Raiding is becoming less and less optional

[Kaoru_Nagisa]

The bold part sort of invalidated your point because it comes off as a dig to "filthy casuals". For the record, I'm not upset about the new direction of this game, I just found it interesting.

If you read my OP I even said I've voluntarily gone back and done all the old raids just for fun. It's just odd that they would start requiring raids to advance in the MSQ, if they do indeed do more of that in the future.

Doesn't invalidate my point at all just because you dislike the way I phrased something. I'm also one of those 'filthy casuals' you claim I was talking about, as I'm no longer raiding Savage.

If you aren't upset about it, you're certainly coming off as such. Continuing to cite a statement SE made about 'only a small % do raids' also gives off the impression you dislike any possible 'direction' they're going in (they're not, btw) to making moderately more difficult content non-optional.

The only reason CT is required to advance this is because they made the decision to tie in one of the NPCs to the MSQ. They gave people plenty of time to do the raids as an optional thing, to enhance their ShB experience (while not forcing it, since there are options in dialogue for people who have not completed CT). Understanding what will come next in the MSQ is very likely to need some understanding of the original story in the CT raids and knowledge of who [redacted] is.

That decision is by no means pointing towards a future requirement to do optional raid content, though. And before you cite Bozja requiring the Ivalice raids - that is entirely optional content. Relic has been and will continue to be optional content.

There is very little possibility of the Mhachi raids tying in later unless we delve into the Void or need to learn about the Great Flood. Yorha is also not likely to be required for any MSQ in the future, as it was guest content (the same as how the Great Hunt is permanent guest content, but not required for anything). Ivalice is not required for the MSQ, only for an o p t i o n a l questline.

So stating that the raids are becoming forced content is more or less stating a lie. One raid out of the many, many 'raid' content we have is not all raid content becoming forced.

I miss the old Steps of Faith, I loved firing the cannons and dragon killer harpoons. It was fun and very chalenging, i'm still very disapointed they nerfed it so much.

I do as well. It wasn't even difficult content, it just required a fair amount of organization and communication - two things of which this community seems to avoid like the plague at times. The requirements of competency for it made the trial actually feel fairly stressful and epic, something that I think fit the 'end' of ARR and pulling us into Ishgard and its Dragonsong War. Nerfing it the way they've done has all but eliminated that feeling, which I feel has soured the experience overall. Same with how brain-dead CT is now - it wasn't ever 'hard', but it required some attention and communication before whereas now you can basically alt-tab to Netflix the entire time and no one will notice. (Granted this is due to ilevel creep, not nerfs. Still something that should be fixed all the same.)

[Iscah]

SE should have made it a requirement in addition to completing 4.5 MSQ to do the Crystal Tower to unlock the first 5.0 MSQ quest, if the Crystal Tower was that important and intertwined to the story. Waiting a year on a "suggestion" and then making it mandatory past the 1 year anniversary of the release of the expansion tells me there's other reasons beyond lore.

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.

[Melichoir]

The 24 man Alliance stuff arent raids. Theyre pretty much just a dungeon party with 24 people instead of 4.

The only trouble I see is when people dont know mechanics from SB alliance raids. That slows things down a bit. But its not that huge a deal.

[Crushnight]

SE should have made it a requirement in addition to completing 4.5 MSQ to do the Crystal Tower to unlock the first 5.0 MSQ quest, if the Crystal Tower was that important and intertwined to the story. Waiting a year on a "suggestion" and then making it mandatory past the 1 year anniversary of the release of the expansion tells me there's other reasons beyond lore.

Since SE loves not giving much money to FF14, some SE executives could be looking at these 24 man raids, seeing a completion and participation rate lower than what was to be "expected", and they could cut more funding and move resources around. FF14 leadership forcing participation could be a move to save the content. Then again, I work for a corporation that literally forces people (employees and customers) to use tools and applications just to have a high usage rate to justify spending money on resources to upkeep and make similar tools and applications.

Now for those scratching their heads on why people would be stating their dissatisfaction to now have to do content they were not interested in doing in the first place and changes from being from optional to required, let me just change just one noun in this scenario:

Instead of ShB being around the Crystal Tower, it is around the island of Eureka.
The Eureka storyline has many ties to the MSQ.
It will be required to complete the Eureka storyline in order to progress in the MSQ in 5.3

Would you not come onto the forums to state your dissatisfaction? Would you not feel like this is "forced?"

