Current fixes to Forked Tower is not good enough

[Jeeqbit]

1. They are not locked out of it. They can make a PF and find 24+ people who feel the same way. If they can't find 24 people who feel the same way, then they are probably the only one that feels that way, so they need to adjust their mindset.

2. Since PFs can enter as an alliance of 48, it almost guarantees a fresh instance. Only very rarely is there gonna be a non-fresh instance with less than 25 players in, and I think they intend to make it guaranteed fresh later on. A fresh instance effectively means they are not affecting "random" PUGs.

3. Nobody is vetting others to enter FT; on the contrary the entire idea is to help anyone and everyone go from fresh to clear by carring them with callouts that make it as easy as possible to clear.

4. Some runs will not be "fresh prog". You might need to have "seen" a certain phase. If you have not seen that phase, you can join a fresh prog group instead. It's not rocket science.

5. Not being allowed to join a "certain phase" party is not exclusive to FT. It's always happened with Extreme, Savage, Ultimate, Criterion, etc. It's not hard to just join a fresh party instead if you aren't up to that phase.

6. You're effectively saying High-End raids shouldn't exist. Maybe what you could ask for instead is for the normal modes to 1. exist and 2. be more challenging but not be a phase prog. Extreme trials are pretty good at that really - I can take first timers through them and prog through to the end within the timer in many cases.

[Themarvin]

1. They are not locked out of it. They can make a PF and find 24+ people who feel the same way. If they can't find 24 people who feel the same way, then they are probably the only one that feels that way, so they need to adjust their mindset.

2. Since PFs can enter as an alliance of 48, it almost guarantees a fresh instance. Only very rarely is there gonna be a non-fresh instance with less than 25 players in, and I think they intend to make it guaranteed fresh later on. A fresh instance effectively means they are not affecting "random" PUGs.

3. Nobody is vetting others to enter FT; on the contrary the entire idea is to help anyone and everyone go from fresh to clear by carring them with callouts that make it as easy as possible to clear.

4. Some runs will not be "fresh prog". You might need to have "seen" a certain phase. If you have not seen that phase, you can join a fresh prog group instead. It's not rocket science.

5. Not being allowed to join a "certain phase" party is not exclusive to FT. It's always happened with Extreme, Savage, Ultimate, Criterion, etc. It's not hard to just join a fresh party instead of you aren't up to that phase.

6. You're effectively saying High-End raids shouldn't exist. Maybe what you could ask for instead is for the normal modes to 1. exist and 2. be more challenging but not be a phase prog. Extreme trials are pretty good at that really - I can take first timers through them and prog through to the end within the timer in many cases.

Stop acting like FT is high end content for starters, it is not, it is in fact quite a beat mainstream, if anything that is.

[Jeeqbit]

Stop acting like FT is high end content for starters, it is not, it is in fact quite a beat mainstream, if anything that is.

This is from the live letter, translated into English by Square Enix:

As for entering Forked Tower itself, the current entry method allows players to increase their chances of being selected by inserting multiple Sanguine Ciphers. We believe part of the reason why groups are having trouble reliably entering the dungeon with all of their members is the lack of a menu to see "who" inserted "how many" ciphers, so we hope to alleviate the situation by displaying this information.

Additionally, the current entry method allows players to jump in without a cipher, but this feature and the lack of a difficulty warning when unlocking Forked Tower led to conflicting mindsets between players who entered the dungeon together. To ensure that all participants understand the challenge that awaits them in Forked Tower, we will be changing entry system to always require at least one cipher from every player.

It also includes factors like death limits which is what they tend to put on "high-end" versions of content.

They confirmed that their intention was that we would figure out optimal or "braindead" strategies and then begin carrying first timers through - because that's what happens with a lot of high-end content if we're honest. But their intention was not achieved due to the entry system issues that made it hard for pre-formed groups to even get in together and made them play instance roulette and wait ages for a weather.

[Valence]

They confirmed that their intention was that we would figure out optimal or "braindead" strategies and then begin carrying first timers through - because that's what happens with a lot of high-end content if we're honest. But their intention was not achieved due to the entry system issues that made it hard for pre-formed groups to even get in together and made them play instance roulette and wait ages for a weather.

