Hello! First of all, I do want to clarify that what I'm going to go over is mostly ideas I have seen in other threads, mixed with what I have been personally thinking over the past few months. With that being said, I hope at least one of those ideas has value for you.
Introduction
Roulettes serve 2 main purposes depending on the part of the game you are in.*
Usually, during new patches, roulettes work smoothly and as intended, but when downtime arrives, or people already have all they want from tomestones, the reasons to run them start to diminish. This is even more true for expert roulette, where exp isn't even a consideration as it requires max level to queue.
To address this, we must look at what affects the population of a roulette, and the main indicators I could pinpoint were the following:
Proposal 1: Exp Tomes
The first proposal is looking to address the rewards and role in need factors of roulettes. As an introduction, let me put you in a scenario:
You log in after a day of study/work to do a quick roulette before having dinner and finishing up your chores. As you get comfortable to play, you change to Dragoon and queue for leveling roulette. To your dismay, the queue time reads "18 minutes or more," and as the first 10 minutes go by, you are already sinking in the chair, thinking about what to do to make the queue more bearable. By the time the queue pops, you are slightly fed up with it; you get through it, and you have no more time to play for the night.
The system I propose would consist of "Exp" tomes being rewarded at the end of a roulette if you queue with a max-level job. This would allow you to get fast queues as Tank/Healer, filling the role in need, and as a bonus, continue progressing with the classes you DO want to level.
Points of concern
While it may feel discouraging for purists who may voice, "You should be playing the job you want to level," you can already level to max (in jobs that start at 30+) through Frontlines without ever playing the class.*
Another point of concern is that people would reach max level without knowing how to play the job in particular. Which already happens because of paid Job skips.
Finally, and the one I share concern with, is that people would stack up tomes for when a new expansion arrives. My proposal would make it so unspent Exp tomes expire when a new expansion is released, preventing people from insta-leveling everything to the new level cap as soon as the servers go live. But I would leave this up for discussion and more careful consideration.
Possible implementation
A way to implement exp tomes would be as a book you get in your inventory, similar to savage books or relic materials. I would much prefer adding a currency in the currency tab for it, but we already know that SE is very adamant against this.
The way to exchange the books would be through an NPC that offers a repeatable, level-scaled, yellow quest with a multi-item turn-in.*
My proposal would propose that it takes 4 or 5 books to level up a job, and the amount of books yielded per roulette would be something like this:
I would also make note that the roulette tome bonuses would be awarded on the first run of the day, as part of the roulette reward. While the Role-in-need bonus would be repeatable for as many times as a player wants to help the Duty roulette.
To recap
If you run a duty with a job that isn't max level, then you acquire exp as normal. If you run it at max level, you acquire exp tomes.
The goal of exp tomes would be to incentivize players into running duties with their max-level jobs, to increase the duty pool that the roulette can fit them into, and to incentivize players to fit role-in-need requests from the duty finder.
Exp tomes in Expert particularly would supply a reward for players that don't need or want tomestone items anymore, giving them an additional reason to keep running it.
Proposal 2: Dungeon Modifiers
Dungeon modifiers would look to address the burnout issue that many players seem to take with Expert roulette. As we all know, after patches .0 and .1, the expert roulette turns into a coin flip between 2 dungeons, and a simple but effective way to spice things up with more variety, is dungeon modifiers.
If you have played Destiny before, you are probably familiar with Nightfall modifiers. For those who haven't, a TLDR is: Every week, the Dungeon playlist in Destiny picks random modifiers, some positive and some detrimental. Playing into the positive effects lets you earn the weekly reward, and how you play the dungeon switches up depending on the modifiers.
I will attempt to translate some of the Destiny 2 modifiers into FFXIV below as some ideas:
And some suggestions I may add:
Finally, I would also add a modifier called Sprout's Adventure, which automatically triggers when someone is a first-timer on the duty, overriding any other effect. This effect would put players in the ilvl of the duty +10, with the goal of making the experience for a first timer closer to when the dungeon was on-patch.
Points of concern
I understand some people dislike or may not want to engage with modifiers, so for those people I would propose that either Saturdays or Sundays is a no-modifier day. Either that, or Reset Day.
Another point of concern is that players may get skewed into certain jobs because a modifier benefits them or because a modifier makes it hard for their favorite job. This is intended by design; having people pick a job based on modifiers is the general goal with the modifiers, letting them "switch things up" to avoid burnout.
To continue, difficulty would also be a point of concern for a group of players; to balance things out, I would prefer if each negative modifier was rolled along with a positive one. Making it so, if you make use of the positive modifier, you nullify or make almost trivial the negative one.
