At this rate it'll take ages for me to 200-210 my relic.

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Originally Posted by bass9020

They have reduced this content to what it is because people couldn't handle titan HM and they weren't happy with the numbers of people who stopped the relic at that point. So now we have stupid long and pointless grinds instead of interesting and fun trials BECAUSE PEOPLE ARE BABIES and throw tantrums. Oh wait isn't that happening AGAIN NOW?

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So requiring anything more than just logging in is too much for a good chunk of our community? That's terrific.

AT Bass9020,

I know what you are talking about, but that isn't really what is happening right now. There were complaints that were comical at the time of the first relic, but the complaints people are having now are mostly addressed at the amount of time it takes to complete the task: Not the difficulty associated with it, which is basically zero outside of the effort it takes to run the few dungeons required for it. The entire set up for relic is kind of a wash, anyway. Outside of just the time required, players are required to do some of the most routine and boring content in the game to collect items that don't even get placed in the quest item section even though they are quest items, and these items end up sitting there taking up room for ages.

Agreeing with what a lot of other people have already said: getting the relic parts aren't all that difficult, it's just that the amount of time and mindless grinding required is ridiculous. I know for certain that I'm not attempting another relic until the 200-210 step is nerfed into the ground: I'll stick with only progressing on my AST one.

Note that while mindless grinding may cut the time required to get the items, Idk about anyone else here, but it is absolutely impossible for me to mindlessly grind for days and weeks on end without going insane. Not going to do that for the two other relics I already have and the three I'm planning to get with the coming nerf of the crystal grind. ._.

I wish they had alternate ways of gathering the items.

Have one long, grindy way. Takes no (actual) effort, takes a lot of time. Like it is now.
Have a second path, more difficult, shorter amount of time required.
Have a third path with.. I don't know.. a mix of the both? Crafting/Gathering (bound) items? Punting Lalafells? Building sandcastles?

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Originally Posted by Vrahjin

I wish they had alternate ways of gathering the items.

Have one long, grindy way. Takes no (actual) effort, takes a lot of time. Like it is now.
Have a second path, more difficult, shorter amount of time required.
Have a third path with.. I don't know.. a mix of the both? Crafting/Gathering (bound) items? Punting Lalafells? Building sandcastles?

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Grindy way=relic
Difficult path=Alexander Savage
Third path=Tomestone weapon.

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Originally Posted by MilesSaintboroguh

Grindy way=relic
Difficult path=Alexander Savage
Third path=Tomestone weapon.

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I do believe they are talking about differing paths for progressing on the relic itself, not alternatives to it...

Different paths in which one may take to advance their relic may make sense actually, as this relic step starts the actual stat customization of it, which, in theory, would make it so you could tailor it to be the best weapon for your job, no?

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Originally Posted by ThirdChild_ZKI

The initial part of the original relic quest was great. I had to go exploring (then) dangerous territory to find it, then take on some fearsome (but not impossible) creatures to gain items to restore it. Then I got to break it in. THEN I had to take on bigger (and STILL not impossible) challenges to fully empower and complete the weapon. . . THAT felt good. THAT felt worthwhile. THAT felt like a Final Fantasy-style weapon quest. Instilling an uninspired grind-for-the-sake-of-a-grind just dumped all over that and completely devalued that relic. Looking back, I won't remember farming fates for crystals or buying overpriced materia, or running content ad nauseum for arbitrary numbers of token items to turn in. I WILL remember the exploration, the restoring, and the ADVENTURING that went into creating a relic weapon. Consider this when you create the next relic quest saga, SE.

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Quoting myself because I REALLY want SE to see this. PLEASE take note of this as we move toward 4.0 and you conceptualize the next relic or otherwise significant weapon/gear related quest. Do you want to simply tack on another grind for the sake of, or do you want to create something that might possibly leave a lasting impression and become a fond memory for players down the road? Cause I can easily say one will keep people playing. The other will do the same AND pique interest in others to play as well.

