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

[LaylaTsarra]

Nope, I have fun at titan without lag spike even my ping is around 100ms

Sure lots of people had fun with Titan. It's why there were so many people selling clears for Titan HM. It took some weeks to clear it. Personally I didn't have a problem with that duty given it was a challenge and was rewarding when I finally cleared it.

[Yukiko]

Nope, I have fun at titan without lag spike even my ping is around 100ms

Most players had ping of 300+ without lagspikes, with them it gone up to 400+ and sometimes 500+
To reach the 100+ ping you needed a very fast internet connection (most players tried with VPN - example "WTFast")
It wasnt the ping, but more the packet lost with about 30% lost and on prime time it sometimes gone up to 50% lost

But to be fair: Square Enix done a lot and it wasnt always that high. The game was playable and you could workaround if you precast or premove...

[Fynlar]

I'm sorry, this is not me being elitist or hardcore or anything when I say this but; if you're not raiding, then you don't need a raid-level or near raid level weapon. Even if it takes longer, even if it's grindier/pricier/etc. You don't need it. I mean, why? What are you going to use it for?

Do you try to acquire ultimate weaponry in a FF game only if you absolutely needed it to beat something, or simply because it was fun to get stronger?

This may surprise you, but a lot of players fall into the latter group.

[ThirdChild_ZKI]

Very valid point. I however counter that with what I stated before: The initial relic quest. I had to brave some of the toughest corners of the open world for it. Then it led me to the challenges of Chimera and Hydra. THEN it led me to the HM Primals. All of which did ask more and more of me as a new player (at that time) to overcome those challenges and obtain a stronger weapon overall in the end?

Where does a to-do list or buying materia to meld involve getting stronger? Granted, I'm sure the context we say it in is different, and some simply DO like a grind or a to-do list, and that's fine. But I know people with several Zetas who STILL can't clear Garuda Extreme (whether by lack of skill, or complete lack of ever trying); what use is that "strength" gained from a weapon they grinded easy tasks for?

Again, I'm not trying to take a hardline and say effort isn't its own reward. I mean, clearly it is, whether your efforts mean clearing a raid or grinding enough tomes/dungeons/gil to obtain your weapon of choice. Still, one hand washes the other. What good is a good weapon without a good or experienced wielder?

At that point, it may as well be glamour (as they all ultimately become anyways).

[Cherie]

To Cherie,

I don't disagree with you about the relic quest being boring and unnecessary. It's a reaction to a bigger problem. I just outlined the process that could lead to this long, unfun grind that is the relic quest. It's a result of people not wanting to raid but still wanting to get better gear. The problem isn't the quest, it's the way raiding is handled. Raiding can't be taken out of the game or they will lose more than a third of the player base. But they are hand holding people that don't want to raid too much. It doesn't help them. It just makes the non raiders bored and want to quit. Instead, maybe they should make more systems that people could get into some kind of raid community perhaps without a static. This new "raid finder" looks promising. I guess we will see if it does any good to help.

I have to say the relic grind is intentionally a time trap on purpose though. It's hard to think that it's an accident. Any item in this game's value is judged by how long it takes to aquire it. There is no getting around that. We could shorten the quest to be done in a single afternoon and suddenly people all have relic weapons but still feel just as bored. Like I said, the larger problems need to be fixed. Shortening the quest doesn't improve people's enjoyment, nor does lengthening it.

In the end, it's hard to say any task in a game is worthwhile though. It's either fun or it's not. This is all for our enjoyment. We aren't learning any life skills here, etc. I'd love to put "hardcore raider" on my resume but.... well.. you know ... lol

[LaylaTsarra]

Raiding can't be taken out of the game or they will lose more than a third of the player base.

Do you really think that many people are raiders? I would be surprised if it's more than 10 percent.

[Colt47]

To Cherie again,

You're talking about raiding and how it needs exclusively superior gear being rewarded to be worth doing. This is the old MMO vanguard misconception that was born out of the hardmode shinanigans popularized by World of Warcraft. Historically, better gear did require raiding but raids were highly accessible on difficulty level. Often they just required significant amounts of damage being dealt to a large tanky creature with some relatively simple mechanics, while the group worked on keeping up that horde of 40+ players banging on said giant monster / raid challenge. The trouble with that model was that it often took forever for someone to organize the event and the loot was drip fed so that it took too long to actually reward the players involved, so developers made the group smaller. This led to the next stage of Raiding which involved small group skirmishes. Without the "challenge" of assembling a 40+ man group, the dedicated organizers suddenly felt that the raiding wasn't "challenging" anymore, so the developers got stuck with a dilemma: How do we make it challenging again? At the same time, the people that were more casual and tagged along on the 40 man runs suddenly found more responsibility was slapped on them and found the default too challenging.

This led to what we have today: Raid finder and Hard modes. So what is the problem now? Well, originally everyone got the same gear for doing the content in the 40 man raids regardless of if they were super dedicated or casual. There was no discrimination based on skill level or time requirement: only that someone had enough time put in to either DKP buy an item or succeed on lady luck rolls. Right now we have discrimination against people who are moderately driven thanks to gear level discrepancy and content exposure, which is a rather big step back on the design wheel.

I've been shaking my head at the MMO space for ages because of a refusal to fix the broken end game model, not just in this game but in several. Blizzard Activision has been taking steps to try and make it work better, but they are on the way out of classic MMORPGs with the coming of Overwatch and the dominance of the MOBA genre. That leaves Square Enix, Trion, and a few other publishers to work with their development team on fixing and making the games work better and keep people invested. So far they've been failing since they are relying on this experimental end game item level model that has been proven to be toxic by intentionally segregating what was once one big group of happy people into a bunch of smaller exclusive groups, not just in numbers but by content catering.

One of the best solutions to the entire problem is to just have achievements for completing boss fights with lower level gear sets. The people running EX and savage could easily get the same thrill from running similarly complex content with lower level gear, and once the next major expansion hits people can still desync, wear older gear, and have an easier time getting any cosmetic rewards from it.

(Well, this got a little off subject on anima, but it's related in the sense that the EX content is part of the reason Anima was made so grindy to begin with).

[ThirdChild_ZKI]

Post #137

I could learn to love you. <3

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

The problem with the first relic, is that people cried and cried that titan was too hard. You had ifrit HM parties disbanding if you didnt have casters to LB the nails. People couldnt do titan cuz they always tried to get that last cast off, then blamed it on lag, or they didnt understand, AT LVL 50, how AoE's in the game work.

There is also the point where, when the original relic was still fresh content, no one outgeared the fights. Now, they are trivial. It would be like that instantly now, if they put in special fights for the new relics. I can maybe see them changing this in 4.0, before we have a chance to outgear the thing, but as we are now? No way.

[Vrahjin]

Grindy way=relic
Difficult path=Alexander Savage
Third path=Tomestone weapon.

Indeed, three ways to get three different weapons. Which is fine. I'd still like alternate paths (not easier, never easier, just different) to upgrade the Relic weapon though.

Will it happen? Probably not. But a Hyur can dream, can't he?