If the death limits alone as a concept like in criterion is the best they can do when it comes to making content difficult, I think this content is doomed from the start. Exactly like twice/thrice comes ruin (or worse, combined with it) is literally the embodiment of everything that's wrong with the trinity in the current state of the game.
If they design things counting on "braindead cheeses" then it is no wonder that the pve has taken such a nosedive for a while.

[Jeeqbit]

If they design things counting on "braindead cheeses" then it is no wonder that the pve has taken such a nosedive for a while.

I don't think they necessarily meant braindead strats, I was just being blunt, that's all. The exact wording from the LL digest is:

"We initially anticipated that, as strategies developed, those who cleared the dungeon would be able to assist others with their clears. But entry method-related complications have hindered groups from going back for multiple clears; as a result, the overall situation has yet to reach the state of affairs that we originally envisioned."

they didn't like that people could just use the PF to find a party and queue for DR/DRS.

I assume they meant the gathering and selection of Lost Actions and having to set all that up being overbearing. In contrast, Phantom Jobs choose the action setups, reducing the focus on that as much.

"The system features for Delubrum Reginae seemed too overbearing, so we tried making them a little more hands-off this time around. By doing so, we hoped to open up more opportunities for players to converse with each other and form their own practices."

It's stupendously befuddling they made Forked Tower even more difficult to prep than Baldesion Arsenal, instead of emulating the much more positive experiences provided by Lacus Litore, Delubrum Reginae (and Savage), and the Dalriada. It really makes me question their idea of "fun."

"when designing a new in-game system, looking back at previous projects helps set the bar for what seems "good enough," but this could also be considered complacency. Our intention is, and has always been, to strive for the best results possible, even in the smallest of ways. But as content and project sizes continued to swell, with pending deadlines to be met, more and more design decisions were made based on precedence rather than seeking ideal solutions for each scenario.

"we should have prepared an adequate number of QA staff beforehand. Because we stuck to our standard protocol, certain sections of the game were released with undiscovered issues. There were a large number of new functions added in these implementations, and there were also issues that persisted across several frames of animation."

"Having multiple difficulty levels would've been ideal; unfortunately, with the time constraints that we had, we lacked the development resources to design and debug two separate difficulties in addition to creating large-scale battle content like Forked Tower from the ground up. Furthermore, we believe the difficulty level overshot what players were expecting before release."

[Amarande]

1. They are not locked out of it. They can make a PF and find 24+ people who feel the same way. If they can't find 24 people who feel the same way, then they are probably the only one that feels that way, so they need to adjust their mindset.

Except that people are so used to Discord based organization at this point that you wouldn't just need to make a PF, you would need to make a Discord.

It is incredibly difficult to get FFXIV culture out of the tailspins it sometimes finds itself in, and a large part of that is because with the massively discord based culture at this point, it often doesn't just involve putting up a group finder or making a linkshell/fellowship - you actually have to full blown kickstart and admin a whole new social media community to have any "real say" ...

3. Nobody is vetting others to enter FT; on the contrary the entire idea is to help anyone and everyone go from fresh to clear by carring them with callouts that make it as easy as possible to clear.

There is a huge deficiency in fresh prog parties atm (especially compared to this far into BA's timescale), and a distinct impression that most people are trying to "get theirs" before going back to help (starkly contrast BA, where even people well along in prog still participated in Frag runs).

I'm not sure if this is a difficulty matter, a carrot matter (BA gearing was done through frags alone so it was beneficial to get in as many farms as you could even if they were prior to your prog point, while Sanguinite is likely not nearly so alluring when virtually everything but the fixative and emote are dirt cheap from chest drops and you can't use the fixatives without getting 3 lucky enough outside chests per gear piece along with them?), or if player culture is in fact in sharp decline. Or if it's a combination.

4. Some runs will not be "fresh prog". You might need to have "seen" a certain phase. If you have not seen that phase, you can join a fresh prog group instead. It's not rocket science.

