TLDR
Bozjan Southern Front is an attempt to not only remedy the mistakes of Eureka and Diadem, but also strives to provide unique challenges and opportunities to help improve player performance and cooperation; however, the noble intentions of the developers have been marred by poor implementation and a system that, in its current iteration, is designed to be unfun to play.
I have taken the time to methodically list all of the design choices I feel are counter-intuitive not because I am ungrateful, but because I adore this game and I want to see Bozja thrive. The last thing I want is to see it become another failed experiment. So please brace yourself, this is going to be one heck an extremely long-winded post I can sum up in one sentence:
“We’re all waiting to have fun, but aren’t having fun while we’re waiting.”
https://preview.redd.it/tce9s6u6epv...bp&s=ee88ecde8c7e98735bbb9fd0fd1503167f1fb245
Skirmishes
On paper, the design choice is clear. Generate Skirmishes, which are essentially FATEs; encourage players to field themselves throughout the zone; inevitably spawn a Critical Engagement in response to a number of participants within a given Region.
Yet the execution doesn’t quite work in practice. Players quickly realized that most Skirmishes are not actually factored in toward zone behavior. They are merely bait, and frankly, poor bait at that. Granted, many players do use Bozja to level jobs under 80, and Skirmishes provide experience points. Furthermore, Skirmishes are a good source of Mettle toward your Resistance Rank.
However, players discovered that their time is best spent farming Clusters and Fragments. Skirmishes are only a means an end, and once players have reached a certain level, Skirmishes are no longer viable and are (almost) entirely ignored. This is a fundamental flaw when you factor in how Skirmishes are balanced.
But that doesn’t mean Players are the problem. Skirmishes just aren’t a very good idea, and no matter how many coats of paint you give it; FATEs themselves have never been a good idea. Players participate out of necessity, not joy. They are a task. They have always been a task, and they will forever be a task. But, there is one notable exception.
Of Steel and Flame
One Skirmish in particular, called Of Steel and Flame, should arguably be the blue print for all FATEs moving forward. The FATE is mechanically engaging, it requires on the fly teamwork with total strangers, and it feels like it’s part of a bigger narrative. Heck, I’d say it’s even more entertaining and more mechanically intense that the Critical Engagement that immediately follows it. In my opinion, it’s actually fun to play.
But the true shame is that Bozja’s own Skirmish System frequently undermines this FATE, making it difficult for many players to experience it in full. So while I may be of the opinion that it’s a great piece of work, other players may have had a vastly different experience. And where is why…
Proximity Based Difficulty
For those not aware, Bozjan Southern Front introduced a new way of handling FATE scaling. Everywhere other than Bojza, FATEs scale to all players present zone-wide — whether they choose to participate in the FATE or not was never factored in. One must give the developers credit for trying something new with Bojza, for when a Skirmish spawns it now only factors in the players in direct proximity of it. I have yet to work out the exact radius, but a rough guess is about three to four times the size of the FATE circle itself. But once the Skirmish has spawned, it locks it at that difficulty even if all of the players have moved to a different destination.
Once again, a great idea on paper does have some issues when put to practice — in fact, two massive ones.
- One, since Cluster Farms are so popular, they often consist of two or more parties. These parties are entirely absorbed in their pursuit of Clusters and care little for anything else, which includes any Skirmishes that are a stone’s throw away. The result can be a Skirmish balanced for at least two or more parties, but only has two or three actual participants. This frequently up scales Skirmishes like All Pets Are Off, which is actually a special kind of Critical Engagement Trigger-FATE, or “Trigger-FATE” for short. Since no other CEs spawn when one of these are present, this can and often does drive the momentum of a zone to a screeching halt.
- Two, isolated Skirmishes that spawn where there is little player activity are scaled to one player by default. Ever wonder why certain Skirmishes always melt so quickly even though they just spawned, resulting in rarely anything better than a Silver Metal? Well this is why. There are several examples throughout the zone of Skirmishes that are never, and will never be, properly tuned. Simply because there is nothing in those regions for players to actually do to keep them occupied enough for a Skirmish to scale to them when it spawns.
Again, the developers do deserve credit. But that system just doesn’t factor in enough variables. I personally feel it should continuously re-adjust itself every 60 seconds, re-evaluating its own difficulty based on how many people are actually take part, rather than a presumed allotment.
