Bojzan Southern Front is currently impossible to complete for new/late players.

I'm gonna start by getting straight to the point. If you were to start Bojzan Southern Front now, you would be unable to clear it under normal conditions. A player CAN reach rank 15, they CAN complete their resistance weapon, however the final story mission, and anything requiring coins can not be obtained/completed because no one does Castrum anymore.

I'm not blaming players, because players will always do what is "easiest" at the expense of everything else, regardless of tedium. I am, rather, blaming the XIV team. We saw this same thing happen with Eureka. We knew that when they chose to continue this idea of group based instances like Eureka that the same issue would occur again.

It would be easy to say "they never should of allowed coin drops from fates" but that's not a better alternative. Rather, they need to alter the content so that others can catch up without having to hop on a discord or beg their free companies for help.

While I hate back seat game deving, I would like to see the team separate the story completion (and by proxy, the unlocking of Bojzan coins in fates) from the Castrum Event since I can't imagine them coming up with a better incentive for people to actually DO the event, nor can I imagine them spending time redoing the entire instance to be faster/easier/whatever.

new patch drought, but should pick up again when 5.45 is released.

I doubt it will even take that long. Maybe as early as 5.41 for the people who arent interested in ishgard restoration. People will buy up the rewards worth listing on the MB, which leads to higher prices, which leads to people going back for more to sell. Add to that people leveling alts/alt classes, and the people who got to it late(like OP) but want to be up to date to jump into the new stuff(particularly delubrium reginae and its savage version) on the day 5.45 launches and this content will have a steady playerbase again soon enough.

Yeah as a player trying to finish castrum for the first time, I'm just going to give it up. Too many people do not want to join because they lose a bit of mettle if there is a death. I have tried the past 7 hours (thats 6 castrum pops) to get a group large enough to clear the first encounter. Either I dont even get to 20 people who join (with more than 60 people in the instance) or we wipe at the first boss and people give up and leave.

I cant even begin to describe how salty/annoyed/frustrated I am at this and that spills over to the rest of the game.

Just let me solo this so I can get the story, its all I care about. Not the loot or the mechanics or whatever, just let me enjoy the story I pay for.

Loosing mettle isn’t the problem with castrum. You get easy 15k back from one fate at level 15. You loose around 3k I think from dying. The problem is farming the coins and the memories. Memories don’t drop from castrum and the time to get coins isn’t worth it unless you’re multitasking for the coins and memories at the same time. Also the coins will be nerfed later on so right now why not do memories and coins at the same time with just fate.

Devs need to drop memories at each boss and buff the coin dropping to 100+

Is there really a reason we need to grind the same fates for the coins? Make more content in your world. Give us chances to work on upgrading items and skills for fun and not as a requirement. People enjoy upgrades let us carry our horizontal upgrades to the next areas. Why not? Should fate grinding only be for a memory and some coins? Shouldn’t our constant killing of the bosses help our character grow in knowledge of the boss making it weaker or even drop unique items? I wish castrum had more to it then just kill these things. I wish it grew our character based on how well we performed. Giving us buffs for other fights in castrum our outside. Maybe allow a mini skill tree with out items that when we combine them they grow stronger or split in fun outcomes.

I would definitely do castrum if that was 100+ coins and a memory drop from each boss. Maybe from the personal chest at the final boss so no one abandons. The game needs more than just kill thing to get thing. Now kill thing 1000 more times to get 3 items.

Honestly, I'd like them to adjust the content for eureka and bozjan (especially past content) to be trust enabled (like XI does), or even using our Grand Company operators (max them out to 80) and then make them usable for this kind of content in your own party. Things that should've been in the game (once content dies easily), and still aren't. Why???

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Originally Posted by LalafellDown

Loosing mettle isn’t the problem with castrum.

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When I tried grouping for castrum, people would say to us that they wont do it until Rank 15 because they dont want to lose Mettle. It is definitely a factor unfortunately.

You are right on your points and the rewards should be more focused on castrum and not all over the place.

Hopefully this changes with 5.45. This time Ill do the content as it comes out otherwise im afraid ill miss out again :s

The primary issue with Castrum is the time/reward equation. Prior to rank 15 the death penalty sucks especially if you are a tank and after rank 15 is beyond pointless. There is zero incentive like an exclusive mount like Ozma or achievement. The EASIESTTTTTTTTTTTTTT way to fix Castrum is to add it to the Duty Queue outside of Bozja, put it on a set timer like ocean fishing so that people can queue in from outside of the zone.

