2.25 in 9 days or less. Animus weapon owners, are you excited?

[Tiggy]

That has to do with how it was worded. There's a lot of contradictions and loopholes especially when it points fingers to those that haven't bothered investing the time of day to care about grinding for their atma.

I don't mind delays as long as they are honest and don't give runarounds and blame players in the process.

You seem to be in the mind set that releasing content they know already needs fixed should take priority over releasing it in the proper form the first time. The sheer number of forum threads talking about the animus drop rate proves that wrong. You're just impatient. You somehow blame the players for their being too few weapons in the game. I'm sorry but that isn't the players fault. I'm going to use myself as an example here. I play this game nearly every day so I'm definitely in the hardcore group. Aside from working over 40 hours a week in the last weeks I've been farming for my bear mount (98/200!), getting BiS for my War so I had accuracy to hit t6 properly, also working on t6 (first win monday woo!), and I've been getting Weaving mining and goldsmithing to 50. I play a lot. I only have 5 out of 12 Atma because it is an incredible time sink that pulls me away from making other progress in order to stand in a zone for hours on end in a vain hope that I might get lucky. All the while I'm ability locked doing low level fates. The ONLY reason I do not have this weapon is because quite simply the existing method to upgrade your weapons is a complete and totally bad implementation. It is in no way the players faults that there are too few animus weapons. This is directly caused by bad design and needed to be fixed by square.

Many players still have yet to obtain an Animus weapon.: Aside from the "and what of it", it doesn't justify the delay in anyway.

Yes, it absolutely does. It was a bad design, it's holding people back and it needs fixed. There is absolutely a reason to keep the game balance in check by delaying the new release. This isn't about you and the fact you have your weapon. This is about overall game health. Square is making the right call.

We would like to incorporate feedback regarding the difficulty of the Zodiac Weapon quests.: There's been "feedback" since the launch of 2.2 so why is this a thing now?

Because major balance patches don't happen all willy nilly. This was the first big patch after 2.2 dropped. This was, and always was, the correct time to release such fixes. It always has been and always will be. So that's why this is "a thing now." You should have seen this coming. Also, developers do not release knee jerk reaction fixes to content just because people complain. They have a whole process that must be followed internally to vet out how to change it, play test that change, bug fix that change, etc. You can't just read a bunch of complaints on a forum and fix it on a whim. That is not how game design works.

We are working to increase the number of locations where materials for the next upgrade can be obtained.: Why can't they just release the "fix" in 2.28 instead of delaying it overall?

Because releasing knowingly broken content is a poor business decision. The only people they would appease is the EXTREMELY small portion of the player base who actually finished their weapon. Appeasing that small portion is not more important than releasing the content in a proper form the first time. You are not a special snowflake who should be allowed to continue while nearly the entire community gets stuck behind because of bad design.

The fact they are going back and modifying this is a tacit admission that they designed this poorly. This was in no way them blaming it on the players.