But I also understand this would require a massive redesign and is actually a lot more complicated than even I let on. As it’d have to constantly tweak the scaling, stats and HP of bosses already present in the world — among other factors. But having something that’d first scale to the total number of people in a given Region and then work its way down based on how many people actually come to take part would be an extremely welcome improvement.
180 Minutes Isn’t Enough
Do not be mistaken, three hours is an incredibly long time. This point of feedback does not advocate a longer timer, but rather highlights the humongous flaw with Critical Engagements. But to better illuminate the issue I feel I need to explain Critical Engagements in greater detail; how they function, how they spawn, what they do, etc. These details are crucial towards understanding feedback I’m going to provide.
For those not familiar with Critical Engagements, they are unique encounters similar to Boss FATEs that can often accommodate up to 48 players. What makes them unique is that players throughout the entire zone are invited to participate and are subsequently moved to the location of the fight once activated. At that point they may prepare for the encounter, form parties, buff, etc. I reiterate for emphasis, players are physically moved to the location of the arena, this is a crucial detail I’ll refer to again later.
Furthermore, the requirements to spawn them are so surprisingly underwhelming that many players actually over-complicate it in the vane hope that there is more to the process. Bozjan Southern Front has three Regions: South, Middle, and North. The region with the most number of players outside of camp gets the Critical Engagement. That’s it. There are no other requirements. Killing enemies and Skirmishes are not factored in. Players simply just need to be in the area and outside of camp, even if they are just AFK.
Critical Engagements emerge in three forms: for the sake of this post I’m going to coin a few of terms to identify them: Trigger-FATE CE, Force-Pop CE, and Duel-FATE CE. I explained the prior already, but let’s cover the other two. Force-Pop CE refers to the type of Critical Engagement that requires no perquisite Skirmish to spawn — it just pops.
https://preview.redd.it/oc9fwb0kgpv...bp&s=2c2818c79c56a5737537b6364fad796433041d5b
Duel-FATE CEs are unique creatures in their own right. Each Region has one of these. When you look at the bigger picture, one could easily look at Force-POP CEs as “One Step” CEs, they just appear. Trigger-FATE CEs are “Two Step” CEs as they require you to complete a specific Skirmish in order to spawn. Following that logic, Duel-FATE CEs are “Multi-Step” CEs, as they require a long chain of perquisites.
Keep in mind that other CEs (excluding Castrum) are not permitted to spawn while any of these three are present in the zone in any form. Technically, this is to ensure that there is almost always a Critical Engagement happening or on the verge of happening at any given time. And for the most part the system does actually succeed, but to a point.
Once a Critical Engagement has been completed it goes in a solid, unwavering, sixty minute cool-down. This puts them on par with Notorious Monsters in Eureka, which required players put together Third-Party Trackers to actually keep tabs on these things so people were not wasting time trying to spawn something that wasn’t going to spawn.
Eureka Tracker Pyros
So now that we’ve covered that, let’s get into the meat and bones — and more accurately — the blaring flaw of this system: It strives to please everyone; literally. That’s actually the problem, it’s a system that has been literally designed to try and please everyone. The system is currently trying the ‘Appeal to the Needs of the Many’ sort of approach to things, and while admirable — is found to be counter-intuitive toward promoting an atmosphere that is fun and engaging.
Remember how I mentioned before that CEs spawn based on how many people are within a Region? Do you also remember how I highlighted that CEs physically move players to the location of the area? If you put two and two together, you can see how this can create an almost unstoppable chain of events that is beyond the control of the average player.
For example, let’s presume All Pets Are Off was finally dealt with. This would result in the Kill it with Fire CE spawning in the south. If all CEs are available in south and not on Cool-down, and if Kill it with Fire fills at the maximum of 48 people — this will immediately force pop another CE in the South. This can potentially continue until all four CEs in the south are resolved.
https://preview.redd.it/k5ztqkj9gpv...bp&s=ac9dff0e0dba8b3dd4ad00cff653c8f6fe8c9573
If every available player slot fills, the System will presume that players want to do CEs in the south, because everyone applied for the CE in the south. So it’ll just keep spawning them all until there are no more to spawn. There are only two circumstances in which the system will pause to recalculate Player activity in the zone:
- The CE doesn’t fill 48/48
- All CEs in that region are on cooldown.
