Castrum is dead. Please do something, Squenix

[Raltar]

I do Castrum at least once a day and we always have 30+ people. Maybe you are just doing it at the wrong times.

[Ursa_Vonfiebryd]

No one runs it anymore. Making fates give coins was a HUGE mistake. It has rendered Castrum incredibly useless to the point that no one queues for it anymore. Why did you do this? Did you not foresee this happening? New players now can’t complete the story and people who enjoy Castrum or want to finish the achievement for 50 runs are SOL. You should not have to join a discord group in order to complete story content in this game. I don’t know what the solution would be, either drastically upping the drop rate of boxes, making it give exp, or just plain making it doable with less than 10 players...just please...DO SOMETHING

PLEASE DO SOMETHING

This happened with the big instanced battle in Eureka. It required such coordination that only large raid groups could reasonably be expected to complete it successfully and said groups would discourage free roaming players from entering it, even just to try it out (to be fair, execution was very tetchy in there, or so I hear, much like the main Emergency in Diadem. I can only assume it takes very little to wipe it).

The problem is, co-op is vastly different overseas, as some posters from EU and JP have explained. This kind of content never really goes very well here, as we've see in Diadem, Eureka and now Bozja. Thus the reason the currency is available outside of this instance. Only the most determined will go for it but for those who miss out, they can still get what they need.

You can try for a Party Finder, or try to find enough people in Bozja itself if you want the story completion. Good luck in any case, but NA execution of this kind of group content has been terribad for ages. At least you can still get the main payout without doing the Castrum at all. A small consolation but I feel like that's their answer.

[TheMightyMollusk]

Shinryu was still never nerfed, he's just been outgeared.

[RyuDragnier]

Shinryu was still never nerfed, he's just been outgeared.

Which I'm still thankful for. The calls for him and Nidhogg to be nerfed were absurd, they were always going to be outgeared at some point, and neither fight was that difficult.

[HyperiusUltima]

I've been staying away from Bozja for a while because of the issues it has right now. The fact they threw in Coins into the Overworld is not a bad idea, but eventually you're gonna HAVE to go into Castrum for some reason for another.

Want to do 1v1s? Go into Castrum.
Want to complete story? Go into Castrum.
Need more coins? Go into Castrum.

A lot of people exacerbate the rate of losing Mettle in Castrum like it's going to literally make you lose 100,000 Mettle just for a goof. You can gain TONS of Mettle just by doing stuff outside of Castrum - Bozja's rates for gaining Mettle are a higher net gain than what you can lose in there over a whole hour if you're constantly running FATEs. If you're not R15, then sure; but it shouldn't stop you from trying to get there. People always want the easy way out no matter what, and don't want to work for anything. 1v1s are where that was, but the gate of RNG and 20/1 people qualifying is literally too horrible right now to even try. SE has too much they need to fix in Bozjan Southern Front that I hope they can fix after 5.4 or on 5.4's patch.

[Zakon]

A lot of people exacerbate the rate of losing Mettle in Castrum like it's going to literally make you lose 100,000 Mettle just for a goof. You can gain TONS of Mettle just by doing stuff outside of Castrum - Bozja's rates for gaining Mettle are a higher net gain than what you can lose in there over a whole hour if you're constantly running FATEs. If you're not R15, then sure; but it shouldn't stop you from trying to get there.

We don't know what's going to happen in the future of Bozjan. Will they add more ranks? I certainly don't want to touch Castrum if it means I'm going to have to grind even more once that happens.

I'm not rank 15 yet but in trying to get to that point just to future-proof myself it's making me legitimately hate playing this game. And I'm not even dying that often, but even using it to level jobs I don't have at 80 yet I just can't stand the endless FATE grinding when I could just do a leveling roulette, followed by maybe MSQ with a show on my other monitor and then go do something else.

Anything that would possibly set me back is a no-sell. I'm not touching Castrum for as long as it doesn't give mettle to offset any I might lose in there.

I have never felt so down on any piece of content this game has offered, other than Blue Mage and the previous versions of Diadem. Bozjan I find mildly more enjoyable than them to the point I'm actually participating instead of giving it a hard pass.

[Shinklet]

I can bang out my 50 runs in a week because I can use discord to queue 2 parties of not even competent people, just people who are willing to listen to voice calls and get them into the same instance and easily divide them up to get through the gate fight and even rescue all 6 prisoners easily.

It's such a low level of competency that the average player doesn't meet. The mechanics themselves are normal tier difficulty, but good luck finding someone that'll step up as a leader and take the time to organise it for you.

You can argue it's square's fault for fostering and catering to a pretty lazy playerbase but my only critique is that they made castrum easier than BA because other players struggled.

[LaylaTsarra]

You can argue it's square's fault for fostering and catering to a pretty lazy playerbase but my only critique is that they made castrum easier than BA because other players struggled.

I'm sure discord is an option. It worked real well for BA BUT 3rd party services shouldn't be the mech by which people queue for a clear content. This I do believe was an attempt to make queuing for the content in game but they screwed it up big time by messing up the incentives for doing the duty. One of the biggest complaints about Eureka and BA was that it wasn't really doable in game and needed discord to accomplish it.

Right now Casturm is failing big time and personally I'm surprised it's taking SE so long to hotfix it. I'm sitting right now in Borza on Crystal DC with 2 people queued for Castrum at 2:30 minutes left to join.

[Shinklet]

I'm sure discord is an option. It worked real well for BA BUT 3rd party services shouldn't be the mech by which people queue for a clear content. This I do believe was an attempt to make queuing for the content in game but they screwed it up big time by messing up the incentives for doing the duty. One of the biggest complaints about Eureka and BA was that it wasn't really doable in game and needed discord to accomplish it.

Right now Casturm is failing big time and personally I'm surprised it's taking SE so long to hotfix it. I'm sitting right now in Borza on Crystal DC with 2 people queued for Castrum at 2:30 minutes left to join.

Nah, hard disagree, big group content has always required voice coms or an external factor in some shape or form, in every mmo ever. There's a wow guild of people who are literally deaf and they're all on discord even still.

The main mechanic is co-ordination and it's the easiest one.

[LaylaTsarra]

Nah, hard disagree,

You're welcome to disagree but I'm not convinced. It's not something that should be required sorry. BA is was necessary but this is certainly more than doable if they didn't screw up the rewards structure. A hotfix is incoming and you're more than welcome to push discord, I used it significantly for BA, but it isn't necessary here or should be necessary for this content.

I've got 6 toons who cleared Castrum with it before the hotfix (probably close to 16 clears given some have cleared it 4 times) without using discord and there isn't one that could have cleared BA without discord and I have 8 toons with marbles.