OC NEEDS multiparty queuing, forked tower is a orginizational nightmare!

Occult Crecent should allow alliances of players to join together instead of spending 30 minutes leaving and rejoining instances to try and locate the rest of your groups parties. It baffles the mind to how SE thought players could rouse half an instance into joining an optional dungeon, instead of implementing a system to lets pre-made parties enter together. SE have Alliance size PF formats for raids and Delubrum Reginae yet the crescent get left whith an antiquated system that was a pain in BA but made worse with the smaller instance sizes. I have no complaints with the areas content but accessing this content has been a complete blunder.

This needs to be fixed asap or atleast before the second zone comes out. Dropped the ball on an otherwise great addition..

Small indie company

multi dollar company

Yeah, it is truly awful. They need to patch this immediately or it's going to be dead content in about a week after all the hardcore masochists are done with it.

Please do something about this. Currently Forked Tower groups spend more time organizing and waiting for weather than they actually spend in Forked Tower

Another thing that would be nice is the option to save waymarks for the forked tower, it baffles the mind that it isn't there already.

3rd 48 man group session we have had to cancel in a few days since we were unable to queue instance together.
1 party being in a completely fresh instance with no way to join them since the instance is locked.
Trying to join them just puts us in the same previous instance over and over again.
SE please add the same multi-party queuing system as in DRS.

It would be interesting if someone from SE, not Yoshida though since he has made it clear on numerous occasions that he's out of touch with ffxiv and the ffxiv-playerbase, could explain what exactly their thought process and motivation behind this method of queuing into OC and FT was. No matter how much I try to come up with good reasons why this awful system exists, I can't. If their intention was for random players to meet up in OC and spontaneously be like "hey wanna do FT?" and tackle the content, then by now they must be very embarassed.

You can't do FT this way, because:

• You require a certain number of level 20 players in the same instance. Then you need to wait for the correct weather to appear. Then... you need to pray that at least 16 random players are willing to go into FT with you (good luck with that). If they aren't willing, then you wait 40 minutes for the weather to appear again.

• If they do want to go in the tower this time, great, but then you pray they don't join any CE's as the weather is up, because yes for some reason CE's still spawn during this crucial signup window of 5 minutes which requires not only a specific item (cipher) but also demands your character to physically be present at the Solitary Pavilion (in the middle of the map).

• Once you're in FT you pray the random gang of players that queued in can meet party role (tank/healer/dps) and very specific phantom job (and phantom job level) requirements. If they do (press x to doubt) then you pray that others are at the same prog point as you, which let's be real, will never be the case, as most players you meet this way are players interested in trying out FT for the first time.

• Then when you clear the first boss (which you won't because everyone else got pushed off the arena or died to towers), you have to get through a long section of dungeon mechanics (traps, hidden rooms, trash) and realize you have the majority of players on the Oracle phantom job, instead of geomancer and thief. (Unlike in an organised run (or you know an alliance PF party wink SE) you can't expect or require players to have read up on mechanics/studied a raidplan, expect them to know what phantom jobs (+ level) are mandatory, because it's a group of random players that got together - most of which who probably won't return after realizing that content like this requires a certain amount of actual organising.)

All of the above are indicators that random meetups within OC instances leading to FT progging was never the intention. So why make it so difficult for the players who want to access this content in a more realistic manner? Through this design players who avoid 3rd party communities to do content ingame are being gatekept, while the actual 3rd party communities are simultaneously being gatekept by fricking Jeffroy the Expedition Coordinator.

Lol suggesting you need to have the gold coin jobs.

I still stand with my opinion, its overtuned garbage if you cant do it with randoms at all. I fully support them locking out premades though... its fine once stuff dies down but right away?
CLL and Dalaria were ok, idk why they had to use the savage for normal mode...

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Originally Posted by Kuroka

Lol suggesting you need to have the gold coin jobs.

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You misunderstand; it's not a suggestion, it's necessary to have at least 2 players on Geomancer and 2 players on Thief to progress past the first boss. There are more mandatory phantom jobs that you need (at either max or a certain level too). I can explain which and why, but since you refer to FT as "overtuned garbage" I'm going to assume you aren't too interested.

