in every game) for dungeons, or which has a limited amount of spots reserved for any particular dungeon, there needs to be a way to clear these spots to prevent the system from choking.
In general, other mmos don't have so much cutscenes and story in dungeons, and also don't generally take that long either and if people wipe multiple times without a chance for a kill they will usually leave on their own.
The peak times in other mmos also tend to concentrate on any -one- particular time span, because most mmos have region-specific servers which only get linked in dungeon queues with servers of the same region. In this game, peak times occur several times a day.

You can't really accuse me of being elitist either. I watch the cutscenes myself, I'm neither very well equipped nor do I expect others to be, I don't degrade into flames or insults if there is wiping.

And yet I argue that the timer is perfectly fine.
In the rare cases I run out of time, it's simply too bad and I will have to try again.

Besides if you only do random dungeons, it's kinda your own fault if you keep getting bad groups. This is a mmo. Get social, find friends and do dungeons with them. I guarantee you, you won't ever have to do a dungeon more often than twice if you do run out of time, because there simply won't be anybody who doesn't know the fight and you won't even have long queue times if you have a full group.

And before you even try, I have also stated before that I agree with the people in favor of removing timers in one single aspect: That, if you do lose a player of your group for any reason, the timer should be paused until you have found a replacement.