Conclusion: We really like FATES, but lie to ourselves.

I like the big boss FATEs like Ixion and Tamamo, or the ones that give achievement rewards like Cancer or Kidomaru. I even like seeing the FATE chains with progressing stories.

FATEs in general, though, are not terribly interesting beyond occasionally amusing description text.

I like the FATEs in ShB, the additional reward that is cross zone valuable is nice. I hope they expand this concept. I do not like fate trains though, having leveled a few jobs that way. I find them brain dead monotonous and while rewarding in the sense of a task I don't find them enjoyable and often watch or listen to something on the side to save my sanity. I like FATEs in groups of myself up like 12 people, anything more is a train. Of course I don't like the FATEs that are anticipating 50 people and there is only me so it takes 8 years to finish.... Would be nice if there was some sort of immersive way to call a FATE out. Like praying to the twelve before it or something lol. If few people are in the zone it'll debuff the fate and or buff your character (just for that Fate).


I don't relish FATEs for large groups, like for the FFXV (solo parts were nice) or XIII event. You can hardly see anything and it hardly matters, just visual noise. It's fine others like it but I've a strong bias against that design- just a bunch of Zerg. Of course later when the content is not hot FATEs tend to not be Zerg like- so part of my dislike of them is strictly related to how adaptive it scales and how many people are there.

I think the hate for fates steams from in early ARR fates was the best way to level up so you kinda HAD to do them over and over and over.

I'm still sour over old Atma drop rates. Since then, I've only done FATEs when the reward makes sense.

Fates are fine, its the obvious botting that instantly ruins it, when you see 20 ppl take of in a pixel perfect line going from one fate to another. It just zaps all the fun out to know "this group thing is now a botting ground" It got so bad, that because bots are programmed to kill only the boss the Maiden was not killed many times ... Which gives you an exp boost aka the reason you likely do this.

While yes its prolly a lot of real players doing it for Yokai, if not for this event, its mostly small teams of bots getting exp for players who are at work or do something else.

I enjoy FATEs like I enjoy Triple Triad. It's a neat game with a simple set of base rules that has a lot of room to add complexity with card types, same/plus, etc. There's nothing bad about it per se (NPCs in FF8 cheating with rules like Random aside), but this well-crafted piece of content with a lot of potential is only ruined by the fact that anything interacting with it requires you to do it 2239045729357238945728934752893475 times.

I love the idea of world events, but the genre has moved past "we spawned a number of mobs in a circular area with little to no context, kill them" which most of the fates that spawn are. There's barely any setup to the defence/escort quests. The defence target(s) and enemy targets just suddenly exist until it's time for the fate to be over and then the world continues to behave as if the fate was never implemented. I would love to see fates and fate chains affect an entire zone outside of those few boss fates that appear for 15 minutes once a week. (and no put this in a leveling zone so we can be going about our business and then be suddenly surprised when something big is going down. Quarentining these things to eureka/bozja removes all of the organic wonder from these spontaneous events)

Something something GW2, something something plagiarize it pls.

I dislike FATEs a lot.

First off, sync in this game is terrible, should be automatic and to the stats, not merely item levels, that way older content would be at least a bit more challenging. And the removal of skills is just awful. Makes classes so boring to play.
Second, most FATEs are fun loredumps, but they are so random, and unconnected and most times not even themed to the maps themselves... Then again maps lack theming in this game. So yeah, i don't care about some "insect extermination" efforts in a map that is clearly a warzone, for example.

I guess i'm just spoiled by GW2 dynamic events, which are really so much better, not to mention they give you actual rewards and incentives and are oh so much more thematic, to the point you cannot tell if the events were made for the map or the map was made for the event, in XIV case, you know most of the FATEs are just "there", have some "lore".

I love fates because I love overworld activities in general. I'm currently leveling jobs and it's great if I just want a bit of extra XP after/between my roulettes.
Also it's content I can easily enjoy in small doses and end if something IRL comes up.

I think one of the problems with FATEs are part of what makes it a good design solution. They wanted to take many components you'd like in an open world game, like elusive enemies (that aren't hunts), spontaneous collection quests, defence missions, world events, etc., and package them all under one label. One flaw with this system is there is a huge, broad, massive range of disparate activities in how it works, the consequences to the world, the rewards available, etc.

I don't think it's a problem that some FATEs are just walkovers where you fight some random enemies you can bulldoze in short time. The problem is there is not enough visual distinction to let players know of all the cool stuff that is happening because there is too much noise, and the developer doesn't respect their own systems with stuff like BLU being able to oneshot bosses or giving the same amount of credit with regards to relic weapons or events like the Yokai stuff regardless of how much effort it actually took.

It would have been better to maybe have a system delegating the quality/reward/impact of FATEs in a visually intuitive way. Like, notorious monsters that are meant to be fought by a party should not have the same appearances as some chump you can blow up in a minute. A solution could have been to maybe have a bronze, silver or gold border for FATEs on your map, with different presentations in terms of music and stuff.

So it would look like:

Bronze: Very basic enemies, bosses, gathering FATEs you can easily do on your own and have no impact on the world.

Silver: FATEs part of a massive chain, or winning here changes the world like making vendors available or yielding collectable loot.

Gold: Big scary FATEs you really are not meant to try to fight on your own; typically with loot and achievements. Stuff like the cyclops out in Coerthas.


Also, while I appreciate the novelty of "hidden bosses" and stuff, IMO stuff like Odin makes the world feel way more awesome after you learn about them and I wish the game had some kind of notice system. Let's not pretend it's elusive; it's usually a matter of people being inside of some kind of Discord or linkshell or not. It's cool the community is the notification system but I feel like we'd get more people into those communities and more involved with the game in general if they knew about these things.