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Originally Posted by bass9020

They have reduced this content to what it is because people couldn't handle titan HM and they weren't happy with the numbers of people who stopped the relic at that point. So now we have stupid long and pointless grinds instead of interesting and fun trials BECAUSE PEOPLE ARE BABIES and throw tantrums. Oh wait isn't that happening AGAIN NOW?

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To be fair: Titan on JP servers were, well... lets say: a challenge! Lag spikes sometimes were out of control.

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Originally Posted by FabricioRF

Does anyone actually have fun with this mindless grind? Sorry, hard to believe.

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Now that Gordias NM is pretty much dead how can you even "grind" this anymore? not saying its fun or boring but you really cant grind this atm i mean REALLY grind it. If you do BT's then that is not really a grind as its daily locked so only option would be tome spamming and i can agree that would be extremely boring specially PoE's, EsO's are fine as literally everything you do ingame will throw those in your face so you can choose your favorite content for those(PvP for me example)and it makes it feel non-grindy.

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Originally Posted by Yukiko

To be fair: Titan on JP servers were, well... lets say: a challenge! Lag spikes sometimes were out of control.

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Nope, I have fun at titan without lag spike even my ping is around 100ms

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Originally Posted by Eul

Nope, I have fun at titan without lag spike even my ping is around 100ms

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Sure lots of people had fun with Titan. It's why there were so many people selling clears for Titan HM. It took some weeks to clear it. Personally I didn't have a problem with that duty given it was a challenge and was rewarding when I finally cleared it.

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Originally Posted by Eul

Nope, I have fun at titan without lag spike even my ping is around 100ms

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Most players had ping of 300+ without lagspikes, with them it gone up to 400+ and sometimes 500+
To reach the 100+ ping you needed a very fast internet connection (most players tried with VPN - example "WTFast")
It wasnt the ping, but more the packet lost with about 30% lost and on prime time it sometimes gone up to 50% lost

But to be fair: Square Enix done a lot and it wasnt always that high. The game was playable and you could workaround if you precast or premove...

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I'm sorry, this is not me being elitist or hardcore or anything when I say this but; if you're not raiding, then you don't need a raid-level or near raid level weapon. Even if it takes longer, even if it's grindier/pricier/etc. You don't need it. I mean, why? What are you going to use it for?

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Do you try to acquire ultimate weaponry in a FF game only if you absolutely needed it to beat something, or simply because it was fun to get stronger?

This may surprise you, but a lot of players fall into the latter group.

Very valid point. I however counter that with what I stated before: The initial relic quest. I had to brave some of the toughest corners of the open world for it. Then it led me to the challenges of Chimera and Hydra. THEN it led me to the HM Primals. All of which did ask more and more of me as a new player (at that time) to overcome those challenges and obtain a stronger weapon overall in the end?

Where does a to-do list or buying materia to meld involve getting stronger? Granted, I'm sure the context we say it in is different, and some simply DO like a grind or a to-do list, and that's fine. But I know people with several Zetas who STILL can't clear Garuda Extreme (whether by lack of skill, or complete lack of ever trying); what use is that "strength" gained from a weapon they grinded easy tasks for?

Again, I'm not trying to take a hardline and say effort isn't its own reward. I mean, clearly it is, whether your efforts mean clearing a raid or grinding enough tomes/dungeons/gil to obtain your weapon of choice. Still, one hand washes the other. What good is a good weapon without a good or experienced wielder?

At that point, it may as well be glamour (as they all ultimately become anyways).

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Originally Posted by Colt47

To Cherie,

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I don't disagree with you about the relic quest being boring and unnecessary. It's a reaction to a bigger problem. I just outlined the process that could lead to this long, unfun grind that is the relic quest. It's a result of people not wanting to raid but still wanting to get better gear. The problem isn't the quest, it's the way raiding is handled. Raiding can't be taken out of the game or they will lose more than a third of the player base. But they are hand holding people that don't want to raid too much. It doesn't help them. It just makes the non raiders bored and want to quit. Instead, maybe they should make more systems that people could get into some kind of raid community perhaps without a static. This new "raid finder" looks promising. I guess we will see if it does any good to help.

