Dear SE. Understand that FATEs are not fun!

[i2agnarok]

so next time a customer complains to a CS rep, the CS rep should ask the customer to give a solution?
so next time your boss bans your idea, and you ask him/her to give you a solution?

Your first two questions are two different situations and make no sense together.

1) If a customer complains about something, its because they are unhappy with the way it functions. The product is already released and is in the consumer's hand. If a customer tells me "I hate your website because I can't find anything," if they are genuinely looking to provide feedback and get something fixed, the correct thing to do is ask something along the lines of "we value your feedback; where would you be expecting to see x item, or what would make it better to you." Otherwise, the customer is complaining; we know they don't like it, but don't know why. That's why you shift things around, then customers complain because they changed things and the original problem is either worse or has the added annoyance of having to learn it all over again. This is why companies with high Net Promoter scores have them.

2) If your boss bans your idea, its not getting the green light. He will tell you why your idea was banned. You go back to work. You have feedback on why your idea doesn't fly. You have the feedback that gornotck is asking for in the first place.

I'm under the impression that you don't actually work a CS position where feedback actually matters or are able to contribute, as this is fairly standard practice for companies that do.

Do you know what you do when something isn't working and you have absolutely no idea why? You tweak things until you can figure out why. In some cases you cause other things to not function as well. This is why you have Atma in the first place. If a customer is going to whine, the less information they give, the less likely they are to get the expected result. Whining helps about as much as saying "my car's broke," and that's it.

If I understand correctly, the real complaint here is that FATEs have been tied to Atmas. If you're just playing normally on a pre-50 character, I don't think there's anything wrong with them. They can be a fun way to gain extra exp, there are varied goals to suit different people, and there's a nice sense of community sometimes, when a bunch of random players arrive and all start working together. I'd be sad to see them go.

I'd venture to say that the Atmas are tied with FATEs. I'd say the problem is that you're doing a low level FATE that requires you to sync, for an item with an extremely low drop rate, and are getting absolutely nothing for the time invested. If you're doing anything else in the endgame, whether it be going through Coil for gear, doing dailies, etc, you receive something else, a minor compensation to not make it seem like you're not completely wasting your time. Also, keep in mind that you lose all of your abilities, and because you have a level-sync, you can literally spam the skills you actually have access to, not bother dodging most things, and still be fine. They are completely uninteresting. If the FATEs were brand new, level 50 FATEs, there would still be complaints, but probably nowhere near as many.

The problem isn't the FATE system itself, but the way the Atma questline is implemented into them.

[Ferth]

...The problem isn't the FATE system itself, but the way the Atma questline is implemented into them.

Yes, and no. You are correct, though. Being forced to do low level FATEs as a level 50 where the only rewards you are likely to get is a paltry sum of gil and gc seals is poor design. They could alter the atma quest in one of two ways from there and it would atleast seem less... lazy? They could allow people to farm atma with non-50s, which would allow people who don't have every class at 50 a means of leveling alternate classes as well, or, as you say they could have created new FATES that pertained specifically to atmas.

But to say that the FATE system is fine as it is... I don't agree with that. If their only purpose is to supplement exp from leves, quests and dungeons then yeah, they are fine. They are basically grab bag experience and there's nothing wrong with that, per se. But the system really bears no weight in the game world. And really, that's a complaint I have about numerous aspects of this game... It really lacks a lot of depth. I'd much rather see FATEs altering the world around them to some degree, providing players with a sense that their participation can actually make differences, that they are more than npc errand boys and that mobs are more than exp pinatas.

When the game launched I was willing to forgive some of the shallowness, figuring that the time constraints paired with having to work with a lot of pre-existing ideas carried over from 1.0 meant that they wanted to get the bones for the game in place and then they'd flesh it out after the fact... but after 6 months of seeing them add more bones and very little flesh I'm beginning to think it won't happen. They have a very pretty game... if they want it to last ten years though, they need to add some depth, to give it some personality.