Please make Boja Castrum a direct queue from Duty Finder

I have found that it is very hard to find a Boja Castrum run that is up within my playtime (2 hours on NA prime time) and its even harder to get a clear. Please put the Castrum in the Duty Finder so its possible to get a run in within a limited playtime and with 48 players to have a good chance of a clear.

I've joined a Discord group that has planned out runs. So far it's been a nightmare. The run organizers are doing the best they can with a bad system, but here's how my experience tonight went:

- 4 parties, led by people who have cleared who volunteered to run it
- Password protected parties to keep non Discord members out
- Still fills up in 5 seconds because people are so hungry for clears and want a competent group (yay I finally got in one)
- have to keep jumping from instance to instance until they find one that has LL in a reasonable amount of time
- have to leave and requeue a bunch of times until everyone is in the same place
- this whole process takes an hour and a half to two hours, so if you missed the earlier time, better plan to stay up late for another one

The final point wouldn't be that big a deal; I ran Dynamis in the old days of XI and I'm used to 3 hour long raids. But even Dynamis's reserved instance systems with the hourglasses ensured everyone who needed to get in could get in (up to 64 people. Heck, I maintained a second sub to pass out hourglasses to my members who were late.)

They've announced a hotfix for Castrum. Not sure when it's coming but it shouldn't be too long. They will adjust the rewards significantly I suspect and Castrum will probably fill regularly. We're going to have to wait to see what exactly they have in mind.

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Originally Posted by Catwho

I've joined a Discord group that has planned out runs. So far it's been a nightmare. The run organizers are doing the best they can with a bad system, but here's how my experience tonight went:

- 4 parties, led by people who have cleared who volunteered to run it
- Password protected parties to keep non Discord members out
- Still fills up in 5 seconds because people are so hungry for clears and want a competent group (yay I finally got in one)
- have to keep jumping from instance to instance until they find one that has LL in a reasonable amount of time
- have to leave and requeue a bunch of times until everyone is in the same place
- this whole process takes an hour and a half to two hours, so if you missed the earlier time, better plan to stay up late for another one

The final point wouldn't be that big a deal; I ran Dynamis in the old days of XI and I'm used to 3 hour long raids. But even Dynamis's reserved instance systems with the hourglasses ensured everyone who needed to get in could get in (up to 64 people. Heck, I maintained a second sub to pass out hourglasses to my members who were late.)

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Gating your runs behind discord would lead one to believe it has the opposite effect of getting more people to run castrum, you don’t need it to clear it.

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Originally Posted by LaylaTsarra

They've announced a hotfix for Castrum. Not sure when it's coming but it shouldn't be too long. They will adjust the rewards significantly I suspect and Castrum will probably fill regularly. We're going to have to wait to see what exactly they have in mind.

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They could add 450 Revelation tomes and I am not sure if they can get enough to do it. Time and time again I have tried and its always the same, not enough, wipe, mettel loss, rinse and repeat. This is feeling like it will be the first relic I have failed to complete since relics were released at the beginning. If they want more to do this, they need to look at the penalties. One wipe and its all over, try again the next time you can get 23 people to do it? Sigh... How did they not see this being a total disaster?

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Originally Posted by Catwho

I've joined a Discord group that has planned out runs. So far it's been a nightmare. The run organizers are doing the best they can with a bad system, but here's how my experience tonight went:

- 4 parties, led by people who have cleared who volunteered to run it
- Password protected parties to keep non Discord members out
- Still fills up in 5 seconds because people are so hungry for clears and want a competent group (yay I finally got in one)
- have to keep jumping from instance to instance until they find one that has LL in a reasonable amount of time
- have to leave and requeue a bunch of times until everyone is in the same place
- this whole process takes an hour and a half to two hours, so if you missed the earlier time, better plan to stay up late for another one

The final point wouldn't be that big a deal; I ran Dynamis in the old days of XI and I'm used to 3 hour long raids. But even Dynamis's reserved instance systems with the hourglasses ensured everyone who needed to get in could get in (up to 64 people. Heck, I maintained a second sub to pass out hourglasses to my members who were late.)

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We shouldn't have to join discord to run the current popular content to do basic clear for a relic weapon.
It should just play by itself.
I hope dev will adjust it with all these problem in mind

+1 for this and hoping whatever the "hotfix" they have planned is smarter than adding a couple rewards.

