The preatorium, streamlined

[Shougun]

There is no forced cutscenes, ruining new player experiences and making the dungeon far less rewarding for everyone (and likely the roulette being rejoined with all the other dungeons), or forced cutscenes, preserves new player experience, high reward, high time cost... Maybe trusts added to that dungeon and then no one gets to play together because we ruined a good opportunity.

Which isn't to sound super blunt, but the forced cutscenes and the /very/ high reward on exp (and pretty good tomestone, if you're needing that for relics or whatever) was made as a unit. I know because I was there for the feedback of both systems, literally before forced cutscenes saying "these should be forced, but you're going to have to make the reward huge otherwise people are going to refuse to run this". Now we have loads of people doing it because of the high value, and new players get to preserve the experience that was intended.

If players can't handle the wait and therefore don't get the reward, I'm relatively certain that it will just be changed to a solo experience which will lose veterans an easy way for exp casually and new players / social players the ability to enjoy an important part of the story together.

Maybe a bit false choice, maybe there is another choice, I guess I just don't see it. All I can realistically see personally is either high reward + cutscene or low reward / no cutscene and ruined first time experience of a major part of the story (which will likely end up SE making it a solo experience because that later bit, ruining the major story, seems like a non-optional option.. just not an acceptable outcome).

In the future you're totally right though they did change how they display cutscenes so it's at the end, but it would really be all sorts of wonky if they did that here lol. I suppose you might suggest they remake the entire experience.... I guess that's what you're sort of saying.. but.. seems like you'd miss a lot of stuff doing that, many scenes just wont fit where they are if you bundled them at the end. You'd have to leave a lot of stuff on the cutting room floor (there would be a sense of retconning potentially as some stuff just couldn't happen as it used to). Although if one was realllly into it, I suppose you might be able to keep the main story concepts / beats intact. Just seems like a shame and so I set it over to the non-optional side, but I guess I don't want to be swinging fallacies around like it's impossible...

So I think it rests between the two outcomes, forced but high value or not forced and low value which will lead to solo experience.