Quote Originally Posted by Cleretic View Post
The problem here is that this would require making Eden mandatory, and they're not doing that. Making Crystal Tower mandatory was a hugely unpopular move, and that was not only absolutely required for the story to progress (and led to introducing one of the most popular Scions to the core cast), it was also the absolute smallest, easiest side-content ask you could ever make because the Crystal Tower is three absolute cakewalk raids.

Eden is twelve separate queues, that all add up to the hardest normal raid experience in the game. If you want to be SURE that there's a critical drop-off of casual players before an upcoming expansion, 'make Eden mandatory' is the plan most likely to work.
What they should do, if they ever decided to do that again, is to just make the MSQ pretend that you've done the raids. In ARR now that the Crystal Tower is mandatory, it pops up a little notification telling you that you have to complete them before you can continue; Instead what they could do is have a notification pop up saying something along the lines of "The following MSQ continues story threads from the optional Eden Raid series. If you have not completed them, you may want to do so before continuing, as the MSQ will act as though you have, which may lead to confusion." Then it's up to the players to decide if they want to do it or not. When I first played through Shadowbringers, I had not done the Crystal Tower raids. Thankfully I had read online somewhere that other players recommended it for the story, so I went back and did them before I got too far. I'm sure many others would choose to do so as well, but if some don't, they should have that choice. Some of the optional content is good enough that it'd be a shame if it never got included in the MSQ.