Good afternoon,
I am a player on the Materia data centre, and I have been since its creation. As I’m sure we’re all aware, the Materia and Dynamis data centres are experiencing low populations and long queue times at present, and have been for some time. Rather than complain about it, I would instead like to propose a solution, one that hopefully shouldn’t be particularly difficult or expensive to implement.
THE PROBLEM
The Preferred World Bonus to EXP gained is helpful, however it is partially offset by long queue times reducing the overall efficiency of EXP gain on those worlds. The playerbase’s usual solution is to create Party Finders and advertise them in various places, but this creates an issue of fracturing the active playerbase between those who are trying to queue through Duty Finder and those who are trying to use Party Finder, inadvertently making the queue/fill times even longer.
Furthermore, in the case of Dynamis specifically, it creates a perverse incentive to create characters on Dynamis for the bonus, then transfer off to a different server for the short queue times, thus leaving Dynamis even emptier. The Preferred World Bonus is good at incentivising players to create their characters on underpopulated worlds, but with the advent of Data Centre Travel, it has proven to be less effective at actually keeping people playing on those worlds.
THE SOLUTION
Based on past trends and developer comments, the intent in future appears to be to allow any player from any server to Data Centre Travel to any other data centre. As I’m sure Square Enix is aware, this is going to be a costly and time-intensive measure, but in light of this, I would like to propose an additional measure – one that will work even in the current state of the game, but will only grow in effectiveness as Data Centre Travel is expanded. I call this solution Adaptive Duty Finder Incentives.
Individually, every data centre should keep an hour-long running tally of all the times that an instanced duty engaged through a Duty Roulette on that data centre, has resulted in successful completion of that duty. The game already tracks completion via Duty Roulette for the purposes of one-a-day reward allocation, so this should be a relatively simple statistic to monitor.
Every hour on the hour, these numbers are compared across all data centres. For the next hour, the data centres that have the lowest amounts of completed duties gain a bonus multiplier to all rewards from their roulettes. Any player who has access to Data Centre Travel can see in their Duty Finder which data centres have the bonus, to encourage players to travel over there and queue in their Duty Finder.
Continue reading...
I am a player on the Materia data centre, and I have been since its creation. As I’m sure we’re all aware, the Materia and Dynamis data centres are experiencing low populations and long queue times at present, and have been for some time. Rather than complain about it, I would instead like to propose a solution, one that hopefully shouldn’t be particularly difficult or expensive to implement.
THE PROBLEM
The Preferred World Bonus to EXP gained is helpful, however it is partially offset by long queue times reducing the overall efficiency of EXP gain on those worlds. The playerbase’s usual solution is to create Party Finders and advertise them in various places, but this creates an issue of fracturing the active playerbase between those who are trying to queue through Duty Finder and those who are trying to use Party Finder, inadvertently making the queue/fill times even longer.
Furthermore, in the case of Dynamis specifically, it creates a perverse incentive to create characters on Dynamis for the bonus, then transfer off to a different server for the short queue times, thus leaving Dynamis even emptier. The Preferred World Bonus is good at incentivising players to create their characters on underpopulated worlds, but with the advent of Data Centre Travel, it has proven to be less effective at actually keeping people playing on those worlds.
THE SOLUTION
Based on past trends and developer comments, the intent in future appears to be to allow any player from any server to Data Centre Travel to any other data centre. As I’m sure Square Enix is aware, this is going to be a costly and time-intensive measure, but in light of this, I would like to propose an additional measure – one that will work even in the current state of the game, but will only grow in effectiveness as Data Centre Travel is expanded. I call this solution Adaptive Duty Finder Incentives.
Individually, every data centre should keep an hour-long running tally of all the times that an instanced duty engaged through a Duty Roulette on that data centre, has resulted in successful completion of that duty. The game already tracks completion via Duty Roulette for the purposes of one-a-day reward allocation, so this should be a relatively simple statistic to monitor.
Every hour on the hour, these numbers are compared across all data centres. For the next hour, the data centres that have the lowest amounts of completed duties gain a bonus multiplier to all rewards from their roulettes. Any player who has access to Data Centre Travel can see in their Duty Finder which data centres have the bonus, to encourage players to travel over there and queue in their Duty Finder.
Continue reading...