Going on 6 attempts, never above 17 people in the queue for it.

Same here. It's actually beyond awful being late to this.

You should at least be able to queue from gangos, like delubrum, a daily quest for a bunch of mettle and XP would be nice too.

Hell, if they want to play it a bit conservatively, even a weekly quest that gives a bunch of XP and mettle would do. I'd at least queue for it once a week if it essentially functioned like a bonus leveling roulette.

The hotfix will only add more rewards and this will change nothing. The whole system is broken by design (something SE noticed themself by changing that for DR). Unless they add a group finder and relent on the "2-pulls or you are out" for each boss nothing will change. This is content that ages incredibly bad, even by FF standards.

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Originally Posted by TalithaSolarien

The hotfix will only add more rewards and this will change nothing. The whole system is broken by design (something SE noticed themself by changing that for DR). Unless they add a group finder and relent on the "2-pulls or you are out" for each boss nothing will change. This is content that ages incredibly bad, even by FF standards.

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I’m fine with 2 pulls and you’re out as a mercy killing of a party that needs to reform, but only if it’s simple to rerun and reform parties for that content.

Castrum needs a direct queue from Gangos, ala DR. Until that happens, anything else Square throws at it won’t really matter much.

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Originally Posted by van_arn

I’m fine with 2 pulls and you’re out as a mercy killing of a party that needs to reform, but only if it’s simple to rerun and reform parties for that content.

Castrum needs a direct queue from Gangos, ala DR. Until that happens, anything else Square throws at it won’t really matter much.

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If we get a queue system then this would be fine, as DR has shown us. I fear SE is reluctant to add a queue system, but without it and with keeping the difficulty it will remain hard to clear or dead content, blocking the relic.

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Originally Posted by Hyperia

They could add 450 Revelation tomes and I am not sure if they can get enough to do it. Time and time again I have tried and its always the same, not enough, wipe, mettel loss, rinse and repeat. This is feeling like it will be the first relic I have failed to complete since relics were released at the beginning. If they want more to do this, they need to look at the penalties. One wipe and its all over, try again the next time you can get 23 people to do it? Sigh... How did they not see this being a total disaster?

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Oh they'll get enough if they sweeten the pot. We'll have to wait and see. They did say it was a problem and that people are having trouble completing the quest line. Just hope this hot patch they announced it soon. I have a toon at R9 on Gilga and need Castrum soon. If need be I'll go with Discord but I suspect the new reward structure will be worth it for me.

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Originally Posted by TalithaSolarien

The hotfix will only add more rewards and this will change nothing. The whole system is broken by design (something SE noticed themself by changing that for DR). Unless they add a group finder and relent on the "2-pulls or you are out" for each boss nothing will change. This is content that ages incredibly bad, even by FF standards.

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Oh there are plenty of incentives to make people want to do it. Fragments, Mettle, Role xp, Memory Drops, increased drop rate for Upgrades and so on. Tomes too can be an incentive. I'd suggest you wait and see what they have planned before writing it off.

The idea of in zone deployment worked just fine until they added coins to skirmishes and CE's.

Weird that they add a queue for Delubrum Reginae but not Castrum. Castrum right now is basically a 90minute time-investment for zero reward. 1 hour to even enter, 30m to clear- Assuming you can even muster the people for it, not to mention capable.

edit - Is it 1 Loathsome memory for Castrum? Honestly it should be 5, given the effort to run Castrum instead of just running 5 Syrcus Tower. And without exclusive drops like DR has with the hair and mount, Castrum will eventually die. I know it's not just about relic progression but multitasking, but you get such a pittance of everything you're better off just doing anything else. Cluster farming, usually, with how much gil fragments are worth.

edit 2 - 5 clusters, called it. You can buff my droprates, but you cant unrun these alliance raids!!!

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Originally Posted by Luin

Weird that they add a queue for Delubrum Reginae but not Castrum. Castrum right now is basically a 90minute time-investment for zero reward. 1 hour to even enter, 30m to clear- Assuming you can even muster the people for it, not to mention capable.

edit - Is it 1 Loathsome memory for Castrum? Honestly it should be 5, given the effort to run Castrum instead of just running 5 Syrcus Tower. And without exclusive drops like DR has with the hair and mount, Castrum will eventually die. I know it's not just about relic progression but multitasking, but you get such a pittance of everything you're better off just doing anything else. Cluster farming, usually, with how much gil fragments are worth.