So if you don’t actually want to take part in CEs in the south, you have little choice in the matter. And if you want to try and encourage the system to pop the ones you want, you have to abstain from joining the CE so you can hope the system will recalculate. So while a great number of people are being appealed to, the system doesn’t exactly benefit everyone. It just works, but not particularly very well.
I understand the 60-minute cool-down as a stop-gap to ensure that all the CEs spawn throughout the zone in a timely fashion, but at the same time it feels like it’s merely a system designed with function rather than form in mind. When you begin to look at the bigger picture, you quickly start to realize there isn’t enough time for everything. And re-instancing stands to cause additional headaches, more we’ll cover later in this post.
Duels Promote Toxic Behavior
Gabriel, the Southern Duel CE
So, I love Final Fantasy XIV. But never have I hated it more than I do right now. I’m one of those people trying to get their Sword of the South title, and while you may feel like you immediately know where this is going — buckle up, because things are going to get interesting. Additionally, I have some constructive critiques on how I feel this system can be vastly improved.
I feel Duels worked as intended; on day one. But after that point, they quickly devolved into something else entirely. To the point where they are now mostly a farce, a demoralizing parody of what they could be. While a fantastic idea in concept, the execution is by far one of the poorest I’ve ever witnessed since Diadem. I have no qualms stating that their current implementation is just straight up bad design.
First, they depend far too heavily on a sense of morality. To better clarify, there are way too many factors in which the developers decided that the “Players will handle it from here” as it were. The whole concept is for players to allow what they feel is the “best among them” to rise up and take down a very challenging boss for the “benefit of everyone”. Yet, let’s face it — this is a very Japanese design choice.
https://preview.redd.it/j9r2uob5gpv...bp&s=e7f73abf8a878055f93daa87eb71352703b106d5
Second, as proven time and again, Western players are not too keen on allowing others to benefit. What the developers likely did not factor in that certain players exist — certain players that would rather no one benefit at all, if they themselves cannot exclusively benefit. The biggest issue is derived from people accepting the Duel but ultimately declining to enter and letting them time out on purpose. Mostly because they don’t want anyone else to win, which is brutal and demoralizing for a lot people.
Let’s not forget that it takes a lot of time to spawn a Duel-FATE CE. Aside from the fact it may have been on cool-down, it also takes time to encourage a CE to spawn in a Region. Once it has worked through the other CEs to get to that one, then you have to do the prerequisite Skirmishes, only to finally do the CE itself, and on top of that avoid damage and take no Vulnerability Stacks just to get a CHANCE to get in. Let’s also consider that maybe you want to do Castrum, and based on pure RNG, Castrum may overlap with the Duel-FATE CE itself and you’ll miss your window entirely.
But making it through all of that, you still have to battle a harsh queue-boss of everyone and their mama registering for the Duel — only to discover the one person to get chosen doesn’t even show up! Ouch. But let’s push it further. Let’s say you didn’t even want that duel, well you’ll still have to wait for the ENTIRE CE chain to finish, as no other CE will pop until the Duel is complete. Even then, it may not even be in the region you want! So you’d have to wait for the unstoppable CE chain to work its way around to the Region you want, only to THEN go back up prior paragraph about perquisites.
I can tell from experience that it’s the insanely long grind to get to what is ultimately a fruitless waste of time that is encouraging hateful behaviors to one another. It’s just way, WAY too much work to do what is supposed to be a fun show of skill. Because let’s face it, the Livestream and the Patch Notes made it sound like SKILL would play a huge factor into getting into the duel — but it doesn’t. Almost no skill is required, just avoiding easy-to-dodge mechanics is the only requirement to get in: nothing else. And that is where I feel the issue resides, there is no other way.
100 Clusters For Duels Please
I think I have, what I feel, is the most viable solution to this problem. A new Priority Buff. I feel 100 Clusters is a very reasonable cost. There are those people who put a lot of pride and effort into their Clusters and they wouldn’t be so willing to throw them away to deny people a title. Additionally, new players coming into the zone will not immediately have access to 100 Clusters, and if they managed to happened by them, if they chose to spend them on a chance a Duel — well, more power to them. It’s their time and their Clusters.
