Please stop making Eureka

[Neophyte]

According to XIVDV.com the statistics look like this:
Anemos weapons (Pagos achievments not listed) are almost as common as UI step relics of HW; which got released almost 3 years ago.


Average possession rate of anemos weapons:
each weapon is owned by 4,05% on average; every weapon was done about 8250,33 times

Average possession of the early UI step of relics in HW:
each weapon is owned by 4,5% of the players on average; every weapon was done about 9158 times

Average possession rate of finished HW relics:
each weapon is owned by 2,69% of the players on average; every weapon was done about 5472,31


Just to put into perspesctive how "popular", "common" and "casual" relics really are and that Anemos at least isn't that far off.

[HyoMinPark]

According to XIVDV.com the statistics look like this:
Anemos weapons (Pagos achievments not listed) are almost as common as UI step relics of HW; which got released almost 3 years ago.


Average possession rate of anemos weapons:
each weapon is owned by 4,05% on average; every weapon was done about 8250,33 times

Average possession of the early UI step of relics in HW:
each weapon is owned by 4,5% of the players on average; every weapon was done about 9158 times

Average possession rate of finished HW relics:
each weapon is owned by 2,69% of the players on average; every weapon was done about 5472,31


Just to put into perspesctive how "popular", "common" and "casual" relics really are and that Anemos at least isn't that far off.

If these are based on achievements, they won't be that reliable since achievements are set to private on the Lodestone by default. If XIVDB can't access your achievements, it would be able to pour your data into these statistics (and this is something LuckyBancho repeats when he does his own unofficial censes).


And if you mean each weapon has a ~4% ownership rate, there are 13 HW relics and 15 Anemos weapons. So either your wording is off (and you mean to say ownership of relics as a whole is ~4%), or you're being disingenuous by trying to say ownership as a whole is ~4% when actually it's ~4% per weapon (4 x 13 = 52%; 4 x 15 = 60%). So please clarify which it is. Because your wording says EACH weapon, and there are multiple weapons involved here. Not just 1.

Considering Ultimate clears are only a couple thousand, I find it highly unlikely that relic ownership as a whole has a similar amount of participation to Ultimate.

Ok, call me nitpicky, but nothing in the post you quoted says anything about "intended for the majority". It only says that the requirement will be "a long period of time" instead of difficulty, that for some people is also a hard gate. And, it may be assumption on my part but when he says "playing solo", I think he meant "without a dedicated group", since it's hardly reasonable to farm that many tomestones without doing any group duty.

You are being nitpicky. It’s an implication. He’s explicitly saying that they’re making the Relics even easier to do because people complained about steps in the Zodiac quest chain that required doing the harder versions of Ifrit, Titan, and Garuda. Most players don’t want to do harder content; most in this game aren’t raiders, a lot don’t even step into Extreme primals. Making it easier is an attempt to make it more appealing to the general playerbase.

Again, the Relic is not niche content like you are trying to claim.

You can't really say that. Assuming the relic wouldn't be there, they would have had to put another interesting rewards in it (Since, no interesting reward would kill any content), and we don't know what participation would have been on that situation.

I feel fairly confident that I can. They literally threw every new optional item from Patch 4.45—minions, mount, hairstyle, housing items—into Pyros because the Relic is no longer enough; especially after the mess of Pagos (which is the main reason I stopped doing the Relic this expansion, and I’m not one who has issues with grinds, since I have 4 completed Anima, 1 on the i270 step because I was too lazy to do the primals at the end, and 1 on the i260 light step that I haven’t finished because, again, lazy).

They’ve done the same things with PvP: all the new hairstyles lately have been going into there (minus the Gyr Abanian style from HoH, but at least PotD also included one hairstyle, so there was a semi-precedent set there). Because they’re trying to tempt people into the content, because the content itself or the content-specific rewards are no longer enough.

If the Relic were enough, there wouldn’t be a need for all these other items to be thrown in to try and get players in there, but clearly it’s no longer enough.

That’s what tells me that, if the Relic had never been in there in the first place, the participation would have been on-par with Ultimate participation. Not exactly what the developers would want for a feature they boasted as a selling point of the expansion.

Oh yes, it does. No tomestones required at all. And, for me personally, that's a huge selling point, especially since tomestones are already the main way of gearing making old relics basically more expensive tome weapons.

