The hypocrisy about Forked Tower / BA

[Valence]

Let's be real for a minute here. A lot of people seem to have forgotten how terrible Baldesion was at release and suffered from almost the exact same problems than Forked Tower does today, precisely because the latter has been a gigantic copy paste of the former in terms of entry restrictions. The main differences mostly lie into the instance duty cap (144 vs 72) making it a lot harder to get any group going at all inside Tower, so BA had more groups going in back then, and the initial absence of ticket system in Hydatos until the next patch so in comparison there was also a LOT more griefing and toxicity inside BA.

Ultimately it's been two duties that were originally designed to be cleared only by a handful, where most of the wall preventing a wider clearance was mostly the entry that artificially barred people from attempting 1) multiple times since groups needed the proper weather type and the Ovni / group preparation as well as releveling after a wipe and 2) the limited amount of slots and having to deal with randoms inside.

Forked Tower so far may be panned by critics, but so was BA, perhaps less so, I don't know, but it was full of problems as well. Then what happened? Hydatos turned obsolete/old, instances petered out, and since there is now not more than a single instance running, it's quite easy to get a full group in (56 people). More, the content has been solved since forever as well, but the fact remains that the entry requirements aren't a problem anymore. So people logically find it suddenly "good content". After Stormblood ended, there has been this slow but radical shift in perspective precisely because the experience of the content suddenly got a lot smoother as a result.

And I do believe Forked is going to be the exact same thing once South Horn gets obsoleted and people stop playing it. Instances are going to go down by a notch, perhaps one or two active at the same time at best. Randoms won't try to get in, and organized groups will have a super easy time all meeting up in the same instance, get in, and attempt their clears. There will still be like for BA all the constraints of the time it takes between two actual attempts if you fail, of course, so what's left to compare is how much of a no brainer the content is once solved, because for BA, it's a no brainer, just follow some instructions and you're gucci. If Forked is savage levels of difficulty however, requirement practice to get through party wiping mechanics or body checks, then it's gonna be a different story for sure.

All of this makes me think that this type of content is only aimed at hardcore groups, world first or streamers at release, and becomes actually manageable for everybody else once the content gets obsolete. I'm personally not sure this is a good model at all, but mark my words, everybody is gonna praise Forked or remember it "fondly" once DT is history.

[Valence]

Another thing that I think this design does pretty badly, and it's literally what the dev team has been roasted for with Chaotic: it tries to pit together two different audiences that do not want to have anything to do with each other inside the same duties. This is like putting lambs with wolves in the same enclosure. Any random freelance player that gets inside will by nature "grief" the serious attempts of an organized group, and both of those will have legitimately spent resources to get in, only have one attempt and it's over. And like it was already the case in BA back then, people hated getting either their spots sniped by randoms, or just hated having to deal with randoms that could just cause an instant failure by doing on oopsie inside, or just not knowing what to do. Not the same prog point as well. Even streamers now are casually telling groups on their streams that you can just sacrifice the randos by letting them die and pushing them out of the way if you can afford it.

I don't like that the dev team that has always prided itself into being that paragon of friendliness and fostering a nice community is constantly trying to drive wedges between different audiences and actually push on the community a predictable amount of toxicity. I really don't like it at all in fact, because that's exactly what this kind of artificially restricted content does: it's toxic. It's toxic in how it's arbitrary in the way it tries to prevent people having fun, and it's toxic in how it makes the community hate on each other, and it's no different than Chaotic in that regard.

Now then to add insult to injury, the low duty cap makes it that attempts to get into Forked also often results in not even meeting the minimum number of players for body checks or the required phantom jobs, so once you get inside after spending your valuable resources, and see that this is not even worth an attempt, then you're further punished by deleveling and losing all your resources for nothing, which frankly feels like a middlefinger for actually trying to engage with the content.

[Naoki34]

/popcorn
...

[Amarande]

It feels like Diadem emergency mission all over again honestly, not even BA (I do not know about DRS, I still need to do CLL in Bozja that'll tell you how far behind I'm there lol)

BA was a lot more resilient to "one person can mess everything up" - few mechanics (Ozma meteors mainly? It's been a while since I did BA) had that power. Most likely if you snipe a portal, you'll end up on the ground before long, have to port out and drop to level 59, and are likely to be excluded from your datacenter's forays Discord before long (so that you'd better git gud on your own because you'll have to snipe portals forever!).

This place? Oh, Twelve, it's a mess.

* You can't even TRY to pug it from the instance 9 times out of 10 when people are willing because reality is you miss the auroras due to everyone being stuck in a CE. (The CLL problem again basically)

* One person can MUCH more easily ruin it for everyone, this was an issue all the way back in Diadem Emergency why bring it back now?

* Due to the difficulty, we're seeing full 48 person statics form on the reg. How will this dovetail with PUG organization when statics start claiming several days' worth of peak hours (and where there's an achievement for ONE HUNDRED clears, too, vs. the 10 (or was it 20?) for BA).

