(Relics) What is the lowest-development-cost content we'd still find fun?

So, let's say you're a content manager for XIV and have a small amount of development time you can spend to make time-intensive content. This time-intensive content is expected and, though often criticized if overly "grindy", is generally lauded as a well-liked component of the game and an iconic part of its life-cycle. This can be related to Relics, specifically, or anything similar.

Note: If you develop something for the longer term, you can draw in slightly more development time, but have to deal with player concerns over delays. Excuse these delays as you will.

How would you try to create the most development-cost-efficient content you can for the above purpose? What content would you reuse? How would you link these pieces of reused content? How would you stimulate player interest and participation through the means, rather than merely the rewards, of participation?

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Alternatively, from the player perspective alone, what content would you find fun in Relic grinds? Where does the border between "satisfying" and "overly grindy" lie? What can the devs learn from prior iterations of Relic grinds? What novel approaches might they take? To what extent would you forgive delays for greater efficiency or enjoyability in such content later?

Have at it.


Common opinions/findings thus far... (Hidden as not to unavoidably bias any initial posts)

1. Only the best of Eureka, or better than previous iterations, if at all.
2. Upscaled, rather than level-synced, content would rejuvenate huge amounts of currently wasted resource to potentially tremendous development-efficiency.
3. We should have multiple paths for progressing Relics and similar tasks.
4. Finely difficulty-scaling combat can be fun for a wide range of players and can help to compact a lot of combat fun into relatively little grind while still taking longer due to difficulty.
5. Let's make use of presently lackluster systems, e.g. Treasure Maps!

I grinded my way through eureka and it was the absolute worst experience I have had with this game. Eureka was garbage content because it didn't play to the dev team's strengths. Simply put, they suck at making open world content. This game isn't designed for it and they have no idea how to make it work. What they are good at however, is designing very controlled encounters, which is to say, boss fights. To that end, I'd love to see something like a boss rush mode. I imagine it'd work something like this:

You're trying to upgrade your relic by imprinting it with the memories of your past battles (not unlike what you did during the last step of the heavensward relic quest). To that end, you use those memory crystals from the current relic quest to create a simulation of every boss fight in the game. When you go into the simulation you get your relic weapon and a special set of simulation armor. Both would be upgradeable.

When you enter the sim it puts you up against a random boss. You'd be given 60-90 minutes to clear as many boss fights as possible. There would be multiple queues for this, each of which pull from different pools of boss fights and offer more or less exp depending on which pool its pulling from. Going in order from least rewarding to most rewarding you'd have;

1) A standard 4 man queue that pulls boss fights from every dungeon in the game.
2) A standard 8 man queue that pulls from every normal/hard mode primal.
3) An extreme 8 man queue that pulls from every extreme primal in the game and finally,
4) An 8 man savage queue that pulls from every savage fight in the game.

You wouldn't be leveled down or synced when you go into these fights, you'd have your full level 80 kits, but the bosses would have their numbers brought up to compensate. No new mechanics or anything, this system would already expect you to know the mechanics for every fight in the game so adding new wrinkles into that would be massive overkill, just give them bigger numbers.

Every time you fight and kill a boss, you get some exp which raises your sim level up to a max of say, 100 (or even higher if you want to make it grindier, the max number of levels is mostly arbitrary). The higher your sim level, the faster and easier you can take down bosses and the more bosses you can clear within the time limit. At certain level break points (like say, every 25% of whatever the max level is) your gear would go up a number of ilevels in the real world.

In order to encourage players to deal with some of the harder bosses and not just bail the moment they get say, T9 or pepsi man in the savage roulette, boss rewards would be scaled up or down depending on the “difficulty tier” of the fight. The fights would be automatically assigned to a tier based on data collected from players including the average time spent in the fight, the number of wipes the average team suffers during the course of the fight and the number of disbands that occur whenever a team runs into a specific boss.

This game has a ton of fantastic boss fights that are mostly rotting away in dungeons that people don't bother playing any more. I'd hope a system like this would be easy enough to make since it wouldn't really require too many new assets, it'd just plop players down in the boss room that already exists and it would get some use out of those fights that are just sitting there, ignored and unused.

There hasn't been a relic grind in FFXIV that's been too grindy for me—Eureka was grindy enough that I only wanted to do it once (as opposed to previous relics where I've done multiples), but I was still more than happy to do it (and had lots of fun doing so).

I'd be completely fine with grinds as lengthy as FFXI's legendary weapon grinds (with the caveat that the weapons should have upgrade paths available such that they can remain relevant for years, not just the last few months of an expansion).