I understand you hate Tomestones, but the Anima relic also had other ways of getting most of the same items you could buy with tomestones, including the worst step of that Relic (pre-nerf): Unidentifiables could be gotten through Gordias normal token farming, Allied Seals, and Beast Tribe tokens instead of (initially) 680 Poetics/Esoterics; Aether Oils through the Gift of the Archmagus quest weekly instead of (initially) 1,800 tomes; Singing Clusters via 2 quests in Idyllshire (buying them for tomes wasn’t added until later, actually). The only ones that had the Tomestone requirement were Umbrites (not Crystal Sands since they had a myriad of options) and the Ink for the last step. Which could be done slowly through daily roulettes, and not through mindless dungeon farming.

I won’t speak on the Zodiac weapon, since I’ve only casually worked on the BRD weapon.

One simple difference that you conveniently dislike doesn’t change that Eureka isn’t anything different in terms of design. All the elements present in it for Relic completion—FATE farming, token farming, and light farming—have been used before. It’s not revolutionary. Which was my main point to you.

If that happens, then SE better give us an a casual way to obtain ilvl405 raid gear and weapons xD.

It’s called “unsync the content next expansion xD”.

[Reynhart]

You are being nitpicky. It’s an implication.

You can't claim an "implication" as fact. Especially when grinding for hours or even days is hardly an activity loved by the majority. In fact, I really doubt Zodiac/Anima ownership is really that high, even if XIVDB's numbers aren't perfectly accurate.

Again, the Relic is not niche content like you are trying to claim.

Do you have actual numbers to claim that ? Yet, you still use the Anima to claim what purpose should fill the Eureka weapon, when the purpose was already different between the Zodiac and the Anima, since the Anima was never a good weapon for content progression.

They literally threw every new optional item from Patch 4.45—minions, mount, hairstyle, housing items—into Pyros because the Relic is no longer enough

They threw every 4.45 items in the only 4.45 content. When was the last time a new item came from an old content ?

I understand you hate Tomestones, but the Anima relic also had other ways of getting most of the same items you could buy with tomestones, including the worst step of that Relic (pre-nerf): Unidentifiables

Yes, I loved that step for that single reason. You still had Myth Books, the Ink for Novus, Sacred water for the Zodiac, Mahatmas for Zeta...and the atrocious 24000 tomestones for the Umbrites...that I did three times. And slowly or not, tome farming is still doing the same thing over and over for days, especially since it the de facto way of gearing since the very beginning of 2.0. Give me Eureka as the main source of gear for 5 years straight it would also bore me eventually.

Yikes! 4%! That's less people than cleared O8S if I remember from Lucky Bancho which had the total number of players who had Air Force at 12%.

Frankly, I wouldn't be suprised if the majority of people simply skipped the Anima, considering you could get an equal weapon easier and/or sooner without doing Savage. But I still see a problem when using the achievements to judge how many characters are actually owning an Anima Lux, because, since each weapon has its own achievement, if one character has all of them, he would count 13 times.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

They threw every 4.45 items in the only 4.45 content. When was the last time a new item came from an old content ?

Patch 4.35, actually. New recipes were added for crafters, including all the otter stuff. They also didn't used to put RNG as insanely low as they did in Pagos. The Shiver emote has an estimated .2% drop rate. This is lower than even the EX Primal mounts. Granted, it seems they moved away from that in Pyros.

Yes, I loved that step for that single reason. You still had Myth Books, the Ink for Novus, Sacred water for the Zodiac, Mahatmas for Zeta...and the atrocious 24000 tomestones for the Umbrites...that I did three times. And slowly or not, tome farming is still doing the same thing over and over for days, especially since it the de facto way of gearing since the very beginning of 2.0. Give me Eureka as the main source of gear for 5 years straight it would also bore me eventually.

For simple math, let's round each dungeon to 100 tomes per run and each NM to 5 crystals. This equates to approximately 240 dungeons and 100 NMs. What exactly is the difference here except the former allows for multiple options in terms of different dungeons, trails, raids, beast tribes and an assortment of other activities whereas the latter isolates you to a single location with a narrow objective? NMs in Pagos also take substantially longer to spawn than most dungeons. Spawning Brothers last night, I could easily have ran through The Burn possibly three times. Regardless, you've simply exchanged one token type (tomestomes) for another (crystals). And you aren't grinding current tomes since if we had the old relic steps, you'll simply accumulate those along the way.

What irks people isn't necessarily Eureka itself but the one dimensional aspect of its progression. If you dislike this content for whatever reason, you simply don't have a relic to work on for Stormblood. And due to how its synced down, you cannot even go back later and mow through everything like you can if you liked the Genji set for whatever reason. I get it. You despise everything there is to do with tomestones, but they allow options. They also give us a reason to actually look at old content again. I literally have no reason to even touch 50/60 roulette. In fact, I hardly do roulettes these days because they serve no purpose. Capping current tomes is easier than ever.

