We're honestly at a point of the game where content is overly abundant. Not necessarily a bad thing, in fact, the good outweigh the bad noticeably, but it changes the approach people have with content. Besides certain straight forward activities, the grind aspect of traditional MMORPGs is taboo. Things are readily available now, but being bottlenecked to the point of tedium. Mind you, this is NOT a comment on lockouts and raid specific gear. This is simply a remark on development philosophy.

I can appreciate the grind, but the grind only truly existed on the players terms. With Atma, it was about as close as this game got to the old grind. It honestly felt very nostalgic. When you reached Animus, it was back to the newer model, where the focus was the end, not your actual progress. An example of what I'm getting at is player reaction while progressing between both Atma and Animus. Did you cheer when you killed 10 of X mobs for your book? Heck, did you cheer when you finished a book? Maybe, but probably not. Did you cheer when you finally got that one Atma? I'm willing to bet you did. THAT is the feeling of the old grind. You appreciated every progressive outcome of the grind. The thing is though, it was no longer on our terms once the Atma step was complete.

When you start to force players into grouping with each to support this grind, that's where it starts to weigh heavily on us, even from old school MMORPG standards. We no longer have the choice to play by our terms, but are forced to submit to not just the system, but other players. The grind is daunting enough that we don't need to be harassed, griefed, or otherwise subjected to failure because of someones intentional attempts to ruin the play of everyone (not just the relic goer). Due to the system this game follows, and the point of content we are currently at, the style of grind that the relic weapons are do not promote much in the way of "fun". Truth be told, the relic weapons (Zodiac) are a testament to ones accomplishments in getting it. There's no denying that. But we're not playing a game that keeps these items on level of importance (like FFXI, vanilla WoW, etc). The relic weapons are constantly changing along side newly introduced weapons that are generally better or more efficient to obtain. The bragging rights are nowhere near as satisfying for this reason, and as a result, it's not so much the weapon as it is your journey that you brag about. "I endured more of a PITA method to obtain a weapon than others"... grats? Even the lore behind them in XIV is rather lackluster. Godbert's hammer strikes me as far more interesting of a weapon to wield.

I'm not aiming to demean anyone's accomplishments, in fact, I extend an honest admiration to them. I'm just pointing out that, while it was fine in 1.0 and the first half of ARR, the lack of a shift in design philosophy (to compliment how much content is available). This isn't so much a jab at what is required, so much as it is a lack of intent to change what worked. We don't need more people to do FATEs. We don't need more random people doing relic quests to queue for early dungeons (since there's a very high chance that any 50s you encounter aren't there for relic). Keep in mind, I say that within some context. Of course there's a need for people to queue, but the amount of people who do them for relic isn't exactly the sole reason why people actually get a queue.