I have to say the relic grind is intentionally a time trap on purpose though. It's hard to think that it's an accident. Any item in this game's value is judged by how long it takes to aquire it. There is no getting around that. We could shorten the quest to be done in a single afternoon and suddenly people all have relic weapons but still feel just as bored. Like I said, the larger problems need to be fixed. Shortening the quest doesn't improve people's enjoyment, nor does lengthening it.

In the end, it's hard to say any task in a game is worthwhile though. It's either fun or it's not. This is all for our enjoyment. We aren't learning any life skills here, etc. I'd love to put "hardcore raider" on my resume but.... well.. you know ... lol

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Originally Posted by Cherie

Raiding can't be taken out of the game or they will lose more than a third of the player base.

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Do you really think that many people are raiders? I would be surprised if it's more than 10 percent.

To Cherie again,

You're talking about raiding and how it needs exclusively superior gear being rewarded to be worth doing. This is the old MMO vanguard misconception that was born out of the hardmode shinanigans popularized by World of Warcraft. Historically, better gear did require raiding but raids were highly accessible on difficulty level. Often they just required significant amounts of damage being dealt to a large tanky creature with some relatively simple mechanics, while the group worked on keeping up that horde of 40+ players banging on said giant monster / raid challenge. The trouble with that model was that it often took forever for someone to organize the event and the loot was drip fed so that it took too long to actually reward the players involved, so developers made the group smaller. This led to the next stage of Raiding which involved small group skirmishes. Without the "challenge" of assembling a 40+ man group, the dedicated organizers suddenly felt that the raiding wasn't "challenging" anymore, so the developers got stuck with a dilemma: How do we make it challenging again? At the same time, the people that were more casual and tagged along on the 40 man runs suddenly found more responsibility was slapped on them and found the default too challenging.

This led to what we have today: Raid finder and Hard modes. So what is the problem now? Well, originally everyone got the same gear for doing the content in the 40 man raids regardless of if they were super dedicated or casual. There was no discrimination based on skill level or time requirement: only that someone had enough time put in to either DKP buy an item or succeed on lady luck rolls. Right now we have discrimination against people who are moderately driven thanks to gear level discrepancy and content exposure, which is a rather big step back on the design wheel.

I've been shaking my head at the MMO space for ages because of a refusal to fix the broken end game model, not just in this game but in several. Blizzard Activision has been taking steps to try and make it work better, but they are on the way out of classic MMORPGs with the coming of Overwatch and the dominance of the MOBA genre. That leaves Square Enix, Trion, and a few other publishers to work with their development team on fixing and making the games work better and keep people invested. So far they've been failing since they are relying on this experimental end game item level model that has been proven to be toxic by intentionally segregating what was once one big group of happy people into a bunch of smaller exclusive groups, not just in numbers but by content catering.

One of the best solutions to the entire problem is to just have achievements for completing boss fights with lower level gear sets. The people running EX and savage could easily get the same thrill from running similarly complex content with lower level gear, and once the next major expansion hits people can still desync, wear older gear, and have an easier time getting any cosmetic rewards from it.

(Well, this got a little off subject on anima, but it's related in the sense that the EX content is part of the reason Anima was made so grindy to begin with).

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Originally Posted by Cherie

Post #137

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I could learn to love you. <3

The problem with the first relic, is that people cried and cried that titan was too hard. You had ifrit HM parties disbanding if you didnt have casters to LB the nails. People couldnt do titan cuz they always tried to get that last cast off, then blamed it on lag, or they didnt understand, AT LVL 50, how AoE's in the game work.

There is also the point where, when the original relic was still fresh content, no one outgeared the fights. Now, they are trivial. It would be like that instantly now, if they put in special fights for the new relics. I can maybe see them changing this in 4.0, before we have a chance to outgear the thing, but as we are now? No way.

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Originally Posted by MilesSaintboroguh

Grindy way=relic
Difficult path=Alexander Savage
Third path=Tomestone weapon.

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Indeed, three ways to get three different weapons. Which is fine. I'd still like alternate paths (not easier, never easier, just different) to upgrade the Relic weapon though.