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

So, let's say you're a content manager for XIV and have a small amount of development time you can spend to make time-intensive content. This time-intensive content is expected and, though often criticized if overly "grindy", is generally lauded as a well-liked component of the game and an iconic part of its life-cycle. This can be related to Relics, specifically, or anything similar.

Note: If you develop something for the longer term, you can draw in slightly more development time, but have to deal with player concerns over delays. Excuse these delays as you will.

How would you try to create the most development-cost-efficient content you can for the above purpose? What content would you reuse? How would you link these pieces of reused content? How would you stimulate player interest and participation through the means, rather than merely the rewards, of participation?

_____________________________________

Alternatively, from the player perspective alone, what content would you find fun in Relic grinds? Where does the border between "satisfying" and "overly grindy" lie? What can the devs learn from prior iterations of Relic grinds? What novel approaches might they take? To what extent would you forgive delays for greater efficiency or enjoyability in such content later?

Have at it.

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Maybe I'd tie relics to treasure maps so it would be more Indiana Jones esque. Not only do you get great loot from treasure hunts and earn good gil, you can earn relics and it's upgrades over time. This would encourages players to cooperate with their own FC instead of the duty finder. But at the same time I would put a system in place to prevent bad-RNG from players getting relics, so perhaps a token system would also be in place so players could manually trade for relics if they do enough treasure maps.

This idea is based of Runescape's treasure map system where all the best stuff in the game could obtained from them.

Honestly I'd probably have more steps that function like the light gathering phase of a relic. Yes, I know some people don't like it, but it really does encapsulate what I would love to see from relics: A variety of ways to accomplish it, being able to do it while doing your everyday grinding, and an encouragement to do more difficult or longer content by making it give more light.

Now, that said, I'd probably make a few changes to it. For starters, trying to encourage a greater variety of activities. We're creatures of efficiency, and if a most effective method is found we'll grind the fun out of it. There's a few ways one could go about it: Grant more bonuses to things that have an inherent limit like beast tribe dailies, roulettes, challenge logs, heck maybe even wondrous tails, or simply have the amount of light an activity gives go down as it's repeated. Something that's more along the lines of "Go see all the world has to offer" than "Go grind Haukke Manor 70 times."

I'd also add some relic-specific content sprinkled throughout. Doesn't have to be anything major, don't need a new trial for every step or something. Something simple perhaps like a spawned open world mob, and make it different for each weapon. If using re-used mob assets it shouldn't be TOO expensive to do so.

I think the Moogle Treasure Hunt thing they've been doing near the end of patches lately is basically the answer.

I get tired of the hate Eureka got. it was by far my favorite content ever in this game. It offered exploration though dangerous, open world area to explore. Can't say that about dungeons or raids. By the time I was finished I had the best summoner weapon in the game. I had some good gear, lots of fun items from mounts to minions, glamors. I got tomes far faster then grinding roulettes every day. Plus it had a good story behind it. Of course it was hard and had some grind to it but no more than any other grind in this game. Not to mention free materia. and I made many millions from it. And I made new friends.

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Originally Posted by Lainmyst

I get tired of the hate Eureka got. it was by far my favorite content ever in this game. It offered exploration though dangerous, open world area to explore. Can't say that about dungeons or raids. By the time I was finished I had the best summoner weapon in the game. I had some good gear, lots of fun items from mounts to minions, glamors. I got tomes far faster then grinding roulettes every day. Plus it had a good story behind it. Of course it was hard and had some grind to it but no more than any other grind in this game. Not to mention free materia. and I made many millions from it. And I made new friends.

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I don't understand the sudden love for Eureka. Pagos was active punishment to the players.

The grand roulette

That would be all I need to play this game indefinitely as long as new dungeons get added.

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Originally Posted by Edax

I don't understand the sudden love for Eureka. Pagos was active punishment to the players.

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I think it's because Hydatos was generally seen as the most decent iteration of the formula and it left a more positive impression that covered up any ire Pagos might have caused. Though that in part owes a LOT to the Baldesion Arsenal which is what most people praise when they mention Eureka more often than not. Personally speaking if they improve upon Hydatos and give us a new version of BA-like content I would be interested in seeing Eureka again. However if they pull another Pagos I'll be skipping it entirely.

Personally though I wouldn't mind a return to overworld fate farming for the Relic, with new mobs and such spawning in the old zones in relation to it. If we're going to go extremely low cost for the Relic, then make use of existing assets and bringing the few things people enjoyed about Eureka to them would be a good start.

In terms of just general low cost content however, why not bring back the holiday event instances for a time as Gates for the Gold Saucer? You can shuffle through them each week so things keep fresh if need be, but since those are already coded and made it'd be fairly simple to recode them to work as Gates.