Nevertheless, if people had an option; say you could take your the relic outside Eureka and do light farming through dungeons and/or tomes, you'd hear a lot less complaints. Now you have Eureka and people who dislike it have roulettes. Everybody wins.

[Reynhart]

Patch 4.35, actually. New recipes were added for crafters, including all the otter stuff.

For crafters, new recipe is new content.

For simple math, let's round each dungeon to 100 tomes per run and each NM to 5 crystals. This equates to approximately 240 dungeons and 100 NMs. What exactly is the difference here except the former allows for multiple options in terms of different dungeons, trails, raids, beast tribes and an assortment of other activities whereas the latter isolates you to a single location with a narrow objective?

The difference is that the very context of Eureka makes NM different than dungeon. Like I said on another topic, in Eureka, you can enter from solo to a full group and freely change job or group composition depending on needs, and there's a bit of randomness in how you will roam in the zones depending on the NM that pops. You also don't necessarily partake in Eureka for the same purpose, depending of what reward you seek (Train, light farm, challenge log or the, saddly, few quests), and mostly, there is a way higher sense of community in Eureka, with people more willing to talk and help each other. Another thing is that, again, you already run these dungeons for something else. I'd take 240 dungeons and 100 NM over 400 dungeons, especially since, from 2.0, I've probably done several hundred dungeons already.

And due to how its synced down, you cannot even go back later and mow through everything like you can if you liked the Genji set for whatever reason.

That's too early to really say that. Past relics have been nerfed to the ground so they were easily doable for very late people. Chances are Eureka will follow the same treatment come 5.0. Like I said, if you remove the elvl/ilvl sync and make NM like Hunt Marks, you'll be able to solo any weapon.

Nevertheless, if people had an option; say you could take your the relic outside Eureka and do light farming through dungeons and/or tomes, you'd hear a lot less complaints. Now you have Eureka and people who dislike it have roulettes.

Yet again, Relic is only one weapon option. So you should have people complaining that other weapons are also locked to a single content. The difference is that people still assume that relic is "for everyone", which is really not that accurate.

[Nariel]

snip

Oh its so different ?

You kill trash then you can do the boss. Do it three time GG you win tomestone.

You kill trash then the NM pop. Do it GG you win crystals.

You can exchange xxx tomestone to get your token, with x token you have your weapon.

You can exchange your crystal and the token from "insert fate name" token or echange crystal for the NM token and you get your weapon.

What change exactly ?

Light farm ? Yeah no, you go to the trash of your choise and kill the same trash over and over again or participate in the 8 same fate over and over. While before you choose the boss and kill it over and over so much difference...

Oh you can do anything else ? Yeah no Crystal only drop on fate, so do the NM token, yeah sure you can choose the mob you'll chain... Could be a trainning dummie and get the same result.

Tomestone ? Dungeon, raid of every shade from the 24 to the 8 man and from savage, tribal quest and even in Eureka itself. You could do a ARR or a HW style relic while still doing Eureka, you could do it while going in your favorite Eureka instance while chasing your chilling emote, T-rex mount, demon horn or whatever.

The decorum change ? Eureka the instance is the same for all the current step, don't get me wrong those place are gorgeous but don't make me believe seeing those six same panorama for weeks are so different than 10+ instances + tribal quest.

Relic is obtainable by everyone for the only cost of time, get over it you're embrassing yourself. A chimp could play in Eureka you won't see a difference.

[Reynhart]

Eureka the instance is the same for all the current step

It's not really because the way you deal with Eureka is very different depending on your level and your experience with it. You basically go from scaredy cat afraid of mobs looking at you to powerhouse that roam the map without any issue, being able to help people everywhere. Or from player lambda, being quiet and following the train, to Eureka veteran, providing advice or even leading the train. The community aspect is a very important part of Eureka, you can't sum it up with a simple "killing mobs for hours".

Relic is obtainable by everyone for the only cost of time, get over it you're embrassing yourself.

In an MMO, "time" is a real commitment that not everyone have.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

For crafters, new recipe is new content.

And they added nothing this patch cycle. Furthermore, those new recipes typically are incredibly easy crafts or use easily obtainable crafts, thus you can purchase them from the market board for cheap. That hasn't been the case with Eureka since Anemos. We'll see how common everything is for Pyros, but Pagos purposely went in the opposite direction purely to try and drive people into it not unlike PvP.