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Afaik, Castrum doesn't give guaranteed memories like Crystal Tower raids. If anything, Castrum counts as a critical engagement and has a very very small chance of dropping one, or none at all.

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Originally Posted by M0rrigan

Afaik, Castrum doesn't give guaranteed memories like Crystal Tower raids. If anything, Castrum counts as a critical engagement and has a very very small chance of dropping one, or none at all.

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All the CEs need to be guaranteed drop rates. Because between 15 minutes to do 2 CEs and getting nothing, or 15 minutes to do Syrcus Tower to get 1 guaranteed, you're always going to choose the ST run.

The entire design of Bazja was kind of a mess that took a lot of figuring out to even make it work. Pretty much every game system requires some learning on the players part, but the Southern Front was very rough to figure out due to how they separated concerns with Mettle, Clusters, and Fragments. Then they had castrum just sort of like a super instance and assumed coins should be the reward alone, even though it costs mettle to do, and completely overestimated what kind of demand there would be for the coins, let alone organization of the runs.

So at this point we are really coasting on the current DR runs. I'd rather have the relic be easier to grind doing Bazjan Southern Front than have to run around to different locations just to get the memories. Running 45 lower tier raids is pretty maddening when you've played the game for 6+ years.

How many times does SE think established players have run old content for random things? I mean there is a limit to everything.

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Originally Posted by M0rrigan

Afaik, Castrum doesn't give guaranteed memories like Crystal Tower raids. If anything, Castrum counts as a critical engagement and has a very very small chance of dropping one, or none at all.

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They never have. It is more paramount to run older content because they have the auto-drops. The only time where we have seen the Bozja content be more lucrative to run for Relics is the final step of this patch's trio because you will receive the item on completion.

Even then, it may be faster to just do PotD to grind it out.

On the topic of Castrum, it has been much harder to fill in Castrum queues organically with the introduction of DR. If you can add a guaranteed queue system to do Castrum, you would most likely see more people do it rather than wait around or duty-shift until it pops.

I suspect it would be very difficult to retrofit Castrum Lacus Litore into the Duty Finder; so far as I can tell, the Castrum is literally just part of the Bozjan Southern Front map. Like all the other Critical Engagements, when you commence it teleports you to the start point... but the 'start point' is in a location otherwise inaccessible from the rest of the map. Then the entire Castrum encounter is just a FATE/Critical Engagement with probably the largest radius of any such encounter in the game.

That's why /shout still reaches the rest of the zone when in Castrum, and it's why Castrum instances are unique to a given Southern Front instance; they aren't separate duties, it's just a (very, very large and complicated) FATE within that zone.

And it's almost certainly a lot more complex to take a FATE and carve it out into a separate dungeon/raid instance you can add to the instance pool and access from Duty Finder.

They absolutely should do it, because Castrum's queuing method is absolutely horrible for a duty that's required to progress a storyline; you could have 70 people who all want to do Castrum, but if they're spread across six different instances of the Bozjan Southern Front, that isn't going to matter much. It needs to be a duty you queue into directly like Delubrum Reginae.

But I'll admit it's probably not very easy to rip Castrum out of the Southern Front and turn it into its own self-contained 48-person Duty Finder thing, given how it's currently set up.

I think the #1 thing that they could do would be allow for a preformed multi party group to enter the whole zone together via Party Finder, even if it's not actually added via Duty Finder for auto matching. Taking out the hunt and peck aspect of getting everyone into the same instance would already be a huge quality of life improvement, and if a large group has to spawn a new instance to accommodate them, then so be it, because that's what the premade groups are already doing, anyway.

It’s actually pretty easy to pull castrum out even though it’s part of Boja. You would queue people directly to the start of the Castrum section and ignore the rest of the zone. They did this with the training 4 player instances from 1 to 40.

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Originally Posted by Hyperia

It’s actually pretty easy to pull castrum out even though it’s part of Boja. You would queue people directly to the start of the Castrum section and ignore the rest of the zone. They did this with the training 4 player instances from 1 to 40.

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This is also what they do with Guildhests, now that I think about it.

Castrum is a real raid compared to BR normal, where people actually need to work together to split evenly for the first bosses, rescue the hostages, and which party will handle Lyon during Dawon. If anything the most fails tend to be people who don't seem to listen, can't get pass the first bosses, or dying to the Lyon DPS check. A queue doesn't solve those things.