After you hit rank 15 what is the point of the zone? Farming clusters? If they made it more convinient to do outside of Bozja I might queue up for it as a tank but they would need to reduce death penalty by a fair amount. It is almost like they tried to create a WoW raid with literally none of the gear incentives that drive that level of coordination.

You need people to coordinate 4 separate groups that should go top/bottom, then coordinate groups to rescue prisoners and then keep people around long enough to even finish the place. It is a raid not designed around current FF14 ideology. If it were an 8 man instance then I could see it working far better because that is how FF14 works when it comes to statics.

Once you get passed 8 people the UI for FF14 is absolute GARBAGE for doing organize content. Hell Raids A,B,C barely function in Alliance raids. This is one area from WoW that the FF14 devs could seriously use some help on because this raid UI is trash for large scale content much less anything that actually needs coordination.

Impossible? Hardly. I was in another clear group last evening, though it took probably 4-5 failures before I ended up in a raid that could actually make it past the first boss. It's a bit of a challenge to get completed but it isn't impossible. Just have to be in the right place at the right time. I came back at the end of last month, and in that time I have cleared it 3 times. A couple of other times I came close but couldn't seal the deal. Granted, the failures have outnumbered the successes almost 10 to 1, but still. It can happen.

I can't even get to that point. It's a miracle when people don't leave the party after 10 mins or don't kick the low rank players, making the grind a huge pain. I gave up on Bozja because I couldn't see the point in trying to progress in non-solable content where it's been really difficult to find stable parties.

Yep.

In the same boat. Wasting hours upon hours farming mettle and memories all the while with the inability to farm coins. Real legit system. Feels like Square is essentially punishing me for playing a different game and not participating in their content week 1. Only furthering insult to injury as the player-base in shout during the Castrum event act extremely rude to those asking for help to clear.

Sometimes I wonder why I put so much faith in this game.

Honestly yeah. I've finished Bozja when it came out, so I'm definitely not in the same boat as plenty of players still are. Some weren't subbed when it was released, and others just wanted to wait.

I go back every other day because, frankly? I love Bozja. A lot! I love the story, I love the concept, and since I love lore and play a Hrothgar and I feel personally connected to my character while being in there. I already felt it was a shame that the grind there was nigh useless for the weapon itself. But at least you had players helping others level up, far more than what I used to see in Eureka. You had people invested in staying there and waiting for Castrum to pop up for the coins. And I understand that we needed a lot of coins and Castrum was designed in a strange way, meaning that you had to be lucky to get in on an instance and then a group that wouldn't wipe in there to get the coins. I get that. But the change to the FATE rewards without anything to support Castrum, which unless you're there to finish the required story you're no longer invested in, ultimately killed it.

I haven't seen anyone go into Castrum successfully in the runs I've done. Every time I go in, people are just CE farming (nothing wrong about that), but when Castrum pops, I queue for it to try to help. Because everyone had the foresight to realize that Castrum not having any incentive was going to damage players that haven't done it at least a little. All it has are coins and mandatory story progression, both of which most players are already covered for. But we can't even get more than 6 people on a good day. Some runs go by where I'm the only person who queued. And all we see on the chat are people asking for help to do Castrum and no one responding and no one going in. It's purely de-motivational, not just for the people who enjoy the content and are happy to see how Bozja and Castrum were designed, but for those that just want to finish the weapon and engage in the content to begin with.

Often I wonder if the best way to do this is to just organize runs via Discord (which seem to be dead, at least for my Data Center? Though I will be honest, I haven't checked there often.) or use Party Finder. But I haven't seen any PFs open for the exclusive reason to run Castrum, a CE that only spawns every now and then. I have friends that haven't done Castrum yet, for various reasons. And many of them have no idea how to progress. Perhaps yes, they should wait for the next weapon tier to see a spike in players. But what about after 5.0 is done and we're well into 6.0? Should we just wait to do this at all until they nerf the living hell out of it if they're not planning on being subbed for the first two months of whenever this gets briefly revived?

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Originally Posted by Skyros

Yep.