Another point of concern would be sprouts or first-timers for a duty, which I addressed in the last paragraph of the suggestions with the Sprout's Adventure modifier.
Possible implementations
On a surface layer, this is a suggestion with expert dungeons in mind first, but it would bring value to other MSQ dungeons and optional dungeons, but for this to work, it would need much more work to ensure things work properly.
For the display of the current modifiers, there could be 2 ways: day/week-based modifiers that show in the Timers/Duty finder menus. Or random modifiers that only appear when you enter the dungeon. The day/week-based modifiers would work much better, as they allow people to make farm parties on "good modifier days" for glamour, capping tomes, etc. While random modifiers will keep you on your toes every time you enter the dungeon, there is also the possible negative effect of people only rolling modifiers they dislike.
Proposal 3: Retooled dungeons for max level
The concept of this consists of taking a couple of dungeons per patch, from early points in the MSQ, and retooling them to be done with max level kits.
For example: Satasha retold
- Trash pulls have double or triple the enemies (as the jellyfishies would be harmless if kept the same), as we have many more mitigation and crowd control tools nowadays.
- The first and second bosses have mechanics added to them.
- The first boss shoots a series of lightning cones, the circle AoE becomes a fast in-and-out attack, a tank buster is added, and paralysis on a random attacker now and then (gotta keep Esuna useful), and by the end of the fight the Coeurl dashes around.
- The second boss has pirates with cannons periodically assault the room, shooting large AoE explosions that players have to dodge and bait (think Eruptions from UWU); the adds gain stacking strength if not dealt with quickly (minor DPS check/target priority mechanic), and the pirate boss itself does cleave attacks similar to Lyon's Heart of Nature from Bozja, adding bleed stacks when hit.
- The third boss is replaced with Satasha (hard) kraken.
The goal of this concept is to generate pseudo-new content with little dev time. Most of the things I have described for this Satasha example are things we already have in the game, coded, and executing in other fights. This is just a plea to make better use of those same assets.
Another few examples of filler mechanics they can add into almost any boss are stacks, spreads, towers, tankbusters, tidal waves, soaks, gazes, directional parries, etc. They have many flavors of those coded in the game, and just by sprinkling them across older content, they can make what feels like an almost different dungeon (save for visuals).
Pros:
Points of concern
"I don't want to run old content in my roulette; I want new content." While I can understand the sentiment, having this feeling and losing the 50/50 and getting Lapis Manalis a week in a row when you want to run Aetherfront feels also terrible. At least by having retooled dungeons, you would skew the chances of getting "new" content in your favor.
Another point of concern would be that new players would have longer queue times for their MSQ dungeon of the patch, and while that may be possible, the lure of the retooled dungeons is meant to incentivize players into doing Expert more often and, by proxy, reduce the overall queue time of the roulette.
No less important, rewards would be another concern. I would propose that on top of dropping the old dungeon gear (for glamour hunters), they could also drop multiple materia clusters, extra tomestones, or even dyes as part of the chest rewards. Another interesting change would be an increased minion drop rate from the dungeon.
Possible implementations
As the goal of this is to lure more players into Expert roulette, both the rewards and engagement of the content are the main priority. Therefore, I think that keeping the scope to 1 or 2 retooled dungeons every patch would be reasonable. Even then, 2 dungeons may be pushing it.
Most of the other implementation is described above, with mechanics getting shuffled into existing environments scaled up to level 100 to provide a pseudo-new experience of the dungeon.
Continue reading...
Introduction
Roulettes serve 2 main purposes depending on the part of the game you are in.*
- To fill spots in the parties of people that need to clear said dungeon for the first time.
- To get tomestones of the current capped kind, in order to upgrade or obtain better gear.
Usually, during new patches, roulettes work smoothly and as intended, but when downtime arrives, or people already have all they want from tomestones, the reasons to run them start to diminish. This is even more true for expert roulette, where exp isn't even a consideration as it requires max level to queue.
To address this, we must look at what affects the population of a roulette, and the main indicators I could pinpoint were the following:
- Rewards
- Role & Role in need
- Burnout of the content
Proposal 1: Exp Tomes
The first proposal is looking to address the rewards and role in need factors of roulettes. As an introduction, let me put you in a scenario:
You log in after a day of study/work to do a quick roulette before having dinner and finishing up your chores. As you get comfortable to play, you change to Dragoon and queue for leveling roulette. To your dismay, the queue time reads "18 minutes or more," and as the first 10 minutes go by, you are already sinking in the chair, thinking about what to do to make the queue more bearable. By the time the queue pops, you are slightly fed up with it; you get through it, and you have no more time to play for the night.