Will it happen? Probably not. But a Hyur can dream, can't he?

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Originally Posted by Vrahjin

Indeed, three ways to get three different weapons. Which is fine. I'd still like alternate paths (not easier, never easier, just different) to upgrade the Relic weapon though.

Will it happen? Probably not. But a Hyur can dream, can't he?

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We should have two ways of obtaining it.

1. A faster but difficult way involving trials that are extreme level and not in DF and make you go to each location to queue up like the old Chimera/Hydra days.
2. A grind fest involving RNG and lots of items to finish.

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Originally Posted by bass9020

We should have two ways of obtaining it.

1. A faster but difficult way involving trials that are extreme level and not in DF and make you go to each location to queue up like the old Chimera/Hydra days.
2. A grind fest involving RNG and lots of items to finish.

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The issue with that, as I mentioned before is as so: If I were to offer a million dollar prize to whomever reaches the top of a mountain, and the options are to climb the mountain or walk the trail, what do you think most people will do?

Fact is, I know SE wanted to attract people who might be new to MMOs to this game, and they've been successful in that. They started to take the training wheels off by making open world enemies a little more threatening in HVW. Currently, dungeon enemies and bosses are as tough as, if not tougher than the old Coil bosses (unnoticeable at/above ilvl, but just putting it in perspective). At some point, they've got to stop holding back or holding player's hands. Even some FATE bosses are more of a challenge now than what people cried was too hard then. Something's got to give.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by bass9020

We should have two ways of obtaining it.

1. A faster but difficult way involving trials that are extreme level and not in DF and make you go to each location to queue up like the old Chimera/Hydra days.
2. A grind fest involving RNG and lots of items to finish.

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yes , please ...i would love to get my relic doing difficult content instead of grindin 2.0 old boring content

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Originally Posted by Warlyx

yes , please ...i would love to get my relic doing difficult content instead of grindin 2.0 old boring content

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I agree. People who are doing relic are not opposed to hard content. They just want challenging content they can do on their own time. Making people spend hundreds of hours doing the worst parts of Final Fantasy XIV is not going to win people over on any level. I've got a few pieces of gear from my WoW days that were sort of like anima grinding and while I look fondly at owning them, the fact is I wouldn't wish the things I had to go through on my worst enemy.

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Originally Posted by bass9020

We should have two ways of obtaining it.

1. A faster but difficult way involving trials that are extreme level and not in DF and make you go to each location to queue up like the old Chimera/Hydra days.
2. A grind fest involving RNG and lots of items to finish.

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So people without static groups get shafted while exclusive cliques get their upgrades faster. That concept was garbage in XI and appears no better here.

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Originally Posted by Hayward

So people without static groups get shafted while exclusive cliques get their upgrades faster. That concept was garbage in XI and appears no better here.

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Exactly why I listed NUMBER 2. Im sorry that people don't have statics... actually I'm not its not my problem and I don't really care.

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Originally Posted by bass9020

A grind fest involving RNG and lots of items to finish.

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Not Zodiac again, please.

The 200-210 should have been 10 tokens and a single normal quality crafted item. It's not really surprising that SE took all that feedback about not making the relic grindy and threw it in to a furnace.

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Originally Posted by Hayward

So people without static groups get shafted while exclusive cliques get their upgrades faster. That concept was garbage in XI and appears no better here.

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In a game that requires skillful execution of a team of 8 players, that's a perfectly natural outcome, but it's a bit off to assume that ONLY players with statics can pull these things off. My number one goal in ARR was to clear Coil, and I did so without a static, and in an FC that treated raiding like an allergy.

If you want something bad enough, you find a way.

the relic's is SE's way to make older dungens more active and continual collection of tomes beyond the basic gear into relic items and such. been playing for 2 years and it's very clear that there is no other reason.
to make the relic a good time investment, u get glamour and sometimes customize stats.
i guess this is the deal they offer, and we either take it or leave it.
i have given up trying to talk to change this as majority of players are ok with running rehashed contect time and time again every single upgrade. people stressed how important it's to rehash the content and how great of achievement for them it was to get their relic by spaming 1000 dungens.
SE is not gona change their ways, if we the paying customers are perfectly satisfied with this.

