Occult is awful, and I enjoyed both Eureka and Bozja greatly

[Kyuushi]

As for the tower, it'll get powercrept within a couple weeks when people actually have the gear and mastery stacks. I doubt 48 is mandatory even right now. People just need time to actually do it and learn each fight, the same with every other high-end encounter. Just with a few puzzles like BA/DRS.

The issue is not the difficulty of the tower. The issue is that people that want to get in the raid are being actively punished. It is objectively bad design when the people that actually want to do the content can't just because of how instances are designed. You can have 48 people willing and ready to go but after hours of trying to get in the tower they have to abandon 2 parties and just go in with 4. This is not an anecdote, this has been my experience with forked tower so far and that's not even the worst one.

The only argument I've seen about this is that it's to incentivize just random players going in and doing it but there are several issues with this. First of all is the level of content. There are body checks, enrages, specific job requirements and certain degrees of co-ordination you definitely won't get from random people just chill grinding the content. If it's meant to be done with randoms it should be at the level of Castrum/Dalriada and we have those raids as proof of concept of how good that works. If it's not meant to be done with randoms then there is way too much friction in just trying the content. You should not have to spend 2 hour just to get in the raid when you have 48 people willing and ready to go.

The second issue is that the community by and large seems completely disinterested in doing the Forked Tower at all. Everytime the tower weather comes up and me or some other person have tried to shout to try tower we're just met with crickets. You can blame the community all you want but if the difficulty level isn't designed for them, there's no real reason for them to engage with it. So we have content that's trying to pull in randoms, with difficulty levels that they do not wish to engage with and that actively punishes people that actually WANT to go into it as an organized group. Who was this content actually made for? The design is so backwards.

You could say it was the same with BA but BA was put at the end of a series and also had and instance cap of 144 which although it was still a mess at the time was still easier to deal with than this. And that is another issue. They have created content that is better than BA for this sort of thing with the Bozja, both for more random friendly content like Castrum, Delubrum and Dalriada, and also for more hardcore content with Delubrum savage. But not only did they go back to the worse design of how to get into BA but they made it EVEN WORSE by halfing instance caps to 72.

[Mawlzy]

The second issue is that the community by and large seems completely disinterested in doing the Forked Tower at all. Everytime the tower weather comes up and me or some other person have tried to shout to try tower we're just met with crickets. You can blame the community all you want but if the difficulty level isn't designed for them, there's no real reason for them to engage with it. So we have content that's trying to pull in randoms, with difficulty levels that they do not wish to engage with and that actively punishes people that actually WANT to go into it as an organized group. Who was this content actually made for? The design is so backwards.

I have a tinfoil explanation.

SQEX made a game that is a tribute to the franchise. They tried to appeal to the broadest base as possible, because MMOs are expensive to make and consequently require a massive subscriber count. Thus they pulled in people covering a wide spectrum from those who like visual novels with dragons and cat-girls to those who desire a second (or possibly only) job clearing high-end raids.

With EW wrapping up phase I of this plan, SQEX has concluded a sea change is in order. The story is now aimed at teenagers, and the fight design increasingly emphasizes twitchy reflexes and rote memorization. The little non-raiding content we have been drip-fed, such as cosmic exploration, is some of the least imaginative, dull, repetitive rubbish puked out by any "respectable" studio in the last three decades.

Apparently a cost-benefit analysis has revealed that phase II of this project will be more profitable with a significantly smaller player base, all of whom like high-end raiding of the monothematic design SQEX produces. All other content is an afterthought slowly being kicked to the curb.