Why did Forked Tower reuse the BA entry system LOL

[melbye]

Forked Tower has become the most tedious thing in the game now. I am TRYING to prog, but at this point i wanna throw up thinking about everything before the third boss

[TaleraRistain]

Apparently the game gave "too much support" to DRS or something like that so they decided to make the playerbase constantly at each other's throats instead.

I don't think anyone remotely understands their mentality here.

[Jeeqbit]

They said that the developers made decisions based on precedent due to tight deadlines, rather than consulting with Yoshi-P or having a meeting to figure out the ideal entry system and how it would all come together.

They also said they didn't assign enough QA to it. We know they have over 100 QA but since you can solo Critical Engagements and do Forked Tower with 24 people, they most likely didn't assign as many as they could have.

The features are similar: bunny FATEs (NM icon, rarely spawn, pot instead of a bunny, and an Elixir to find the treasure), Critical Engagements (except they spawn constantly now), FATEs and gold farms. The CEs have faster paced mechanics and you're meant to get hit by them a lot at first, but to account for that you can survive a lot of vuln stacks, and people will only avoid getting hit if they really make an effort to (or in some cases follow others and hope). They have tried maths in the mechanics like picking up the right sets of money and delivering it or observing a lot of things, but some of them don't have a lot of RNG so you can get used to them. The FATEs have actual mechanics but you won't notice this unless you fight them solo in a dead instance.

Phantom Jobs are mostly sets of Lost Actions that are similar to the jobs we have already, such as mit and a heal for Phantom Knight, dashes, gap closers, but there are new ones like Cannoneer that have status effects or additional effects and it can be fun to combine them. I've been solo farming gold (basically like Bozja clusters) using Paladin, Cannoneer and 9 stacks of Phantom job mastery. There are some differences they've been willing to do; for example, Phantom Samurai's version of Third Eye is like Hallowed Ground. Berserker locks you into doing auto attacks but the challenge of that is you need to do it when a mechanic won't hit you. I recall someone saying they were abusing the increased cast speed of jobs for some of the Phantom jobs as well.

The new things are mainly treasure coffers all around the map and lootable carrots where you can find treasure.

I mean I'm alright with it. I wasn't expecting it to be functionally different to other Field Operations in any significant way though. I just like seeing other people around me, as opposed to things like Island Sanctuary and the Endwalker relics that felt like solo experiences.

[Themarvin]

It is their game whenever it get to it, that they chose a way that does not work and more or less don't care about the majority of the player base is also their problem.

Yes they somewhat fixed it, but then it leaves entire instances hostage to 48 people who has queued and the remaining ones get to leave and enter instance again to be able to having things going and also it pushes people away from the games and forcing them to head to Discord Servers and more, instead of making an ingame workign system that further more would be more anonymous as well in a figure of speech, the current system hinder basic relic progress for the special armor.

[Altina_Orion]

The world content there is definitely worse than Bozja. Bozja 2.0 would have been welcomed. There is no point of doing anything in this zone unless you are doing forked. It's wild.

[Raikai]

No idea why. I've said on another thread:

Baldesion Arsenal worked fine because it was released at the very last Eureka zone (of 4), so everybody had already a LOT of Eureka content to sink their teeth at. BA felt more like a bonus than an integral part of the Field Operation's experience, which is exactly what the Forked Tower feels like.

By not doing it, the whole experience in the zone turns out to be almost pointless other than farm currency to get the special glamours.

The fix they implemented really helps, but is by no means excuse for the lack of a more accessible mode where people can actually engage without so much out-of-the-game prep. Not even mentioning the actual difficulty, because CLL and DRN were kinda hard for a clueless player. The only difference is that a couple of those players wouldn't suddenly destroy the whole run.

[Supersnow845]

Forked Tower has become the most tedious thing in the game now. I am TRYING to prog, but at this point i wanna throw up thinking about everything before the third boss

Dead stars as a “no matter what your prog point you are a dead stars prog party” really does make forked prog feel awful doesn’t it

[Fawkes]

They said that the developers made decisions based on precedent due to tight deadlines, rather than consulting with Yoshi-P or having a meeting to figure out the ideal entry system and how it would all come together.

Yeah it definitely feels like content designed by people that weren't even talking to each other.

[Router]

small indie company

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

Their ‘metric guy’ probably was assessing the number of clears BA had accumulated over several years since its release at the time they were designing OC, then concluded that it was something that playerbase love without actually understanding how those clears were achieved.