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Originally Posted by starLivitation

the relic's is SE's way to make older dungens more active and continual collection of tomes beyond the basic gear into relic items and such.

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Its proven that its not working, how can you make older content more active when players just quit and abandon the whole?

You can make older dungeons more active when giving them some mean in endcontent but not with "exclusive items". You have to make the items you can already get there useful (example: adding to crafts as materials). Once Square Enix argued with: "They dont like to let players precollect things", but why is that such a bad thing? It is not the job of the developers to plan life and time of their playerbase, its the player who can choose if he will rush through or not (example: reading quest text or not)... The choice is what is so important.

Lets stick to the: "adding old stuff as materials" or also known as "2 old = 1 new, 2 new = 1 super new". Sqare Enix was arguing with: "We have to keep players for longer period of time", but thats wrong too because time to collect will increase if you just try to get them from "old content" -> Compare with gemfarming in Diablo

If you force players to something, you will always fail. Give them some sort of choice and you will win! We have forced dungeons, forced currencies, even forced timeframe. Lets look at weekly or daily: If you miss the weekly loot, you fall behind and how tight the relict was designed you will most likely not be able to finish the relic before next part comes out. (forced timeframe)

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Originally Posted by starLivitation

the relic's is SE's way to make older dungens more active and continual collection of tomes beyond the basic gear into relic items and such. been playing for 2 years and it's very clear that there is no other reason.
to make the relic a good time investment, u get glamour and sometimes customize stats.
i guess this is the deal they offer, and we either take it or leave it.
i have given up trying to talk to change this as majority of players are ok with running rehashed contect time and time again every single upgrade. people stressed how important it's to rehash the content and how great of achievement for them it was to get their relic by spaming 1000 dungens.
SE is not gona change their ways, if we the paying customers are perfectly satisfied with this.

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People really aren't okay running the rehash content through the DF. Expert Roulette is the fastest way to burn out the newest dungeon offerings ever, and the way they have the level 50 and past 60 dungeons segregated into their own tiers is troublesome for the sake of variety. There's nothing wrong with using old content for questing purposes, it's just how they are doing it that is problematic. We need a quick and easy max iLvL solution across the board to free people up for the other stuff like Gold Saucer, alt class leveling, crafting, and gathering.

A lot of systems in the game right now face the difficult question of "how am I relevant in the face of vertical advancement?" And the answer is that they just aren't. As long as there is vertical content to gather that can be done efficiently, there's not much incentive to do the horizontal content except as secondary activities.

A thought on why the anima questline is designed the way it is:

Notice there's a pattern.
- 170: Involves items that require you to have the quest to gather
- 200: Involves running dungeons, completion requires equipping the weapon
- 210: Involves items you can gather over time
- 230: Involves items you can gather over time
- 240?: Involves items you can gather over time

This time around, the devs shoved the steps that newer players cannot prepare for ahead of time into the first two steps, while so far all of the latter steps involve items you can gather in the process of finishing earlier steps. At this point, anyone who attempts to make a fresh 210 relic may likely have the 5 aether oils needed to upgrade to 230 immediately upon upgrading to 210 through CT weeklies. This is probably why the 210 step hasn't been nerfed yet (as far as anyone knows).

It's a thought.

For the anima weapon a couple changes I think SE should make is firstly bump up daily allowance for beastman tribes from 12 to 18 (18 being the cost of a single ingredient aka like bones or saps etc). Secondly I think SE should allow there to be an option for GC seal purchase of those same ingredients, maybe each one costing say 20-25k seals etc. At the moment the only thing I buy with GC seals is ventures, would be nice if could also use for anima ingredients. Maybe they could drop the allied seal cost to 500 as 1000 seems very extreme.

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Originally Posted by LaylaTsarra

Do you really think that many people are raiders? I would be surprised if it's more than 10 percent.