Most people don't like Eureka. I do. So would you appreciate me telling you to "suck it up," "your making mountain out of a molehill," etc. No, you wouldn't.

Granite, completing the story in Eureka is no where as quick and easy as completing CT. I am not going to pretend that it does. I am just giving a scenario to give those who are not understanding where some of those who are dissatisfied might be coming from.

This becomes a fallacy when you consider this is both the 1st time they made optional side content mandatory in msq but not the 1st time they advised people to do content to enhance the story.

Alisae's return to msq in 3.4 since her spat with her brother in the Quicksand back in 2.0 was highly advised to do coil beforehand yet that still has not become mandatory most likely due to their difficulty (T9 specifically at this point with our level of gear).

So we have a precedence of them both advising and not making it mandatory and of advising and making it mandatory so their is no way to tell at this point if it would ever be a trend.

Also going to put the difficulty of the CT raids for the few that haven't done them, if you can do Philia the last boss of Holminster Switch you can handle everything CT raids through at you.

[Frizze]

Instead of ShB being around the Crystal Tower, it is around the island of Eureka.
The Eureka storyline has many ties to the MSQ.
It will be required to complete the Eureka storyline in order to progress in the MSQ in 5.3

Would you not come onto the forums to state your dissatisfaction? Would you not feel like this is "forced?"

Most people don't like Eureka. I do. So would you appreciate me telling you to "suck it up," "your making mountain out of a molehill," etc. No, you wouldn't.

So in this scenario, they told us over a year ago that finishing Eureka would enhance our ShB experience(with extra dialogue and whatnot) and now we're finding out that it will actually be required? I wouldnt feel forced at all. In that scenario, i probly finished Eureka last spring. If somehow i hadnt found time for it then, id have certainly found time by now. Ive been(slowly) leveling classes i dont care about for months, i could carve out time for an important story beat to happen. And i say this as someone who went into Anemos when it was new, stayed for maybe an hour, and never went back. Yeah, id "suck it up" and not come to the forums to complain about it.

[Delis]

[QUOTE=Xtrasweettea;5347440
Granite, completing the story in Eureka is no where as quick and easy as completing CT.[/QUOTE]


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP-Wd453wq4

[Barraind]

However, what I feel needs to be corrected is the dismissal of Alliance Raids not being coordinated, as they very much are.

They in no way require coordination beyond "the tank tanks, the healer heals, the dps go pew", with the exception of the small number of events that require someone stepping on a pad.

There is no "make sure x group picks up this, y group does that, these healers on this tank, make sure you use healer cooldowns at these specific points, dps have to watch xyz, or coordinate interrupts". You mash buttons, you heal the blue things, each of which is capable of tanking every mob in every mass pull designed for 24 people, and you group heal when the boss hits everyone with an ae.

You can even do them with 24 tanks, because literally all of them can be killed by either spinning in a circle a lot or 123'd and healed with clemency.


We do have one raid-sized event that requires coordination in BA.

[Rasikko]

I also think it's a bit too late in the game's life cycle to be forcing anything on us.

[Iscah]

I also think it's a bit too late in the game's life cycle to be forcing anything on us.

So what sort of content do you do, if you don't want this content (which is very similar to the core content of the game) forced on you?

This isn't meant to be dismissive. I honestly can't understand. I'm very averse to higher-level play - invariably fumble it and need to be revived yet again - and alliance raids don't bother me. They're very forgiving, even the harder ones.

If it was some other game mode I could understand more. If they were forcing the lengthy grind of Eureka or PVP or some other game mode, it might make more sense - but this is standard quest-and-dungeon gameplay you can get through it a couple of hours.

[Vyrerus]

This thread makes me think of the Louisoix cutscene in Turn 12 of Coil where you get to see what he really did to Bahamut at Carteneau. Usually stuff they keep as side story content between main story patches or in savage level raids is the kinda stuff that makes for a good treat to make up for the difficulty. I wish they'd stuck to that method.

Also, more on topic, as others have said it's only because they are going to make an upcoming story beat rely on a story beat from the sidequest that involved the raids. Gotta crawl before you can walk and all that.