Atma disappointment social help thread. For those with no luck.

[ShinkuTachi]

snip

I understand your grievance, I really do. However, I'm not out to make a claim about an entire userbase's preference, based on seeing a handful of complaints.

While I do agree that overuse of any gameplay aspect is not a good thing; I can't personally say whether or not FATEs has reached that point (again speaking personally).

Duuude007 made a good point a few pages ago about how this is good for acquiring additional seals, gaining a bit more gil, leveling chocobos, gaining drops for beastmen daily quests in advance, spiritbonding, and such.

Personally, this was infinitely valuable for me in getting early beastmen daily drops and acquiring additional seals in order to be stacked with Venture Tokens to level my retainers.

The biggest benefit I feel this had, at least when I was farming, was making low level FATE areas relevant again. I can't count how many FATE parties I was in that had lowbies actually leveling classes, because the FATEs in those zones were no longer dead. In my opinion, this was a good thing and was probably part of the reasoning behind SE setting it up like this.

So understand, I'm not here to shoot down your points or anything. I agree with some of what you're saying. At the same time, I hope you're able to see the other side of things I'm pointing out.

[WhiteWindHD]

Burned another 7-8 hours yesterday without a drop. I've consistenly put in 10-20 hours a week since the patch with the exception of one-two weeks where I basically said screw it its not worth it. I still to this point only have 9/12. I'm guessing I have some of the worst luck in game.

Although I guess I've been somewhat lucky in coil2

[HumsterMKX]

Duuude007 made a good point a few pages ago about how this is good for acquiring additional seals, gaining a bit more gil, leveling chocobos, gaining drops for beastmen daily quests in advance, spiritbonding, and such.

Personally, this was infinitely valuable for me in getting early beastmen daily drops and acquiring additional seals in order to be stacked with Venture Tokens to level my retainers.

......

Don't really need any of those. Still got Savage Might Materia III @95 with retainer (>...>

Venture tokens from Maps.

Gil, not really have any use for them (>....>

Cleared all Bstmen levies already.

[Creedence]

Well, it took 7 days of fate grinding in Southern Thanalan but that last Atma finally dropped for me. I promised myself that i wasn't going to do this again after finishing my SMN animus and yet here I am, a mere 13.5k myth away...

[rwyan]

We kind of saw this in 1.0 to a degree. It was one of the reasons why I played 1.0 less and less. However, we didn't have fates in 1.0, we had full-group encounters (8 player teams). Eventually, all content in the game revolved around the same set of dungeons/trials, and it was just awful.

[Mayh]

I know I may just be superstitious here.. and everybody talks about the completely random factor of this Atma stuff, and there is no big secret to it. Its just. random.

But, if you are having an agonizing time grinding the same zone for days I implore you to try farming the zones at a completely different time (in your local time) than you normally have been.

In my experience with this I never ever got an Atma drop in the daytime hours and I wasted hours and hours trying. I quickly noticed that anytime I farmed after 8pm (my local time) my luck went up tremendously and I was getting 3 to 4 Atma in 90 minutes or so.

I started to think maybe its because my server was less populated during those times. It won't hurt to try regardless. Good luck to you all

[Ramzal]

There really isn't a trick to it. Just hammer away at one atma at a time. It's just luck based. Some areas I spent four hours in and my wife got in two fates and vice versa. I did atma and nothing but atma to get mine.

[Killance]

11 now, 1 more to go!

[Diavolo]

Reading this thread has made me wonder if I even want to start on this atma shit...I hate fate grinding with a passion. I do enough of it as it is when trying to level up other classes.

[Jerichai]

Not basically, not even kind of.
What I have been saying is that it is this way, if you don't like it, then there are other options more compatible with your progression needs, and to consider that many of us do not want this feature taken away in its current portrayal. Just as many would not want High Allaghans trivialized by nerfing SCOB.

The list that you so quoted was not a "deal with it" list. It was a list of things you can still take advantage of while slogging through the grind. To make the time more bearable- Call it a silver-lining.

Also- My average droprate across 2000 fates was 3.25%, or roughly 30 fates per atma drop. Until I did the math, averaged it out across a large amount of farming, You or I could have said anything and it could be taken worth a grain of salt. That said, even a layman could readily admit that guranteeing any sort of atma drop every 30 fates exactly is far too exploitable.

Ah, so 30 FATEs an ATMA...so by your logic you only did 10% of the work on average to earn those. Care to toss out those unearned ATMAs/weapons and start over from scratch? No? Then stop antagonizing people trying to blow off steam about a system flawed by the reality of how statistics work.

You 'properly attempted' FATEs comment is asinine and not representative of how statistics work. Every FATE completed (assuming the participation requirements are met, basically having a zenith equipped and hitting a few MOBs at the FATE) has the same chance of achieving a victory state. Yes, I am well aware that in statistics, your chance of getting a desired state increases with the number of attempts made. But in that equation, all that matters is the number of proper attempts (i.e. meeting the ATMA roll requirements we went over) and the success chance (ATMA drop rate). Statistics doesn't give a damn how much time passed between attempts, how much damage they did at the FATE, or whether they were wearing a pink leotard while attempting to get an ATMA. So you have no basis to say that any one person's attempts are invalid, not from a statistical standpoint.

Congratulations, I'd argue you've been extremely fortunate with your ATMA farming. But that doesn't change the reality of how the math works out, and ultimately the main flaw of the ATMA system. Math tells us that there will be a segment of the population that will be well above the average, when we assume a bell curve distribution. So, there will be a small portion of the population that has to do significantly more FATEs than the majority to reach the same result. It doesn't matter how they do it (again assuming they're meeting the very basic requirements), statistics deems some will be screwed at no fault of their own. For such a skill-less grind, I think it's perfectly justifiable some will be a bit annoyed with that. There are ways this could be managed (such as implementing a high end cap on FATEs needed before an ATMA was given that could be high enough to be considered a grind, especially by your average 30 per ATMA standard), but SE choose not to consider this.

Considering all this, and the fact that SE has stated they are not making changes until 2.4, how about you take a step back and let people be frustrated with a flawed system. Stop with your 'silver-linings' and 'don't do it if you can't handle it' talk (which I could go into more depth as a flawed argument, but I don't have the time right now) and give people the luxury of blowing off steam over a flawed system. No one is making you come into these posts, you choose to.