At this rate it'll take ages for me to 200-210 my relic.

[Colt47]

To Cherie,

The problem is that they don't need to make things so time consuming to keep people playing. If the only reason people are playing is to get a single item and not even care about the content they are doing anymore, they are not playing a game: They are showing symptoms of being on a mouse wheel and suffering from a compulsion. The entire point of the game is to have content we enjoy doing with the reward being something we get at the end as a pay off. Hence, it's about the journey, not the destination.

What you are stating is that the developers care nothing about the journey and just want to make the destination an irresistible mouse trap so people will inevitably waste hours of time burning themselves trying to get the highest powered item. Developers on FFXIV don't want that: they care about making an enjoyable game and want to hear positive feedback from the people playing. A major problem they are having is that the small hardcore audience doing hard content want to be the soul owners of the highest level gear. They are competing with the masses and want to stand over them with something to show for it. In turn, it is their own demands that are determining how those who can't join raids can get the same level of gear.

Ultimately, to make a better game the developers have to decide if they want to keep pleasing this smaller hardcore group of ground pounders or support the larger mid-core vanguard that played these games back in the early 2000s and want to keep enjoying the game on a more limited budget of time. They can't please both groups as that strategy has been tried before. It just doesn't work.

Edit: Also, the developers are in a situation where if they want to change Anima, they can't change the existing ones because then it invalidates all the time and hours people put into it already. The best the FFXIV Development team can do is move forward and have the next one be less demanding.