On Forked Tower Changes

[Jeeqbit]

A straightforward solution, as many have already stated, is to simply have a queue system so FT can be done outside of the instance.

If they can eventually queue into an OC all of their own, then that is a similar thing, really.

is there another reason that they are reluctant to adopt such a system?

It would be technically complicated to rip Forked Tower from OC. From a game development stand point, it means decoupling triggers, id-coded objects, and the whole instance full of entities, over to a separate map, without it messing anything up. There is also the formal link to the support FATE. While I don't think all that is impossible (they did it with Praetorium), I think it is not something that can reasonably be rushed and even if it is, testing is needed, due to the possibility of things like variables being messed up in the process.

Would this be due to the supposed philosophy that FT has always intended to be done without premades

Their intention was that as strategies developed and were optimized, and as people began to clear, it would become more trivial to carry people along. This is clear from the fact there are so many telegraphs.

But they did confirm they intended it to be High-End content, because they said they did not provide an indication to players that it's meant to be challenging and that this caused confusion and arguments amongst players. Also, the limited rez tends to be something they do for "challenging" versions of duties such as Criterion, BA, DRS, etc. They also said they believe they overshot everyone's expectations where difficulty was concerned in the Live Letter Digest.

So when I say they intended people to be "carried along", I believe they intended this to be with foreknowledge such as looking up strategy guides or listening to callouts.

Before anyone says "looking up strategy guides shouldn't be needed", it's not and you can of course get together a blind prog alliance if you have the determination to find 24-48 likeminded people. They just know the community and that they usually do lookup guides or raidplans (to such an extent, a raidplan feature is in the works and is going to be released). So they expected it would go like this as Extreme and Savage normally do, and the entry issues made their predictions wrong.

Now, 24 people could have foreknowledge of the strategies from a strategy guide without being a premade. In theory. But if you enter OC and say "hey random 24 people, do you all have foreknowledge of the duty and want to tackle it together?", it probably won't happen. You know? A lot of them won't be there for FT or aren't ready to do it yet, and if you do that same thing in Party Finder, it technically counts as a premade, regardless of if Discord is used.

So since we've established that in most cases finding 24+ people at the same prog point willing to do FT right then and there is likely to be challenging, the question becomes why wasn't PF available for it (under the Alliance tab)? They answered that question by saying they were so rushed with deadlines that they just did things based on precedent and didn't think about them enough, nor had enough QA assigned to it.