Can I ask why Creative Business Unit 3 are radio silent on the issue of Forked Tower?

[Amarande]

Well if that's the case they're going to lose a lot of casuals.

Yeahhhh ... I've been getting this feeling a lot myself (although I didn't do Bozja much, the setback mechanic being when you die rather than when you fail to get a rez made things a good jot more stressful and I'm certainly glad that OC at least brought back the wild and free Eureka mechanic in this regard).

Either that, or their definition of "casual" has perhaps shifted and unfortunately us longtimers get caught in the ... Interpopulational Rift: their most important focuses possibly now being on hardcore raiders and sprouts.

Actually this last theory makes a lot of sense to me on reflection. The game's pacing more or less leaves us in an awkward spot, honestly.

Casual play thrives pretty heavily on the "new friend join me in this game" angle, and raids are just not really a priority from that point of view: unlike a fast-burn game like WoW where you better have accessible raids that the vet can readily help a new player along in or their options are basically to develop altitis or quit after the first month's sub, a month into XIV they're probably still reaching for the Heavensward emergency tissue box. It's a LONG time after they get off the wagon before they are remotely ready to join you or I in any endgame content ... so SE may have begun to consider endgame content accessibility a lower priority as a result.

(I checked my own achievements, FWIW, and even as a fairly heavy player, a month after I started this character I was just wrapping up post-HW and heading into Stormblood, so this is about right)

the raid is not part of the relic at all :shrug:

True, though it's still up in the air if it will be a required step in order to upgrade OC gear going into North Horn (we might get a brand new set of gear then like with Pyros, but they could throw a further curveball and require the Arcanaut +2 in order to upgrade into NH steps ...)

and the community around such dungeons becomes so toxic that it becomes unrealistic and nasty to get into (like it was with chaotic).

On the Crystal based Discord I am in it seems fairly open and friendly community wise with little or no active toxicity, but there are still some grave logistical issues.

Runs fill fast (mostly advanced sign ups rather than the Discord queue bot that was used for BA when I was on Aether in StB) so it can be difficult to find one, especially in today's world where prog points are expected to be much more strictly adhered to. (BA had MUCH less difficulty with this latter, I still remember tearfully the time we had a very nervous first timer with us in one of the midnight Aether runs who was glad for our kindness and reassuring and she came so very close to clearing when unfortunately during Ozma an AoE slip clipped her and, yet lacking the protection of +2 gear, she was slightly too fragile to take the damage and was whisked away by the next Black Hole before we could get her back up)

I'm also not sure how reliably runs actually happen after planning, especially since I've seen scheduled runs listed literally a half hour apart from one another on the same datacenter - the way gathering 6 groups into one instance and Auroral Mirage windows work, this seems way too optimistic for people to not be stepping on each other's toes ...