In the same boat. Wasting hours upon hours farming mettle and memories all the while with the inability to farm coins. Real legit system. Feels like Square is essentially punishing me for playing a different game and not participating in their content week 1. Only furthering insult to injury as the player-base in shout during the Castrum event act extremely rude to those asking for help to clear.

Sometimes I wonder why I put so much faith in this game.

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That's a shame. :(
I guess that's what you get when you condition players that everything must be soloable. It's sad that the community is that way and in an MMO no less. I hope you find people! :(

Castrum just really doesn't fit into the design of Bozjan Southern Front. Would make sense to either put it in the Duty Finder, or shower every form of currency that you can farm in Bozja so that people really really want to do it.

I think ideally the zone would be restructured to string the FATEs into a series where you push the army back out of each area, and then everyone does Castrum at the end, but that'd be a ton of work including rejiggering the quests so eh.

Honestly, giving ability to farm coins from FATEs was huge mistake.

It literally killed castrum and ANY reason to run it. Why was this not thought about?

People run it once for the quest and now they have ZERO reason to go to castrum beyond "I like challenge" which we all know is rare reason..
So if you are late or new..no one will do castrum so you can farm coins from FATEs too because some players are like "screw you, got mine"

Bozja was great when it lasted.
But there is next to no reason for players to return. So is now as dead as Eureka. Same reason. No reason to go there are you can buy better equipment and get better rewards on duties.

So, i am currently slowly pushing towards rank 15. From my experience it goes as follows. People are farming fates/CE/clusters whatever. Castrum pops. 10 people sign up. Other people continue farming w/e they were farming before.
There's no incentive to run Castrum outside of story. Yes it gives you coins and you can get deep essences from saving alll the prisoners, but it does not give any mettle whatsoever, which, imo, is one of the reasons it's unpopular.

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Originally Posted by Flay_wind

So, i am currently slowly pushing towards rank 15. From my experience it goes as follows. People are farming fates/CE/clusters whatever. Castrum pops. 10 people sign up. Other people continue farming w/e they were farming before.
There's no incentive to run Castrum outside of story. Yes it gives you coins and you can get deep essences from saving alll the prisoners, but it does not give any mettle whatsoever, which, imo, is one of the reasons it's unpopular.

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Mettle loss in Castrum is inconsequential. You can leave it after dying maybe 4-5 times, and 15 minutes later at MOST you are back to breaking even and probably beyond. No, this is not part of the problem. Or at least it shouldn't be.

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Originally Posted by Vahlnir

Mettle loss in Castrum is inconsequential. You can leave it after dying maybe 4-5 times, and 15 minutes later at MOST you are back to breaking even and probably beyond. No, this is not part of the problem. Or at least it shouldn't be.

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One of the reasons, not the main reason.
But it should probably give you mettle for completion regadless.

They will most likely nerf the content so it can be done with a smaller number of players like they did with Eureka, but that nerf wont come until some time after the THIRD phase of Bozja releases in 5.55. We are only just getting the second phase with the 48 man raid in February, so it wont be for a long while.

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Originally Posted by sorawild34

They will most likely nerf the content so it can be done with a smaller number of players like they did with Eureka, but that nerf wont come until some time after the THIRD phase of Bozja releases in 5.55. We are only just getting the second phase with the 48 man raid in February, so it wont be for a long while.

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Yoshida already mentioned they have no plan to nerf any of the raids. Patch 5.5 will add a new "open area" zona and rank increase. Said rank increase will act as an indirect nerf.

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Originally Posted by Driavna

Yoshida already mentioned they have no plan to nerf any of the raids. Patch 5.5 will add a new "open area" zona and rank increase. Said rank increase will act as an indirect nerf.

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I think your rank does not affect your stats whatsoever. You're as likely to get killed by the starting mobs at rank 15 as you were at rank 1.

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Originally Posted by Flay_wind

I think your rank does not affect your stats whatsoever. You're as likely to get killed by the starting mobs at rank 15 as you were at rank 1.

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As of right now, Rank allows you to carry more lost action/items with you. Perhaps in the future extra ranks will give other bonuses. I don't know, but that's what he said in one of the last live letters.

I'd be more inclined to think of an increase in lost action capacity as an increase in character strength if it seemed like more people were willing to use lost actions in the first place

mettle rank is there to gate story progress and the higher level lost actions you can appraise. that's pretty much it. there is no difference battle wise between rank 1 and 15.