Forked Tower Feedback

There are a dozen threads on this topic. While this about Forked Tower I am worried about the games overall direction and this shows a disconnect between the devs and the players.

I'd like to start out with a premise: Forked Tower is significantly harder than doing most of the savage content in the game due to the organization of 48~ players.

I do not understand why this content has a queue system that is unfriendly even after the recent changes. This is content that is essentially impossible to successfully organize in game. It "could" be done but at the end of the day, why would you when the true difficulty is organizing 48 people. To give an insanely frustrating example of this - it takes one person going afk to hold up 47 others or cause a complete raid wipe. I personally have only completed through part of the 2nd boss fight. I have roughly 20 hours a week to dedicate to gaming and I am struggling to find a group that meets my schedule needs and prog point even with that much time.

This is a huge step back from BA as well in terms of encounter difficulty. BA allowed for mostly "follow the leader" esque mechanics. I will say the encounter design in Forked Tower is fun and has a great atmosphere. This great design is completely lost in the fact that organizing this content is a nightmare with mechanics that are so unfriendly to a new player (e.g., lack of basic resurrection) that it creates a toxic environment. I'm pretty sure every single prog stream of Forked Tower has this on display. FFXIV doesn't allow for players to type in chat in PvP - yet the allow for this level of frustration to be levied at players trying to organize this content. I understand there are changes, but at this point they might as well just remove Forked Tower from spawning in OC all together with the changes they made unless you're a premade group.

The fixes to queueing in are at least a step in fixing Forked Tower. However, it's not nearly enough and at this point I don't understand why the devs think organizing 48~ players encourages any positive feelings to this content. I'm worried with the comments on having a normal and savage split in the future. It is awful having content that requires to have this many schedules line up at this difficulty level. There is a reason no other game has this style of content anymore. It's simply not fun to organize, encourages toxicity in the community, and it's only done by a fraction of the player population. To add to my point, the other games that have 40~ player raids it's not timed content. Forked Tower is not only timed, but has a raise restriction, that will likely lead to the party dissolving after a wipe rather than trying to continue.

Remove the raise restriction, keep the fights mostly the same, and add actual features in game to organize this many players ahead of time to releasing content like this. This content should be fun for players to organize in the exploratory mission.

I'm adding to this to add my perspective to 7.3 changes as my above post was written during 7.2.

I don't think anything I've stated above has largely changed and if anything they've had some unintended things happening because of groups getting their own instance and then opening up. The new issue is when the instance opens up and people start coming in, you're going to have roughly 1/2 of the amount of players doing CE's / Fates because of the 48 players tied to Forked Tower. In the middle of the day I was only able to join an instance that had a current forked tower happening so the instance was largely dead with only 10 people doing fates / CE's. While this isn't the end of the world it took the wind out of doing "large scale and open" content.

I think they've just further cemented the fact that Forked Tower shouldn't spawn in a regular instance as well as they've removed any chance for a normal player to do this content organically. I don't have anything against discord or those types of tools, I touch on this because I believe they should be more forward that this content is designed only for that. Anything else just results in frustration for all parties trying to do the content.

The interviews that Yoshi P has given address that Forked Tower and OC didn't hit their goal but also didn't address anything to attain their goal. The few things that have been mentioned are counter intuitive to fixing the content by their own metrics. I only see Exploratory missions continuing the trend of Forked Tower, but getting worse. For example, they're not addressing that you absolutely cannot carry anyone through Forked Tower as it's very easy to wipe an entire raid with 1 person. While the mechanics aren't that hard to understand there are 47 other people you have to worry about. They have not said or done anything to address that fact which aligns with the idea of 24 players pulling others through. Also, I do wonder what their idea of those 24 players is...

Also, they're delulu if they think that people organizing this content aren't using addons - I'd put 10 million gil they still don't address this by the next iteration of Forked Tower (markers, raid queueing, raid UI, etc.). I hope they actually address their own statements on how Forked Tower has missed the mark but I feel they're going to do more damage. I want to be wrong, but I feel this is a larger issue at why Dawntrail is not being received well as its the same issues that have been happening since ARR launch - but worse. E.g., fetch quests, problems with difficulty (Anyone remember the orgional Vishap?), and issues with rewards (Criterion Savage and Normal). Forked Tower has a fun theme and fight mechanics that is lost due to these design decisions. It's worse BA and DRS in nearly every way because of choices they've made on how to simply join it and then prog the content. "Please look foward to it!" I hope I'm wrong and would gladly pay 10 million gil as I want the game to succeed.

I find it disappointing that I could spend all day actually in Occult Crescent, watching the tower spawn repeatedly, and no one even attempts to enter it. I've seen people shouting in OC and wanting to try it but not enough people give an offering so it just passes by. It's content that is actively present in the zone saying "come and do this event", yet no one can or will engage with it outside of pre-made groups.

If this were a "final" raid for Occult Crescent as a whole, akin to Baldesion Arsenal, I wouldn't care as much because that serves more as a capstone challenge when you've already finished everything else. However, this is the introductory zone for the content and we are starting with something that most peope will never have the opportunity to engage in.

I leveled 5 jobs in the OC, then quit. I never the gave the Forked Tower a chance even when it was free to enter. Here's why:

#1 It wouldn't have mattered anyway. Realistically, the time I spent running to the middle of the map to queue for this thing would cost me a fate or CE.

#2 Limited raises. How am I supposed to prog this? Also dead players get no chests.

#3 Preparation. Yeah I've got several jobs leveled. I've even got 5 pieces of gear purchased with silver and the relic. But have you watched a guide? The mechanics inside aren't casual tier and require some degree of coordination. (Maybe Extreme tier?)

#4 Being the jerk. The fight design contains moments where one person 'learning' or making a mistake can get others killed or even cause a full wipe. Combined with limited raises this sounds terrible.

#5 Oh wow somehow it looks like this one FT instance is going to pop? I better not join - it's probably a coordinated Discord.

Out of these issues they've fixed.... #5. And part of those fixes involved attaching a cipher cost. So now it costs silver to lose exp and prog this. Bye lol.

From my point of view here's what FT looks like. It now costs 250 tomestones of Heliometry to queue for Necron (extreme). But you can't use PF to communicate prog levels, open roles, or goals. Instead you give your 250 Heliometry to the Ocean Fishing NPC who puts you on the next available boat. Your Necron boat now has 7 people on it: 4 of which are tanks, and 3 players are first timers. After 3 deaths you are thrown overboard. And if the crew size shrinks below 4, the whole boat sinks. You swim back to shore and your FSH is level 99. But that's fine because it's 90 minutes until the next boat leaves and you've got nothing better to do besides re-level FSH to 100 and grind those 250 Helios.