But let’s say someone like myself, someone who has no need for Clusters anymore, is busting my buns constantly trying to get the Duels to pop, and just wants my title, and is very exhausted of constantly trying and failing to get chosen. I’d love to just sit back, farm Clusters, and get my win. Heck, it’d allow me to even plan ahead and collect 100 Clusters later to get the Mettle Buff for my friends! I’d be willing to do that.
On top of that, because it’d be such a huge cost — there should be some sort of signal, some sort alert to inform other players that ‘Hey this person has a very expensive buff’. Like a special icon on the Player List so you could perhaps open a conversation with them and may coordinate which duels you want so you don’t blow your buff trying to compete for a 50/50 chance.
Finally, an expensive buff like that should last 180 minutes to ensure you don’t waste it while the duel you want is on cool-down.
This suggestion would encourage preparation, put a value on the Duel itself, and give the opportunity for new players to see how the fight is done. Furthermore, it doesn’t change the current system either. It just adds a new layer to promote a bit more cooperation. Something I think we could really use in Bozja.
Castrum’s 60 Minute Spawn Timer
Castrum Lacus Litore stands as the main thing to do within Bozjan Southern Front, but most of the people I’ve spoken to who looked forward to the content have found it to be surprisingly disappointing. From a design prospective, it is understandable. They may have wished to avoid overwhelming people and took into consideration that not everyone had a chance to truly soak in and experience Eureka. But those measures disregard one of the core features of Bozja: Lost Actions.
The truth is Castrum is so simple to complete that Lost Actions only serve to continuously break it and make it even easier — to the point where people can clear it in just under twenty minutes. While it was wise to avoid remaking the Baldesion Arsenal, I find it deeply disappointing to provided players with so many robust tools but absolutely nothing to use them on. Lost Actions are a wasted opportunity that only stand to tease what is potentially around the corner.
https://preview.redd.it/81p3isotgpv...bp&s=ac9999ce22c163f48275a6d3fd11af33051b894d
Those familiar with Eureka have already identified them designed Logograms, complete with a variety of tweaks, improvements, and massive nerfs to make them a little bit more fair. But the difference between Logograms and Lost Actions are simple. When Eureka was current, they were needed. And now Bozja is current, but they are not needed at all.
For instance, there are a handful of Lost Actions that look to be incredibly fun; however, they exclusively come from Castrum. Their drop rare is so incredibly rare that you’d be lucky to get two in a single run. This extreme rarity means they should be coveted and not consumed. Besides, Castrum is so simple, why waste good Lost Actions on easy content? This results in Lost Actions that remain entirely unused. Aside from having nothing to use them on, we just don’t know if they’ll ever not be rare. Will they drop more frequently in future content? Will there be a reason to even justify using them? We just don’t know. And not knowing is why we don’t use them.
So we’ve kind of cut ourselves in the foot here. We see the potential to have fun, but as a result we are not actually having fun while we wait for the chance to have fun. And that is what I feel is the core problem with Castrum as a whole. We’re all waiting to have fun, but aren’t having fun while we’re waiting. This is first wave Blue Mage all over again.
The problem extends to how Castrum itself is introduced to the zone. Despite being easier than the current NieR Raid, it requires a tremendous amount of time to enter. Not effort, just time. Organized groups still run the content in order to get their achievements and their “precious” augmentations. Many of which consist of more than thirty people, and since so many of them enter an instance at once, it often generates a brand new instance to host them. By default, Castrum spawns exactly sixty minutes after the zone has been generated. Otherwise there is no visible timer, so joining an older instance results in something of a crap shoot to guess on when it spawns, which makes gauging what to do to kill time a tricky task indeed.
While the recent hotfix does try to address the issue of giving people a grace window of completing any CEs that are currently underway, it doesn’t exactly resolve the unease of not knowing when it will emerge. While Lost Actions aren’t necessary for the content, there are those players who know how to farm them and put to effective use between Castrum runs. But some Lost Actions are extremely costly and may not match a particularly useful in Castrum build.