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Thanks to Alexander Savage modes, I would say less than 3%. Try getting a static on any server other than Gilgamesh, talk about an exercise in futility. Alexander killed raiding till 4.0, it would be a miracle if raiding recovered by 3.4.

The anima weapons are easy, I didn't even try very hard to get my 2nd and 3rd one, took my time did the beast quests and farms, and only 7 A3's I don't know what people complain about so much >.>

It's not about being hard, it's about being boring.

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Originally Posted by Hyperia

Thanks to Alexander Savage modes, I would say less than 3%. Try getting a static on any server other than Gilgamesh, talk about an exercise in futility. Alexander killed raiding till 4.0, it would be a miracle if raiding recovered by 3.4.

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If you look at statistics, its about 1,9% (all servers) who finished AS4...
Your prediction with 3% may be correct if we count in those who are still struggling with AS4, but you know: those who beaten AS6 is less than 1%

Edit: From what we have seen in last survey is that we can assume about 300 "elite" raiders at all, followed from just 3000 "normal" raiders.

Edit2: Even after being that much outgeared and possibility to clear it with just 3 or 4 players, only 14% have cleared coil.

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After investigating everyone’s gameplay logs in relation to the anima weapons, we found that there are fewer players with crystals than “unidentifiable” items, so we will be easing the drop rate for crystals in Patch 3.3. However, the drop rate for the “unidentifiable” items will remain the same.

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ugh. crystals are not even the annoying part other than it sucks if nobody else is doing fates and you have to solo them. So basically I can earn 5 - 7 items per week by only doing daily roulettes and HW beast tribes (because 2.0 tribes felt purposeless and boring so I am being punished for not leveling them back then) and eventually I won't even be able to use eso tomes for half the items which basically forces me to level 2.0 beast tribes to be more optimal or efficient and not prolong the process several weeks or months. Allied seals are out of the question because when I've tried to do hunts, they've been pretty dead. I started late because i took a long break but im currently at 8/6/8/5 after a month.

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Originally Posted by Cwestcott18

The anima weapons are easy, I didn't even try very hard to get my 2nd and 3rd one, took my time did the beast quests and farms, and only 7 A3's I don't know what people complain about so much >.>

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It's easy if you previously did all content related to the relic which some people found boring at the time or dead and have time to grind other things. (2.0 beast tribes were boring, nobody doing gordias anymore, hunts dead on some servers and even if no S ranks, still need 25 A rank kills per 1 item)

I'm not complaining about the grind or length time to complete but for the average player, some of the methods of obtaining items are inefficient due to time constraints of daily play and lack of players doing certain things causing the length of time to be much greater. Overall it is just boring.

They could have at least shifted the item collection from gordias option to midas. At least people do that.

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Originally Posted by madolyn

ugh. crystals are not even the annoying part other than it sucks if nobody else is doing fates and you have to solo them. So basically I can earn 5 - 7 items per week by only doing daily roulettes and HW beast tribes (because 2.0 tribes felt purposeless and boring so I am being punished for not leveling them back then) and eventually I won't even be able to use eso tomes for half the items which basically forces me to level 2.0 beast tribes to be more optimal or efficient and not prolong the process several weeks or months. Allied seals are out of the question because when I've tried to do hunts, they've been pretty dead. I started late because i took a long break but im currently at 8/6/8/5 after a month.

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What somewhat irks me about this, being a similar boat, is they specifically mentioned making it such a massive grind due to equating it to the difficulty of Gordias. Well, Gordias saw a substantial nerf and the Anima weapon is now a step below Savage raid weapons. So... why isn't the grind also nerfed? Isn't the purpose to give people an alternative to getting gear if they're more casual players? Instead of using my Anima as a stepping stone and upgrading it come 3.3, I have to go the roundabout method of pushing it to ilvl 200, killing Thordan EX for a ilvl 210 drop, killing Sephirot EX for a ilvl 220 drop and finally killing Nidhogg EX for a ilvl 235 drop. Might be able to skip one of those but by the time I actually get my Anima done, I'll probably have Midas Savage gear and it'll be rendered completely obsolete.