At this point, you almost have to volunteer to host a fresh prog group instead, which is a much bigger undertaking (and I'm not even sure how accessible it is to a green-to-FT player at this point seeing that you're like to be expected to take on the full responsibilities of a Raid Lead as well as trying to learn the content).

6. You're effectively saying High-End raids shouldn't exist. Maybe what you could ask for instead is for the normal modes to 1. exist and 2. be more challenging but not be a phase prog. Extreme trials are pretty good at that really - I can take first timers through them and prog through to the end within the timer in many cases.

Possibly they shouldn't, if players can't be patient enough to wait for later starters/slower learners to catch up (an exception can be made for people who are actively griefing in such fashion that it's obvious they aren't trying to clear the duty. Prog liars, annoying as they are, don't really count here: they may be foolishly going in over their head at the expense of the rest of the group but they still are genuinely attempting to clear the duty).

It's a cruel judgment, and I'm not sure if we're yet at that point, but on many an occasion one gets the vibe that the community is teetering on the point of "maybe we just can't have nice things anymore" ...

Stop acting like FT is high end content for starters, it is not, it is in fact quite a beat mainstream, if anything that is.

OTOH these days many players consider anything that can't be reliably cleared by a fresh group in a single run to be "high end" content.

If the death limits alone as a concept like in criterion is the best they can do when it comes to making content difficult, I think this content is doomed from the start. Exactly like twice/thrice comes ruin (or worse, combined with it) is literally the embodiment of everything that's wrong with the trinity in the current state of the game.
If they design things counting on "braindead cheeses" then it is no wonder that the pve has taken such a nosedive for a while.

Omg, 100%. As a White Mage, the sheer number of incurable punishment debuffs literally makes me question the legitimacy of my role in anything other than the most casual of content: healers are kneecapped in their ability to recover the party from mistakes "to maintain difficulty" to a degree that artificial heal check mechanics are necessary to even keep them from being obsolete altogether, ripe to be replaced by additional red jobs instead. (And if you get expert enough this isn't even enough as has been shown several times this Xpac)

Rez limits by themselves are alright (eg WoW gives you a strict limit on how many rezzes the group is permitted during a boss pull) but combined with all the other punishment debuffs seen in raiding it's getting to be much.

Solely Based on that people is gonna be selective about players using third party sites and software to lock people out of it.

(snip)

a too high percentage is based in stats and if people has passed this or that.

Yes. Passporting needs to go. It requires you to either break the TOS yourself or have someone that does in your party. Worse, it requires you to agree to have your data submitted to a third party MONETIZED aggregator (yep, they make ad revenue and even subscription revenue off your tears) or you start being locked out of more and more groups for more and more content.

I remember I complained a lot about it taking two weeks of head bashing to clear Shinryu Ex back in the day.

... I'd take everything needing two weeks of head bashing over this toxic boxscore system. Again, especially since Those Sites are a literal business. It'd still be fairly toxic if it was an amateur project but the idea that I have to not only submit to this garbage but also DONATE to a specific for-profit business in order to effectively raid is a complete pile of steaming stinking dookie ...

[Valence]

Omg, 100%. As a White Mage, the sheer number of incurable punishment debuffs literally makes me question the legitimacy of my role in anything other than the most casual of content: healers are kneecapped in their ability to recover the party from mistakes "to maintain difficulty" to a degree that artificial heal check mechanics are necessary to even keep them from being obsolete altogether, ripe to be replaced by additional red jobs instead. (And if you get expert enough this isn't even enough as has been shown several times this Xpac)

Rez limits by themselves are alright (eg WoW gives you a strict limit on how many rezzes the group is permitted during a boss pull) but combined with all the other punishment debuffs seen in raiding it's getting to be much.

Yes, although I still think that even rez limit ala WoW are lame and arbitrary. If the current MP limiter is too lax that it allows to spam raise everyone then perhaps it should be more stringent. They seriously need to bring back resource management and scarcity baked into most jobs instead of doubling down on body or ddr checks and arbitrary raise charges.