On the bright side, there's at least a little element of responsibility that comes with "sniping" compared to BA, because of the ciphers system - to snipe you will need to use more ciphers than the organized group members or you won't get picked in the first place, which means you may have to pony up an entire outing's worth of Silver Pieces to make sure you get in. And you'd better have a whole party doing it too. So, there's at least some real stakes to sniping rather than BA where it was just one easily tempting click.

On the other hand, if a full group snipes, is the system smart enough to have them replace one of the other parties that queued up or will the premade lose people randomly from each party instead ...

[Themarvin]

its still bad design to get into it.... so was previous content.

[Moomba33]

I would be very curious to hear from the developers on why they went back to BA design as opposed to repeating the Bozja method of having easily puggable raids within the instances and a more hardcore raid that premades could queue for.

I do feel that it is likely intended to get more accessible over time. Future phantom jobs will help by letting players grind more mastery stacks and may have helpful skills that make the fights easier. Future gear may be released that is stronger than the sets currently available and powercreep the content further.

I haven't run FT yet, but it sounds like the biggest issue is there are more mechanics that can wipe the whole raid if someone does them wrong whereas BA and DRS were mostly personal responsibility mechanics with a few key people needing to do dispels and reflects and such.

[ChrysOCE]

I would be very curious to hear from the developers on why they went back to BA design as opposed to repeating the Bozja method of having easily puggable raids within the instances and a more hardcore raid that premades could queue for.

I do feel that it is likely intended to get more accessible over time. Future phantom jobs will help by letting players grind more mastery stacks and may have helpful skills that make the fights easier. Future gear may be released that is stronger than the sets currently available and powercreep the content further.

I haven't run FT yet, but it sounds like the biggest issue is there are more mechanics that can wipe the whole raid if someone does them wrong whereas BA and DRS were mostly personal responsibility mechanics with a few key people needing to do dispels and reflects and such.

Accessible to who? Raiders? Maybe. Not to the casual/midcore player base. The entry requirements, the need to be on a discord, the phantom job requirements (even if the raider portion of the raid picks this up), all of this will push the casual/midcore players away from attempting it. I really don't understand how CBU3 thought that BA was the model to go back to, instead of CLL/Dal. Especially for the first raid on the first release of OC.

I have no doubts that none of this would be addressed but, I would love if YoshiP explained some of the logic behind their design, in the next LL.

[MicahZerrshia]

Future phantom jobs will help by letting players grind more mastery stacks and may have helpful skills that make the fights easier.

Sorry but I am not grinding out phantom job levels for a piece of content a may or may not be able to access later. If they want us to level up these low effort attempts at subjobs they need to make doing other things in the zone a lot more worth the while or double to triple the amount of exp they get per CE/fate. I only had 2 at level cap by the time I was 20, and 3 by the time I had all my demimateria. atm there are 12 phantom jobs that you need to grind and there is no way I'm going to grind 9 more up on the off chance they may be useful in 6 months for exactly 1 piece of content that will be dead completely in 8.0 if not before. And with more phantom jobs coming in future patchesm it only makes matters worse. Exactly why I didn't bother with blu too.

This whole piece of content really makes you stop and wonder how some ppl got their jobs in the first place.

[Fawkes]

You can tell content is poorly designed when you see people saying words like "griefers" and "snipers" when referring to people just trying to do the content without getting a permission slip from some discord first. The Save the Queen content had solved most of these problems.

[Moomba33]

Accessible to who? Raiders? Maybe. Not to the casual/midcore player base. The entry requirements, the need to be on a discord, the phantom job requirements (even if the raider portion of the raid picks this up), all of this will push the casual/midcore players away from attempting it. I really don't understand how CBU3 thought that BA was the model to go back to, instead of CLL/Dal. Especially for the first raid on the first release of OC.

I have no doubts that none of this would be addressed but, I would love if YoshiP explained some of the logic behind their design, in the next LL.

Accessible in the sense that they won't require as much prog/attempts to get a clear. A friend of mine for example that doesn't do current raiding content got her BA and DRS clears on the first try with the help of discord groups once the content had been out for a awhile and experienced players were making groups to help newbies clear.

I agree that the CLL/Dal model would be better. SE clearly intends for the content to be done by pickup groups in the zone with the way the entry system works but that's just not how players enjoy tackling content with a high chance of failure.

Sorry but I am not grinding out phantom job levels for a piece of content a may or may not be able to access later. If they want us to level up these low effort attempts at subjobs they need to make doing other things in the zone a lot more worth the while or double to triple the amount of exp they get per CE/fate. I only had 2 at level cap by the time I was 20, and 3 by the time I had all my demimateria. atm there are 12 phantom jobs that you need to grind and there is no way I'm going to grind 9 more up on the off chance they may be useful in 6 months for exactly 1 piece of content that will be dead completely in 8.0 if not before. And with more phantom jobs coming in future patchesm it only makes matters worse. Exactly why I didn't bother with blu too.

This whole piece of content really makes you stop and wonder how some ppl got their jobs in the first place.

No need to do something you don't enjoy.
I don't expect the content to be completely dead in a few months though. Discord groups still run BA and DRS to this day.