This leaves the player in a state of anxiety. Do they invest in the build they use for farming, knowing full well that Castrum could literally pop any moment — or — do they prepare for Castrum and just sort of sit around and wait so they don’t waste any Lost Actions? This sense of unknowing personally bothers me, and makes it difficult to ascertain what it is I actually want to do in the zone. As I don’t truly know what there is to, and I feel leaning entirely on Third-Party Trackers this time isn’t going to cut it. We need some sort of in-instance timer or record keeper, if not for Castrum then at least for the bloody weather for crying out loud.
For example, if I’m seeking a particular duel, I have no way of knowing if that CE is on cool down. Trusting my fellow players to keep track of that sort of information is absolutely laughable. At present we have people coming into a zone always asking some variation of “When is Castrum?”, and the response they got is generally haphazard at best. Don’t even try to ask for a specific timer on a CE either. Absolutely no one will give you even a remotely accurate time of completion.
So now we have the issue of people at Rank 15 with a potential shopping list of things to do: Wait for Castrum, Farm CEs, Farm Clusters, Farm Fragments, etc — but have no true idea which of those things they should do as almost all of have conflicting Lost Action builds. This enigmatic approach is actually proving to humongous thorn in one’s side, especially if you feel you should be leaving the instance and jumping to a new one for better opportunities; as items and essences do not carry with you upon leaving said instance.
Haste Isn’t Enough
Let’s put this on the table. The Haste Augmentations for the Castrum gear are just not worth the effort and price. Their drop rate is either so insanely random or rare, or there some silly enigmatic little puzzle that the players haven’t discovered yet. Regardless, it doesn’t matter. They aren’t worth the effort. It costs 999 coins for a single major augmentation. You barely get 30 coints per run, and many players trying to collect these are trying to acquire them for SEVERAL classes, not just one. When you math it out, it’s absolutely mind numbing.
We have people who have spent literally 70 hours exclusively running Castrum and only acquire one Augmentation drop. Pride and accomplish indeed! There really is almost no true incentive to acquire these augmentations. For many players, all that drives them is speculation. Will the gear require augmenting so that it can be transformed into something more powerful later? We do not know. Will the coins drop more frequently later and therefore be spent as soon as possible? We do not know. Will the same augmentations be available for cheaper or easier to acquire in future content? Again, we just do not know.
And that sense of unknowing is what leads to a lot of frustration. We do not know if we need the gear, but feel we should acquire it “just in case” — and that is again, part of the whole ‘not having fun while waiting’ thing.
For many who’ve done Eureka, they quickly found that the gear in Castrum requires vastly more work to acquire than that of Elemental +2 from BA, but offers almost none of the benefits. Haste ultimately just makes the Global Cool Down shorter, and not every job can actually benefit from that. Heck, some jobs are actively harmed by it. The gear provides almost nothing else. It’s the exact same gear, with the exact same stats, with the exact same dyables, no glows, no nothing; just Haste. And Bozjan Southern Front is so mind-numbingly easy much of the time, that admittedly even Haste is overkill.
There is no reasonable carrot at the end of the stick, merely the promise of more to come, which renders the current content something of a slap in the face to players. It promises “There will be fun later” without actually making what is there, at present, truly enjoyable.
Indigo Stars
Perhaps the most painful experience in Bozjan Southern Front is approaching the Lock-Pick NPC and taking your shot at winning another handful of Indigo Stars. Lock Boxes have often been seen as something of a ‘Consolation Prize’, something to feel you’ve won so you don’t feel like you’ve wasted all of your time. But in Bozja, the drop rate for these are surprisingly stingy. Indeed, you can convert items into lock boxes, or win duels for an injection of 99 — but they aren’t particularly rewarding.
I believe I’ve opened more than 300 lock boxes myself, but as a result I have over 200 Indigo Stars in my inventory now. They are trash. Their drop rate is 9 out of 10, and I swear I’m not exaggerating. Again, it feels like another slap in the face. Like “Ha! I bet you thought you got something this time. Nope!” — heck there drop rates are right on par with something as toxically villainous as a straight up Loot Box. And really don’t feel they should be tuned this way at all. That seriously needs to be addressed.
Star Mobs
https://preview.redd.it/vw21k829hpv...bp&s=fb636ff3fa19b93e8a89a2d92c937f9a4b6c83b0
My final topic may perhaps be the most controversial, Star Mobs. For those not aware, Bozjan Southern Front has nine very powerful monsters — three per region. A while ago on Reddit you may have seen a post which conveyed how easy it was to just use Lost Death on them and profit. But my beef with them is not necessarily that. It’s their purpose, their true purpose.
