you guys went overboard with this new relic

[Starbirth]

Funny, pretty sure the fact that Alexander savage is so 'hard', is the reason raiding has "fell off". Also explains why it took weeks to complete while some are already near completion of their relic.

Yes it is hard but other factors also come into play as to why raiding is down in the dumps.

[Granyala]

6 HORRIBLE MIND NUMBING HOURS, in the Churning Mist and all I got was 2 crystals .

Imho there is nothing wrong with a FATE grind per se.
What is wrong is that the DEVs are unwilling to program in a safety net.

Since it is the first step of the weapon and not supposed to be soul crushingly hard do the following:

After every successfully completed FATE with GOLD RATING! (no tagging 3 mobs and running away) increase crystal drop chance by 10 percent POINTS (not %).
Resulting worst case scenario: guaranteed crystal drop after 10 FATEs putting the player at 180 FATES (gold rated) maximum.

There you go: I just designed a FATE grind w/o any kind of frustration.

I seriously don't get why game devs INSIST on "unshielded" RNG so much. Sure, it's piss easy to code, but the results are NOT FUN for any player caught on the unlucky side. Shouldn't games we play in our limited free time be exactly that? FUN?

Think long and hard about this SE.

[BreathlessTao]

Everyone really needs to look at it from the developers point of view. For the past few months, playing this game has been this: Log in, do dailies/run static raid, log off. Old content, and world content (FATES) weren't touched. The only zones with actual people in them were Idyllshire and Ishgard. Even then that was only when they were between roulettes. Now, with this relic: We have people everywhere doing FATES, beast tribe quests, crafting, and running every dungeon just because the relic requires every tomestone under the sun.

To begin with: no, we really do not. We are not developers, it is not our job, we are not getting paid for it - heck, can't even be said that we do what we do because we enjoy doing it, like I'm sure many devs like what they do.
Furthermore... yeah, maybe there is a reason why old content was dead? You know, because of people having been bored to death with it all for months. Doing the "daily routine" only, putting in the minimal effort to get the minimal allowed progress in the few things they can, because they are bored to death even with that. Sure, by forcing everyone to do those same things they have been sick and tired of for months, you can re-populate older content. But then cue the hatred, the flames, the quitting, the no recommending the game to outsiders - do the math if it's worth it. From a dev's point, or from ours. (Point in fact, it could be felt for a while that the game isn't getting the money it needs, let the subs start dropping and it'll go down the drain in its entirety. If it hasn't yet.)

Now had they put it in with only new content as most of you all have suggested aka: a couple of one hit bosses like hydra and chimera, no atma style things, and no grind. Then that is the only thing that would be ran and it wouldn't fix the fact that everything else was stagnant.

Consider this then: had they added actual new content with Anima Weapon, the massive delay would have been justified at least. Like it or not, this thing has been delayed "because it wasn't ready". And then it drops, and it's a great big air balloon, like what wasn't ready in this? For the past 3-6-idekhowmany months, we could have been doing this. For the past several months, we could have had actual use of poetics and law tomes that have been collecting dust, capped for absolute ages on everyone's character, because there was nothing to spend it on. For the past several months, we could have had FATEs and beast tribe dailies and old dungeons not dried-out. And by now we (everyone, not only the bleeding-edge raiders) could have at least one weapon that's on par with the rest of our gear's level cap (that has also been there and quite easily obtainable for a month or two now, doing completely casual-difficulty tasks). And maybe, just maybe, we wouldn't be so disgruntled at the fact that by the time most of us even come close to finishing this great big air balloon, another token will be added to VA that enables everyone to have an i210 weapon doing content (once, probably) that's been a faceroll since about 2 days after its release, either.
And on a sidenote, don't even get me started on yet another batch of new tokens that we need to collect - that needs to permanently take up valuable inventory slots again, because they still can't (/ don't want to?) make all these tokens into actual special currencies, even though we have that oh-so-awesome-advanced Currency window now with so many tabs...

Personally, I don't mind the grind. I'm just getting really tired of the old re-hash and no creativity in making the new Relic Quest. 3.15 Relic is basically the same thing we get from 2.5 Relic, they just name the name of Atmas to Crystal. Do Dungeon, used a sh$tload of Tombs to buy the items. Grind old Content in this case Alex over and over again. Then at the end craft some really bizarre HQ items and either have it succeeded or failed. Making the materials also super expensive to buy if you don't have a friend or high crafter job.

^ thank you, glad to see more people noticing how blatant the recycling has become.