The system I propose would consist of "Exp" tomes being rewarded at the end of a roulette if you queue with a max-level job. This would allow you to get fast queues as Tank/Healer, filling the role in need, and as a bonus, continue progressing with the classes you DO want to level.
Points of concern
While it may feel discouraging for purists who may voice, "You should be playing the job you want to level," you can already level to max (in jobs that start at 30+) through Frontlines without ever playing the class.*
Another point of concern is that people would reach max level without knowing how to play the job in particular. Which already happens because of paid Job skips.
Finally, and the one I share concern with, is that people would stack up tomes for when a new expansion arrives. My proposal would make it so unspent Exp tomes expire when a new expansion is released, preventing people from insta-leveling everything to the new level cap as soon as the servers go live. But I would leave this up for discussion and more careful consideration.
Possible implementation
A way to implement exp tomes would be as a book you get in your inventory, similar to savage books or relic materials. I would much prefer adding a currency in the currency tab for it, but we already know that SE is very adamant against this.
The way to exchange the books would be through an NPC that offers a repeatable, level-scaled, yellow quest with a multi-item turn-in.*
My proposal would propose that it takes 4 or 5 books to level up a job, and the amount of books yielded per roulette would be something like this:
- Expert: 2 tomes
- High-level dungeons: 2 tomes
- Leveling: 2 tomes
- Trials: 1 tome
- Main Scenario: 4 tomes
- Guildhest: 0
- Normal Raid: 1 tome
- Alliance Raids: 1 tome ARR, 3 tomes any other Alliance
- Mentor: 2 tomes (averaged from all the other roulettes)
- Frontline: 4 tomes
- Role in need bonus (*as Max level job): 1 tome*
I would also make note that the roulette tome bonuses would be awarded on the first run of the day, as part of the roulette reward. While the Role-in-need bonus would be repeatable for as many times as a player wants to help the Duty roulette.
To recap
If you run a duty with a job that isn't max level, then you acquire exp as normal. If you run it at max level, you acquire exp tomes.
The goal of exp tomes would be to incentivize players into running duties with their max-level jobs, to increase the duty pool that the roulette can fit them into, and to incentivize players to fit role-in-need requests from the duty finder.
Exp tomes in Expert particularly would supply a reward for players that don't need or want tomestone items anymore, giving them an additional reason to keep running it.
Proposal 2: Dungeon Modifiers
Dungeon modifiers would look to address the burnout issue that many players seem to take with Expert roulette. As we all know, after patches .0 and .1, the expert roulette turns into a coin flip between 2 dungeons, and a simple but effective way to spice things up with more variety, is dungeon modifiers.
If you have played Destiny before, you are probably familiar with Nightfall modifiers. For those who haven't, a TLDR is: Every week, the Dungeon playlist in Destiny picks random modifiers, some positive and some detrimental. Playing into the positive effects lets you earn the weekly reward, and how you play the dungeon switches up depending on the modifiers.
I will attempt to translate some of the Destiny 2 modifiers into FFXIV below as some ideas:
- Attrition: Self-healing abilities are diminished (or almost nullified) in non-healer jobs. Healer actions are greatly improved.
- Epic: Enemies appear in greater number, and a wave of enemies will ambush you in boss fights—paired with Daybreak.
- Daybreak: Players have Haste during the dungeon—paired with Epic
And some suggestions I may add:
- Critical range: Increased critical chance according to the distance of your last attack. 10-yalms give a 50% critical chance buff for your next action; 25-yalms make the next action guaranteed a crit.
- Corpse explosion: When enemies die, they drop a small pool that deals constant damage to both players and other enemies.
- Leonogg's Curse: Periodically, Noggins will fall on top of the players, similar to Leonogg's Falling Nightmare attack from The Strayborough Deadwalk.
- Curse of the Undead: When an enemy dies, a wisp/ghost spawns in their place. To compensate, all enemies in the dungeon (excluding bosses) have 60% of their normal HP. When a player dies, they become a zombie that attacks allies; casting a Revive will turn them back to life.*
- Duty action modifiers: These can be things such as the sword/shield from Ivalice raids spawning along the dungeon, Bozjan lost actions, etc.
- Dynamis Surge: Enemies killed greatly increase limit break generation, to the point of having 2 or 3 limit breaks between each boss. Additionally, the light party LB gauge is 2 bars instead of 1, and 3 bars instead of 2 in bosses.
Finally, I would also add a modifier called Sprout's Adventure, which automatically triggers when someone is a first-timer on the duty, overriding any other effect. This effect would put players in the ilvl of the duty +10, with the goal of making the experience for a first timer closer to when the dungeon was on-patch.
