Quote Originally Posted by Stanelis View Post
No, they weren't, the first week of the content people simply didn't go to the portals even though they were all available. Discords only picked up pace when people noticed after 1 week it was simply too tedious to merely find enough players to enter BA if a premade wasn't in the area (it s not a matter of "being impossible", it's merely an issue of logistics and manpower).

People tried to make PUGs during the first week, but hardly managed to get more than 1 group or 2 at most. Even today you don't systematically find premades in every hydatos instance, and when no premades are in the area, people can't manage to find enough players to PUG the content.
I can't speak for other Data Centers, but the Primal Discord was established on the 13th, the day after the content was released. I joined it shortly after (a day or two) and it had ballooned to a large enough size that they had to restructure it to include bots to assign roles and figure out parties. I know the Aether discord was already more established and set up by the point I joined the primal one.

I'm not saying this to judge the discords, I don't particularly care, I'm just trying to help at least describe the timeline of events surrounding them.

As for not being able to find PUGs now, as I said in my original post thats mostly due to the fact that pool of people who want to do the content but don't want to join a Discord for their personal reasons is too small to sustain a large PUG effort, in addition to the general attitude to BA being that it requires a premade to make any progress.