[Taranok]

Omg, 100%. As a White Mage, the sheer number of incurable punishment debuffs literally makes me question the legitimacy of my role in anything other than the most casual of content: healers are kneecapped in their ability to recover the party from mistakes "to maintain difficulty" to a degree that artificial heal check mechanics are necessary to even keep them from being obsolete altogether, ripe to be replaced by additional red jobs instead. (And if you get expert enough this isn't even enough as has been shown several times this Xpac)

Rez limits by themselves are alright (eg WoW gives you a strict limit on how many rezzes the group is permitted during a boss pull) but combined with all the other punishment debuffs seen in raiding it's getting to be much.

Caught this section mostly because Valence responded to it directly, but WHM is truly just the finest example of: "We don't know how to design our healers, so we're going to force encounters to meet what the healers can do, and then force healers to that new standard."

If there's any poster child for homogenization, it's healer design. Every attack is either a party buster or a tank buster->solve with medica 1/2 or cure 2. Every expansion thing healers got are literally variations on those 3 skills. Tetragrammaton in HW is just cure 2 on an oGCD. Asylum is a medica 2, assize a medica 1. You can transcribe almost every single button on other healers back to those 3 skills, outside of things like cards or what little uniqueness exists inside the role.

Fast forward from Stormblood when the devs botched AST so much (in HW) to the point where they realized they needed AST to be a WHM, and we have the modern design of healer where it's a panic-inducing mess of completely overpowered hits with absolutely no flexibility and little in the way of disaster recovery. And some people have the gall to say the design is 'casual,' despite being a hair-pullingly-frustrating set of mechanics all built around the concept that they want healers to heal by numbers and mistakes are just insta-punished.

Unlimited ressing is a problem that shows the devs can make better fights without it (see: BA/DRS,) but healers need triage gameplay. The class just fundamentally doesn't feel good with this binary pass-fail design with heal-by-numbers. Hell, unlimited ressing is a consequence of it, because a proper triage design means MP is a vitally limited resource. Which it kind of was in stormblood, which made things like mana shift much more entertaining and satisfying.

One day, I hope the devs will realize just how awful their support design is at a meta level. Pressing 4 buttons to survive a tank buster doesn't make it anything but a binary pass-fail. Pressing 1 or 2 instant oGCD heals that solve the next party buster on a 40 second timer doesn't make the healing more engaging. This might not even be your point, but 100% of tank and healer design's problems are directly tied to awful fight design and the consequences of forcing all tanks and healers to tank, and heal, almost literally identically to each other. There's no room for variation when everyone is expected to do the same thing.

Furthermore, what we have in Dawntrail is the exact consequence of the bad fight design. Healing has to be done faster, with more precision, with less room for error both on the party and the healer themselves. And if you do die as a healer, there's a good chance you're going to wipe town. It's unbelievably awful design, and it's a big part of why Dawntrail as an expansion is so garbage. When the devs let their worst habits dictate job and fight design, eventually you wind up with a game that no one wants to play. ShB was too big a success that the devs didn't stop to think that the direction they took tier 2 and 3 of the raid series was extremely toxic for the game's future health. So here we are, dealing with the consequences of it.

/rant.

[Valence]

Unlimited ressing is a problem that shows the devs can make better fights without it (see: BA/DRS,) but healers need triage gameplay. The class just fundamentally doesn't feel good with this binary pass-fail design with heal-by-numbers. Hell, unlimited ressing is a consequence of it, because a proper triage design means MP is a vitally limited resource. Which it kind of was in stormblood, which made things like mana shift much more entertaining and satisfying.

Come play pvp, we have resource sustain and scarcity (and cookiees).

[Themarvin]

This is from the live letter, translated into English by Square Enix:



It also includes factors like death limits which is what they tend to put on "high-end" versions of content.

They confirmed that their intention was that we would figure out optimal or "braindead" strategies and then begin carrying first timers through - because that's what happens with a lot of high-end content if we're honest. But their intention was not achieved due to the entry system issues that made it hard for pre-formed groups to even get in together and made them play instance roulette and wait ages for a weather.

Played games where 1 revive or no revive is an option at all, if they wanted to make it high end should had made it 8 or 16 man only content, they are placing a huge doorstop in the major supposed to be fun zone for all baffles me and it should baffle everyone, elite or not.

It is bad game design and the only thing you can do is to admit to the facts.