The difference is that the very context of Eureka makes NM different than dungeon. Like I said on another topic, in Eureka, you can enter from solo to a full group and freely change job or group composition depending on needs, and there's a bit of randomness in how you will roam in the zones depending on the NM that pops. You also don't necessarily partake in Eureka for the same purpose, depending of what reward you seek (Train, light farm, challenge log or the, saddly, few quests), and mostly, there is a way higher sense of community in Eureka, with people more willing to talk and help each other. Another thing is that, again, you already run these dungeons for something else. I'd take 240 dungeons and 100 NM over 400 dungeons, especially since, from 2.0, I've probably done several hundred dungeons already.

This is entirely subjective. You find it better yet that certainly hasn't been the online opinion—which has been near universally negative. Even from people who were alright with Anemos utterly despised Pagos. Regardless, this argument doesn't make much sense. While you may not be able to change jobs in dungeons themselves, they're substantially shorter. So you can easily switch every other run. In fact, I rotate jobs frequently in all content I do. That isn't unique to Eureka. It's actually made more tedious in Pagos due to the poor map design and Aetherryte levels. I wanted to switch to SCH from WAR. Well, I have to spent 5-10mins catching up with the train again. As for partaking multiple activities... how does Light farming, challenge log or train differ? They all revolve around you killing the same mobs endlessly. We spent a good 30mins at least killing Minotaurs by the hundreds. Light farming works precisely the same. Crystal farming? You're still killing hundreds of things to spawn a NM. Challenge log? Kill the same mobs. Everything revolves around the same activity with little to no variation. Dungeons may not be overly exciting but bosses do have mechanics. And trails and raids are significantly different.

No matter how much you want to argue it. There is no choice in Eureka, especially Pagos. You will be killing thousands upon thousands of trash mobs whether you want to spawn NMs, farm light or do your challenge log. They all revolve around killing brain dead mobs with zero mechanics.

That's too early to really say that. Past relics have been nerfed to the ground so they were easily doable for very late people. Chances are Eureka will follow the same treatment come 5.0. Like I said, if you remove the elvl/ilvl sync and make NM like Hunt Marks, you'll be able to solo any weapon.

I can farm Neo Exdeath right now. He is an absolute pushover at i400. Even God Kefka will fall over to a semi-competent group as they approach i400. With past relics even before the nerfs, you could catch up at a fairly reasonable pace because there was never anything gated. Did you start the Unidentifiable Step late? Whatever. Just start farming tomes and you'll be set. Eureka, on the other hand, gets ever more arduous because less and less people populate the older zones. Before people on the Umibrite step were still being funneled back to dungeons, thus anyone behind wasn't impacted. And FATEs are solo-able by design. You'll struggle immensely to solo any NMs in even Anemos, let alone Pagos. So you either hope the instance fills or wait until near the end of 4.x, or 5.0 and hope they make it solo-able. That is bad design.

Yet again, Relic is only one weapon option. So you should have people complaining that other weapons are also locked to a single content. The difference is that people still assume that relic is "for everyone", which is really not that accurate.

Even taken a face value. If a large portion of the playerbase assumes the relic is for a general audience, it will be incredibly foolish for the developers to say, "well, no. You're wrong." All that accomplishes is pissing off a larger portion of your audience. Nevertheless, the relic has been for the general audience. Not everyone but for a far larger crowd than Eureka. The intent behind it is playing the game normally will net you a powerful weapon and sense of progression. Eureka isn't playing the game normally but a niche activity. A perfect litmus test would be taking any other armor or weapon set and put them in Eureka instead of the relic. Does Eureka stand up or fall over? Any other weapon and Eureka gets ignored. It's the popularity of the relic that attracts people to it. How do I know this? Diadem. Even with gear competitive to Gordias, Diadem died almost instantly.

And you know Eureka wouldn't survive without the relic otherwise you wouldn't have dodged what I said. Let us take the Relic outside Eureka and progress it through other means if people so choose. If you prefer mob farming and NMs. Go and enjoy Eureka. If you'd rather do trails for light instead, by all means. Now everyone has a choice on how they want to progress. But you're afraid this would kill the content you prefer, which speaks volumes of its stability.

[Reynhart]

This is entirely subjective.

Better is subjective, different is not. The fact that I find it more fun mainly because it's different is indeed only my opinion.

They all revolve around you killing the same mobs endlessly.

In the end, everything could be summed up as killing lots of trash mobs then a boss, be it a dungeon, a quest, FATEs, etc...But soloing or low-manning the challenge log does not give the same vibe or ask for the same requirement as chaining high level monsters on one spot in a full group with dedicated tanks and healers, or roaming around the whole map with the train.

