Raiding is becoming less and less optional

[Xtrasweettea]

I don't see a reason to see it as some kind of conspiracy - and given the number of complaints about too much Syrcus Tower in alliance roulette, I have a hard time believing it would be out of a need to increase participation levels in low-populated content.

They didn't force CT for 5.0 because - as much as it is highly recommended for story comprehension - it isn't needed to keep the sequence of events straight. (I'll spoiler-tag the rest of this just in case.)

The story will not reference side story events as having happened if the individual player hasn't played the story to "make it happen", which is why side content doesn't usually link back into MSQ, as the story can't build on something that might not have happened yet.

5.0 carefully steps around this rule because the time travel element negates the need for the player to have made those events happen at the point when the story plays out. It doesn't matter if the events of CT, Alexander and Omega are still in your future, because the Exarch has come back from an even further point in the future, so those events happened somewhere between now and then. (It's a flimsy excuse if you stare at it too hard and try to make sense of the altered timeline, but enough to scrape through.) The story can play out the same whether you completed CT or not, therefore they didn't force it.

Obviously whatever they've got planned will for 5.3 will be a different story. Something we'll be doing in the here and now will rely on the state of something changed by those events.

The obvious possibility is that we might need to wake up G'raha Tia again - which is rather hard if he was never sealed in the tower to begin with. So we would need to complete CT to ensure that has happened.

Or maybe the solution to our problem lies in the World of Darkness - and again, to ensure that world is in a particular state (Xande's covenant and the voidgate destroyed, Unei and Doga maybe still in there somewhere, Cloud of Darkness still rather furious at us?), we need to have completed CT.

Eureka would feel forced because it has had no direct recent links to MSQ. Its gameplay is also a fair bit further away from FFXIV's usual play format of story quests and battle instances.

CT isn't a "tough endgame raid" - it's practically a dungeon. Would you complain if 5.3 gave you a new MSQ chapter with three new dungeons to play through? Because level synch aside, this really isn't any different or more challenging. But put the label "raid" on a thing and suddenly it's something else entirely.

I think we had more wipes to the Mist Dragon when the Burn was newly-launched than I've ever seen happen in a single CT run. Even World of Darkness. Might get one or two on a specific boss, but people learn from mistakes and it goes better on the next attempt.

If you work in corporate world like I do, you would understand where I am coming from with my "conspiracy." Also, just because people run a piece of content constantly does not mean that it is popular among the majority. This was an argument that was applied against Eureka back when it was relevant. That argument can be applied here as well.

You assuming I would think CT would be difficult is misplacing my disinterest for the content. I did 18+ man end-game content for years in FFXI and raided in WoW for a few months. Due to the constant grid of that content, I ended up burning out and decided to not participate in anything greater than 8 man content when I joined FF14, unless I know I could end up enjoying the content (like Eureka). I knew before doing CT it wouldn't be difficult. It is completely possible to be just not interested in content beyond 8 man in this game. Just like it is completely possible to not be interested in crafting.

The hardest part of CT was pressing that skip option on the cut-scenes.

As for the MSQ and Eureka example, if you took in what I wrote then "recent story links" would apply in that scenario