But thank you, you prove exactly why spontaneously going in FT with random players is just always going to be a mess and can't possibly be what SE intended, especially when the people in question refuse to inform themselves even a little bit about the core mechanics of the dungeon (spoiler: it requiring specific phantom jobs to progress further into it) but throwing themselves in the dungeon (in this case, discussion) anyway.

They made their explanation around how they “imagine” the content works when this same situation blew up in hydatos. Their “idea” is that basically everyone who can steps on the plate (or kills ovni and goes for a portal) and then whoever is lucky enough to get in organised inside the tower/BA for what they want to be and do and if people decide part way through they have achieved enough they simply teleport out

This sortaaaaaaa worked for BA in JP because even before elemental armour your first real wall for BA is AV, art and owain and Raiden don’t enrage and there is almost no new mobs or tricks in BA besides the portal which can easily be found. This is why JP didn’t lose their mind at BA. It was also easy to farm elemental armour fragments by doing everything up to AV then teleporting out and doing the support fate as a loop, something tower lacks

However forked is much harder and hard requires specific coordination. BA until ozma doesn’t need anything besides a tank and some people percpepting the traps. Formed needs hard coordination from boss one so it goes beyond even what JP is willing to tolerate. DRS did this as well but DRS lets you queue directly.

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DRS did this as well but DRS lets you queue directly.

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Also you did not need to spend anything DRS, you did not have to wait for a certain weather inside the instance, and you queued outside so you always have the players you actually want. and you could simply fail and try fail and try fail and try so you could learn the fight eventually. In FT if you screw it up, good luck getting another weather with the people still in the same instance

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Originally Posted by Senri_95

It would be interesting if someone from SE ... could explain what exactly their thought process and motivation behind this method of queuing into OC and FT was.

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It's a very simple thought process that applies to most new content. They are simply copy/pasting ideas from previous iterations of this content without understanding why or having a cohesive idea of what the end result will play like.

To expound (ramble):

Eureka had elemental level so they added knowledge level, only took away the player power side so you can't murder low-level mobs anymore, but higher level ones will still one-shot you.
Bozja had CEs and FATEs so they kept that.

Baldesion Arsenal had an in-zone system for the raid similar to FT. It was mechanically simple but punishing. Snipers exist, but for most mechanics they can just get themselves killed. Most mechanics can be explained through calls.
Delubrum Reginae (Savage) was direct-queue but much more punishing mechanically. It needed queueing, so you could get your pre-made together to compensate for one person being able to murder everyone.

Forked Tower: They kept the in-zone system and added the personal responsibility of DRs. End result is that snipers can (and VERY OFTEN do) join the run for the sole sake of trying to wipe the run after you spent an hour getting into the same instance and waiting for weather.

On the topic of instance-progging - it's much easier to do in older content like Eureka because the zones are mostly empty. Trying to get 6 full parties into the same instance is a nightmare in OC.

I could go on, but once you start to see the pattern of "copy/paste from old content, lol I dunno" vibes in newer stuff, it's hard to unsee.

Something SE has failed to understand with Forked Towers design is that not everyone speaks the same language. Let's say, for conversations sake, that it totally works and you can bring 48 random people into the Tower no problem. How are you meant to teach and coordinate roles if you have people who only speak one language like Russian, French, German or whatever? It's like in Mentor roulette where if I queue only English I can get stuck with people who don't speak my language who turned on all their languages for faster queues so I'm stuck in an Extreme trial and they can't understand me at all.

Baffling.

I like OC but it's a shame that it's so close to greatness... yet not there.

The two things it urgently needs (or at the very least in the future zone) are 1) a Castrum Lacus Litore or Dalriada type of puggable alliance raid and 2) an improvement on the way to access FT (the hard more raid): either with 144 player instances and 48-player alliances queueing into OC or (better) allowing direct queueing outside like DRS. Most importantly, we need both types of raid (puggable and hard) for each zone. Getting only one is a step down from Bozja, where we had three plus one extra hard version.

Additionally, phantom jobs should be a bit more groundbreaking when it comes to their actions. For instance, for damage purposes, pSAM is the job to go most of the times besides some specific Berserker or Oracle shenanigans. There should be more options, even more than what we had in Eureka or Bozja.

Hopefully this is addressed in future updates and I hope that the 7.4 update will bring more than just new phantom jobs.

I have provided more feedback here, as well.

Square's lack of communication of player feedback like this is truly abhorrent.