Points of concern
I understand some people dislike or may not want to engage with modifiers, so for those people I would propose that either Saturdays or Sundays is a no-modifier day. Either that, or Reset Day.
Another point of concern is that players may get skewed into certain jobs because a modifier benefits them or because a modifier makes it hard for their favorite job. This is intended by design; having people pick a job based on modifiers is the general goal with the modifiers, letting them "switch things up" to avoid burnout.
To continue, difficulty would also be a point of concern for a group of players; to balance things out, I would prefer if each negative modifier was rolled along with a positive one. Making it so, if you make use of the positive modifier, you nullify or make almost trivial the negative one.
Another point of concern would be sprouts or first-timers for a duty, which I addressed in the last paragraph of the suggestions with the Sprout's Adventure modifier.
Possible implementations
On a surface layer, this is a suggestion with expert dungeons in mind first, but it would bring value to other MSQ dungeons and optional dungeons, but for this to work, it would need much more work to ensure things work properly.
For the display of the current modifiers, there could be 2 ways: day/week-based modifiers that show in the Timers/Duty finder menus. Or random modifiers that only appear when you enter the dungeon. The day/week-based modifiers would work much better, as they allow people to make farm parties on "good modifier days" for glamour, capping tomes, etc. While random modifiers will keep you on your toes every time you enter the dungeon, there is also the possible negative effect of people only rolling modifiers they dislike.
Proposal 3: Retooled dungeons for max level
The concept of this consists of taking a couple of dungeons per patch, from early points in the MSQ, and retooling them to be done with max level kits.
For example: Satasha retold
- Trash pulls have double or triple the enemies (as the jellyfishies would be harmless if kept the same), as we have many more mitigation and crowd control tools nowadays.
- The first and second bosses have mechanics added to them.
- The first boss shoots a series of lightning cones, the circle AoE becomes a fast in-and-out attack, a tank buster is added, and paralysis on a random attacker now and then (gotta keep Esuna useful), and by the end of the fight the Coeurl dashes around.
- The second boss has pirates with cannons periodically assault the room, shooting large AoE explosions that players have to dodge and bait (think Eruptions from UWU); the adds gain stacking strength if not dealt with quickly (minor DPS check/target priority mechanic), and the pirate boss itself does cleave attacks similar to Lyon's Heart of Nature from Bozja, adding bleed stacks when hit.
- The third boss is replaced with Satasha (hard) kraken.
The goal of this concept is to generate pseudo-new content with little dev time. Most of the things I have described for this Satasha example are things we already have in the game, coded, and executing in other fights. This is just a plea to make better use of those same assets.
Another few examples of filler mechanics they can add into almost any boss are stacks, spreads, towers, tankbusters, tidal waves, soaks, gazes, directional parries, etc. They have many flavors of those coded in the game, and just by sprinkling them across older content, they can make what feels like an almost different dungeon (save for visuals).
Pros:
- Expert has more than 2 dungeons after patches .0 and .1
- Low development cost
- High potential for fun content
- Similar to Ultimates, they can leave asset development on the side and work more on making a fun experience.
- Visually they are the old dungeons.
- Content feels "cheaply" developed if this replaces another piece of content.
- There is a limited amount of mechanic mix-ups they can shuffle before overlapping (this is already happening) and needing new mechanics for the pool.
Points of concern
"I don't want to run old content in my roulette; I want new content." While I can understand the sentiment, having this feeling and losing the 50/50 and getting Lapis Manalis a week in a row when you want to run Aetherfront feels also terrible. At least by having retooled dungeons, you would skew the chances of getting "new" content in your favor.
Another point of concern would be that new players would have longer queue times for their MSQ dungeon of the patch, and while that may be possible, the lure of the retooled dungeons is meant to incentivize players into doing Expert more often and, by proxy, reduce the overall queue time of the roulette.
No less important, rewards would be another concern. I would propose that on top of dropping the old dungeon gear (for glamour hunters), they could also drop multiple materia clusters, extra tomestones, or even dyes as part of the chest rewards. Another interesting change would be an increased minion drop rate from the dungeon.
Possible implementations
As the goal of this is to lure more players into Expert roulette, both the rewards and engagement of the content are the main priority. Therefore, I think that keeping the scope to 1 or 2 retooled dungeons every patch would be reasonable. Even then, 2 dungeons may be pushing it.
Most of the other implementation is described above, with mechanics getting shuffled into existing environments scaled up to level 100 to provide a pseudo-new experience of the dungeon.
Continue reading...