The Current Status of FFXIV Patch 3.1 and How to Address it Moving Forward

[Velhart]

snip

I don't believe I ever really said I disagree with you. Its called having a conversation, since we are exchanging words doesn't mean we are on different sides. In regards to dropped quality and relics. Last I recall, relic quest has been around since 2.0 for ARR. It's quality has definitely decreased over time with new content coming. I believe what I said about both is relevant. My apologies if I did not make that clear at the start.

[Alahra]

Last I recall, relic quest has been around since 2.0 for ARR. It's quality has definitely decreased over time with new content coming.

To say that the Relic quest dropped in quality is, I think, to misunderstand the very nature of the Zodiac quest. While it's easy to see why people would compare Zodiac/Anima to Relic (since the Zodiac weapons were built from the Relic ones), I think that ultimately creates unrealistic expectations. Zodiac (and Anima, by extension) is ultimately a separate progression path that relied on the Relic weapons mainly because people wanted them to be more involved than just a few Trial battles. The 2.0 Relic quest is probably actually most comparable to the Tomestone weapons from 2.2 and 2.4, which required completing "midcore" content and had a similar tomestone cost to the old Zenith weapons.

The Zodiac/Anima quests, by contrast, are aimed at a different sort of player population. The Zodiac questline has been relatively consistent in quality ever since its inception. The Relic quest is the outlier because they ultimately repurposed it to fulfill another design goal.

(And I do apologize—for whatever reason your earlier posts came off as somewhat adversarial to me, so I thought you were disagreeing with me when it seems that you weren't in general.)

Post Cap Response

Its more to say they are not even attempting to be creative in the grinding department. They did atma farming for anima again, lights twice during the Zodiac, spamming previous tomestones to get items. I guess we should expect to do books again the next step.

I'm not particularly surprised they did any of this either. They've been using the weapon questline to increase participation in older content ever since its inception in 2.2. My expectation was entirely that we would see the same broad strokes—there really aren't many ways they can get people to do FATEs, for instance, unless they do something similar to Atma. We could have had a quest to do a certain number of FATEs in each zone, but that's even less inspired.

The double Light step was more than likely to create a reason for Light farms to exist again, helping folks who had stalled out during the Novus stage to find parties again.

When it comes to tomestones, I'm glad we had two different types to work with—if I had needed 54,000 Law alone, I probably would have gone nuts from spamming Fractal/Neverreap. So I was more than glad to do some content I hadn't touched in about 6 months. It afforded some variety, which was very welcome. And either way, there are still tons of players that aren't level 60 and want to clear those older dungeons (I lost count of how many new player bonuses I got from my L50 Roulettes while working on my Anima), so it's still of interest to the developers to increase participation for them. The need for Poetics also created a lot of interest in Roulettes, too, when there hadn't been much prior to that.

I can understand that some folks don't ever want to see content from last expansion again, but the Anima questline is really one of the best ways they can foster interest in the stuff from the past, and I never particularly expected any changes to the overall nature of the quest relative to Zodiac because of that. If they didn't do so with the weapon questline, they'd need to reinvigorate the old content in some other way, either by putting level 60 tomestones on L50 dungeons (undesirable, given that if the rewards aren't relatively low, people would just spam them as opposed to the new content, but if they are low, no one would do them anyway) or needing them for things like the MSQ or something (and I think we can all remember how well that went when they made everyone do Guildhests in the 2.1 MSQ).

The questline, for better or worse—according to one's individual taste—isn't going to see any significant structural changes. Much like dungeons, I think they've found the general formula that works and what they're doing now is recycling and giving us a new coat of paint each time it goes. That may or may not be enough for you, and that's fine—but the likelihood of it actually changing to any degree that would satisfy seems to be rather low at this point because the questline works and it works quite well at what they've set out to do with it: create a pathway for players to invest time to get a powerful reward, and at the same time, increase participation in less popular content for the time.

As I've mentioned before, they improved the player-friendliness of the quest in some noticeable ways and to my mind, the current leg of the Anima questline is better constructed than any of the Zodiac steps were—so I see that as an increase in quality, rather than a decrease in one, personally.

[Velhart]

snip

Its more to say they are not even attempting to be creative in the grinding department. They did atma farming for anima again, lights twice during the Zodiac, spamming previous tomestones to get items. I guess we should expect to do books again the next step.