We’ve proven time and again through rigorous testing that Star Mobs provide some sort of enigmatic, hidden, latent buff. And this is what bothers me. I’m tired of the old design philosophy of hiding “Secrets” within a system while failing to communicate to the players what is actually going on. If you’re going to put a Secret in there, please for the love of god, communicate to the player that they’ve received it.
So what is this “Secret” that Star Mobs do exactly? Well they provide a Critical Engagement Priority Buff. Does it overwrite the 5 Cluster Marching Orders for buff or the Preparation Marching Order Buff? Heck if I know. I’ve been trying to test that, but finding THREE parties of players willing to give a damn enough to test it is currently beyond me.
- (How to Test it: Basically you have three parties of eight players all buy the 5 Cluster Marching Orders buff and send them into a 24-man CE. You after garnered sole credit for killing the Star Mobs of that region, solo queue, wearing no Marching Orders and see if you bump someone off the list.)
We KNOW the Star Mobs offer a Priority Buff in the first place because we’ve had whole parties of eight players, having absolutely no Priority Buffs what so ever (Purchased or Earned) — register for a CE well beyond the maximum and still manage to not only get in with the WHOLE party, but also bump off another whole party not wearing any Buffs that registered the instant the CE was available.
If you’re going to put something like that out there, please provide some sort of icon or buff timer to convey to the players what they have. I’d greatly appreciate that.
As for the Lost Death part, well — I understand why they can be Deathed in the first place. It is to make the content a bit more Future Proof. Without Death, they’d be pretty impossible to kill going toe to toe with them in a very small party at a later date. While I appreciate this hindsight, I also feel it’s a very poor design choice. This is because of how Death actually works. If you have a large number of parties going up against a Star Mob, someone in the fray will likely cast Death. What they fail to realize is that credit for the kill will only go to the party that claimed it on the pull. All other parties will be denied credit.
Because of this oversight I feel that Death is more of a hindrance than a blessing. Indeed, the Star Mobs do respawn at a timely fashion (30 minutes on the dot), but it does create quite a bit of hassle. Star Mobs have now simply lost all of their value. Since you need to kill all three of them in a region to get the enigmatic “Buff”, it can be a huge waste of time going around trying to claim them only to find that someone else already ran through and cast death on them before you.
People who killed them for Fragments tend to avoid doing so now, as those Fragments have almost much of their overall value. There is almost a universal belief that they are just always ‘dead’ now, or at least one of the three in a given region is, making going around to collect them all more of a hassle than a true reward.
Conclusions
I like Bozja, I do. But it’s got a lot of problems. It’s two steps forward, but two steps back. It tries to be the next Eureka, but it doesn’t commit. It’s too afraid of Lost Actions and doesn’t provide enough flexibility. The content is too easy and doesn’t provide enough challenge to even warrant the use of Lost Actions in the first place. It wants to be new player friendly, but pretends to be more difficult than it really is. The system strives to appeal to everyone, but underwhelms universally in the process. It’s trying to be too much, but at the same time not enough.
Again, I’m getting original Blue Mage vibes from this content. As though the right hand wasn’t talking to the left, and the conception didn’t quite develop well into execution. Which is truly a shame; because it’s clear they looked at Eureka and tried to improve upon it. But ultimately it fell into the trap I feared it would all along — far too much course correction for content that didn’t need that much course correction. By the time Eureka got to Hydatos, it started to finally find its footing. But what good came of Hydatos did not make its way into Bozjan Southern Front.
At end game we need a challenge. We hoped Bozjan would offer us something to do for us to do long time. We still go back and run The Baldesion Arsenal, we still find it a fun and enjoyable experience. We enjoyed the restrictions it put on us, we enjoyed having to make special and specific builds to make things new and interesting. We enjoyed the cooperation and the team work it required to make it all come together. We hoped Bozjan Southern Front would give us something to do. It didn’t have to be the Baldesion Arsenal 2.0, we just wanted it to be something.
At present, Bozjan Southern Front is just a huge zone to farm stuff in preparation for content that isn’t even out yet. We’re all waiting to have fun, but aren’t having fun while we’re waiting.
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