Imagine if a new dungeon is created where instead or running around killing packs of trash and three bosses, you had to keep a position safe from approaching waves of trash and bosses. Or if you had to protect an NPC from waves of mobs and three bosses. Or, as I would really liked The Burn to be, an open zone where you would kill the three bosses and their trash in any order you want, until you open the last part for a final fourth boss. Would it really make you feel the same as the usual "straight line dungeon with three circles rooms" ?

Eureka, on the other hand, gets ever more arduous because less and less people populate the older zones.

For me, it's sill too soon to judge. It's still very easy to end in a full instance for Anemos or for Pagos. I even have taken a full 2 month break just after the release of Pagos and had no issue doing my full Pagos weapon leisurely in a little more than two weeks. From what I've heard, Eureka scales with the number of players, with people reporting that lots of NM are easily soloable when the zone is near empty. Considering that every NM drops XP/Crystal/Light and that you don't need to kill Pazuzu or Louhi anymore, I think it's really doable. Of course, you won't be able to solo if lots of people are in the zone, but, you can simply join them then since chances are they are in a train.

If a large portion of the playerbase assumes the relic is for a general audience, it will be incredibly foolish for the developers to say, "well, no. You're wrong."

Not really. If you have numbers as proof that only a small part of the playerbase actually did the previous relics, it would be useless to streamline the next relic for the whole playerbase, especially when you want to try something a little different. If past relics ended as a niche (No claim since I don't have numbers, but they do), making this one a niche for the new systems you want to experiment is not that far fetched.

Not everyone but for a far larger crowd than Eureka.

Problem is, we don't know the size of the crowd, neither for Zodiac/Anima ownership of for Eureka participation. Officialy, Anemos was a "success", so at least, it matched the size of the playerbase they intended. They didn't comment on Pagos, wether good or bad, and it's still a long way to see if Pyros and the last one will be successful or not.

How do I know this? Diadem. Even with gear competitive to Gordias, Diadem died almost instantly.

There is a big difference between Diadem and Eureka. Random rewards. In Diadem, you never knew what item you'd get and what stats and appearance it would have, especially since you could end with items you might not even use. In Eureka (until now, at least), you always knew exactly what the weapon/armor would be, even if the time it would take to obtain it varies, and you always make progress to that goal. The randomized stats for Pyros may change that a bit, depending on how harsh it is.

And you know Eureka wouldn't survive without the relic otherwise you wouldn't have dodged what I said.

No, I didn't "dodge" the question because I still think it's a silly question. Let's suppose that every item from any content is buyable with tomestones. You have two options : If it's buyable with capped tomestones, people would still do the dedicated content so that they can bypass the weekly restriction. If it's buyable with uncapped tomestones, yes, the content would be dead...but it's true for every content. If EX Primal weapons and mounts were buyable with uncapped tomestones, they would die after everyone get their first clear. If Savage gear, minions and mounts were buyable with tomestones, you'd only see the small fraction of the playerbase interesting in fflogs competition in there, so a fraction of a fraction of the playerbase. If Ivalice gear was buyable with tomestones, people would only get their first clear too. People will mostly chose the path of least resistance (Unless personal gripe like I have with tomestones), and tome farming is the universal easiest way of obtaining things.

Or, one solution would be to make the items really expensive, to the point that the average tome-to-crystal/hour ratio is slower that the average crystal/hour ratio in Eureka. At that point, you'd have people acting the same as me, avoiding an activity because they hate it, even if it's the most efficient way of doing the relic. But I think most people that want the relic would still run Eureka simply to do it faster, thus keeping it alive.

EDIT : Ok, let's do this.

• Protean Crystal : 30 Tomestones of Mendacity
• Anemos Crystal : 100 Tomestones of Mendacity
• Pagos Crystal : 150 Tomestones of Mendacity
• Frozen Crystal : 500 Tomestones of Mendacity
• Pazuzu feather added to Gift of the Archmagus
• Louhi Ice obtainable from a lvl 60 equivalent of Gift of the Archmagus

Total cost of a full set (Anemos Armor + Pagos weapon) for one job : between 210500 (+five weeks) and 227000 Tomestones of Mendacity.
Would you do that relic ?

[Fawkes]

They threw every 4.45 items in the only 4.45 content. When was the last time a new item came from an old content ?

All the time. They are always putting new things in the Gold Saucer, PvP, and hunts even when they didn't add or change anything in that content.

Although the Gold Saucer is the only one of those I like seeing new items added to.