Why is "It's something to do" apparently a valid defense?

[Alahra]

Not to mention I've hardly ever seen anyone talk about how dissatisfied they were with the intial relic quest, other than the fact that titan HM was required (and a good amount of it was attributed more on latency, compared to the fight being a legitimate skill check). And they still left out other niches like the weapons being an individual entity rather than using a broad-sweeping brush to funnel it into all the same plot.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but you started around 2.3 or so, right? That's probably why you didn't hear much about it, as it was ancient history by then. But early on in the first few months, there were people talking about how different the Relics felt compared to their FFXI counterparts and how they wished they were more "meaningful" they were.

the other 2 steps don't seem to reflect the player feedback

Several posts back I talked about ways the Anima saga incorporates some player feedback, in response to someone else. Is the whole thing a response to feedback? No. But some of that feedback has been contrary to part of the very purpose of the questline, which so far as we're aware, was one of the more successful aspects of ARR's design. Lots of people built and completed Zodiac weapons, so it's more than likely that SE considers the core design of the quest to be fundamentally sound, which is why Anima generally follows the same model as the Atma-onward Relic/Zodiac questline, but has various tweaks.

In regards to the "one character" thing, that was a shorthand way of trying to say that, in FFXI, most people didn't build Relics for every job--the time investment would have been ludicrous, and that contributed in a way to the feeling of "dedication" required to build one. You didn't just do one for every job you had capped, not like it was for the 2.0 relics, where you got it for pretty much any job you got to level 50 (though once Primal Focus was added, there was another avenue for weapons). The developers aren't necessarily trying to force us to focus on one job for the quest, but it's a side effect of the fact that the grind is longer, which is something freedback specifically asked for back during the early days of 2.0/2.1. Feedback at the time suggested that players didn't want Relics to be something for an alt job but rather something for a main job. Does that clarify a bit what I'm referring to?

Edit : I'd also like a confirmation that the developers did indeed to intend for relics to not grow in power (and I mean just that, different from being stronger/as strong as raid weapons mind you). From my perspective of FF games, similiar equipment were always a case of "the weapon evolves with you" sort of deal, as was the case for pretty much any other mmo that has a unique/named weapon as a reward.

I'd have to dig around and see if I couldn't turn up interviews and the like from like 2 years ago to really get you confirmation on this, but if it's really important to you I can try to. I'm horrible at Google, though. There might be some information in older Live Letters, but the addition of the Relic questline was also discussed in various media interviews, and I honestly have no idea which of the countless ones conducted around that time have the bits from Yoshi-P that I'm thinking of.

Edit: This interview talks a bit about why they created the Zodiac questline: https://www.playerattack.com/news/20...-realm-reborn/

The relevant bit from Yoshi-P is this:

Up to patch 2.1, there were two ways of getting high-end gear. One was collecting tomestone, that may take time, but you could always regularly gain tomestones which made it a more secure route, or a higher level skillset is required, but fighting against very tough battle contents and trying to aim for those drops.

We received much feedback from all over the world because with tomestomes there was a limitation to how many you could obtain every week, and also when it comes to battle content some was too difficult for some players and they were not necessarily able to complete it in order to receive the item. We received feedback from players that “We would like another way of getting these items, even if it takes time, but something we could obtain in a different way.” So that’s why we decided to include this third option which is the Zodiac weapons.

While he doesn't specifically say that they weren't going to increase the power of the relics over time here originally (it's possible, after all, that they had plans to upgrade them through something more like the original 2.0 stage--but if they did, we never heard anything about it), this confirms that they essentially created the Zodiac line in response to player feedback rather than as something they had been planning to do all along. There's another quote from somewhere in which Yoshi mentions needing time to implement the questline because it wasn't part of their original design plans, but I'm having more trouble turning that one up so far.