YoshiP's solution to add more rewards for Castrum vets is the best answer. There just isn't enough vets to go back to help, and too many new people who just think they can steamroll the content like anything else in Duty Finder. That's the real gist here, a queue doesn't solve it. Give us gold coins or better augmented drop rates.

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Originally Posted by technole

Castrum is a real raid compared to BR normal, where people actually need to work together to split evenly for the first bosses, rescue the hostages, and which party will handle Lyon during Dawon. If anything the most fails tend to be people who don't seem to listen, can't get pass the first bosses, or dying to the Lyon DPS check. A queue doesn't solve those things.

YoshiP's solution to add more rewards for Castrum vets is the best answer. There just isn't enough vets to go back to help, and too many new people who just think they can steamroll the content like anything else in Duty Finder. That's the real gist here, a queue doesn't solve it. Give us gold coins or better augmented drop rates.

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A queue wouldn't solve the underlying issues, this is true. It would, however, let people try as many times as they want until they get a clear or give up. Waiting an hour in an instance only to have the group either fail or fail to form in the first place hurts a person's motivation a bit.

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Originally Posted by Vahlnir

A queue wouldn't solve the underlying issues, this is true. It would, however, let people try as many times as they want until they get a clear or give up. Waiting an hour in an instance only to have the group either fail or fail to form in the first place hurts a person's motivation a bit.

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This!

I’m going to try a few more days and then... I’ll just have to accept the reality that I am not going to get past it because I was too late to the game.

How this got past quality assurance is just mind blowing...

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Originally Posted by Vahlnir

A queue wouldn't solve the underlying issues, this is true. It would, however, let people try as many times as they want until they get a clear or give up. Waiting an hour in an instance only to have the group either fail or fail to form in the first place hurts a person's motivation a bit.

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A 24 player DF queue that triggers a CLL spawn with the remaining 24 players being able to join in from that specific southern front instance could work to fix the tendency for CLL to fail to get an effective group to form.

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Originally Posted by Hyperia

How this got past quality assurance is just mind blowing...

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This is much more a case of emergent behaviors rather than anything the devs could have tested.

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Originally Posted by Ultimatecalibur

This is much more a case of emergent behaviors rather than anything the devs could have tested.

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This is something that they should have seen coming from lightyears away. No incentive? No activity. It's MMO 101.

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Originally Posted by Vahlnir

This is something that they should have seen coming from lightyears away. No incentive? No activity. It's MMO 101.

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Bozja problems (CLL's problem specifically) is less no incentive and more insufficient incentive and trouble balancing the incentive for various things. CLL started as the more rewarding part of Bozja to the point that people tended to camp or hop between instances rather than doing Skirmishes or CEs, Skimishes and CEs getting Bozja coins over corrected the incentives in favor of the Skirmishes/CEs.

I spent no joke over 8 to 10 hours yesterday to try and get Castrum done. Got 4 groups all to small, and missed out on any group with 35 or more players. This raid and the way we have to que for it is just bad. This is a wall that's stopping myself and others on finishing our relics.
Hope they hotfix it soon XD

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Originally Posted by van_arn

I’m fine with 2 pulls and you’re out as a mercy killing of a party that needs to reform, but only if it’s simple to rerun and reform parties for that content.

Castrum needs a direct queue from Gangos, ala DR. Until that happens, anything else Square throws at it won’t really matter much.

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Yes because... waiting 1h between each queue that will probably not gather enough people which negate your wait time...
You can't even leave the current instance safely because you could end up in another one where castrum opened sooner, which would make you wait even more.
You're basically trapped to do this content currently.

I just wanted to keep going on my relic weapon just as anybody else, but despite several tries to get in, I only got one and it ended soon with a wipe on the first boss.
So I hope their hotfix will come soon. I don't bother trying anymore right now, I'm not interested in logging in to wait 1h or more pet instance

I mean... open castrum more regulary on top of the new rewards. 1h is really too long especially for something gated behind the story or the relic weapon.

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Originally Posted by LaylaTsarra

The idea of in zone deployment worked just fine until they added coins to skirmishes and CE's.

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This alone, destroyed CLL to bits.

Lack of incentives to rerun is one problem. But there’s also the very tight time limit for the first fight & the incapability to find replacement for disheartened players and trolls. All of these are working against the nature of PUG runs.