[Yonanja]

Everyone really needs to look at it from the developers point of view.

To be honest, if I were the devs, and saw that content I've made was not being used by the players... I would start to question and investigate WHY! Instead of just throwing in a lazily made carrot on a stick, I would have tried to figure out a way to make those pieces of content actually interesting for the players to do instead. This is just lazy design, and will only last for a short while. Old stuff will be populated for a month, then it's going to return to being a ghosttown. The devs should instead try to give the players a lasting reason to do these pieces of content. It's not like if they had the entire 2.0+ time to figure out that the players didn't seem to like doing fates and obsolete content for little to no reward.

[Alahra]

In terms of how long the grind is: this came up in another thread, but this stage is essentially about as onerous as the original, 2.3 Novus grind was. Each Mysterious Map was worth 800 tomestones (I think it was Mythology back then but I'm not positive), and you needed 75 maps, for a total converted tomestone cost of 60,000 tomestones, which is 5,600 more tomestones than needed to buy the 80 tokens from tomestones. Mythology tomes were harder to come by from dungeons and roulettes back then than Law tomestones are now (though easier to come by through Hunts than they are now).

We didn't have nearly as many options for getting Alexandrite as we do to get Unifinished items, either, so we don't have to necessarily burn ourselves out as hard.

For the "crafted" stage, the cost of the 16 tokens for Anima will undoubtedly be less expensive than the cost of 75 Materia Melds for Novus, especially when you consider that those melds could fail, resulting in lost Materia, even on Grade IVs.

While I do wish they had incorporated newer content (I can't figure out why Diadem doesn't have a part in this, really), the weapon questlines are one of the primary ways they can encourage people to engage in otherwise "dead" content. Given that another common complaint (not necessarily from the same people, of course) is that the game abandons old content too quickly, I'd wager this is one of the ways they try to keep content relevant for longer.

[AzureFlare]

I seriously don't get why game devs INSIST on "unshielded" RNG so much. Sure, it's piss easy to code, but the results are NOT FUN for any player caught on the unlucky side. Shouldn't games we play in our limited free time be exactly that? FUN?

Think long and hard about this SE.

"PS3 limitiations".
The moment they insisted they had to remove 1 single UI element that was already there for local players just for the sake of 'PS3 limitations' (TP bars) is when I gave up on them ever implementing an extra boolean/flag to send from and to the client. Let alone an additional integer/float/double for the servers to hold and keep track of.

[Blood-Aki]

lol no we don't. I'm a customer, they either deliver quality content or they don't. I have no use for their excuses, they don't pay my sub nor make the make more enjoyable. The whys and hows are not my problem.

Do you all get invested this much in anything you buy? If there's a terrible restaurant do you go and sit anyway because you're thinking of the cook? If you see a broken chair in a store do you buy it anyway because of the bigger picture and how no one was using that chair, but now it has a purpose?

You sound like such an awsome guy "lol i don't care about them, their well being or what their human needs are, i pay money i get what i want, period!"

[Granyala]

"PS3 limitiations".
The moment they insisted they had to remove 1 single UI element that was already there for local players just for the sake of 'PS3 limitations' (TP bars) is when I gave up on them ever implementing an extra boolean/flag to send from and to the client. Let alone an additional integer/float/double for the servers to hold and keep track of.

You do realize that the entire tracking process would run server side, right? There is no need to involve the game client into it as it is as simple as the server counting the completed FATEs.
You can even make super primitive coding and reset the counter every time the zone is switched.

[AzureFlare]

You do realize that the entire tracking process would run server side, right? There is no need to involve the game client into it as it is as simple as the server counting the completed FATEs.
You can even make super primitive coding and reset the counter every time the zone is switched.

Oh I know. I was just being overly sarcastic. Your proposal's easy as pie and the fact they insist on using a lame excuse is worrysome, really. There are plenty of methods to avoid the whole 'PS3 limitations' thing and they still pull the card out.

[Yonanja]

You sound like such an awsome guy "lol i don't care about them, their well being or what their human needs are, i pay money i get what i want, period!"

The devs are officeworkers that do their job making this product, if the product doesn't live up to expectations of what they realisticly should be able to do, then customers have every right to complain about it. That's how capitalism and buissiness works. The devs arn't some ill-treated artists or something, some inovation and creativity would be expected when the game's come this far. But it seems that the only ones on the devteam that might actually be invested in their own work are the ones doing the art-assets. The ones coming up with the mechanics and new ideas seem to only care about getting paid and puts in the minimal effort needed to not get fired.