(Relics) What is the lowest-development-cost content we'd still find fun?

[Jandor]

I don't understand the sudden love for Eureka. Pagos was active punishment to the players.

Pagos was by far the weakest part but it still had its fun moments, and there were three and a half other parts to Eureka. It's not like it was all pagos all the time.

[Edax]

Pagos was by far the weakest part but it still had its fun moments, and there were three and a half other parts to Eureka. It's not like it was all pagos all the time.

If you couldn't get through Pagos because you couldn't find people with identical levels as you, then you'd never see what the other parts of Eureka were like.

[Shurrikhan]

If you couldn't get through Pagos because you couldn't find people with identical levels as you, then you'd never see what the other parts of Eureka were like.

Going into Pagos over a month late, I still had no problem finding people of similar levels. If anything, it was far easier to find them there than in Anemos. And grinding camps felt a fair bit better to me than just cycling the map, underleveled half the time, according to NM spawns.

[NessaWyvern]

I don't understand the sudden love for Eureka. Pagos was active punishment to the players.

Pagos taught me that I actually have a hereditary condition, that I got from my mother.
Turns out, I have worse circulation in my legs than most people, and I only found out after seeing a doctor when I was having blood vessels in my legs burst due to sitting down for too long during the grind of pagos.

It... It really was punishment...

After 20 years of gaming, (and in my youth, I used to play Runescape, which is all grind), it was pagos that revealed it.
I check my ankles almost every day for those tell-tale blood spots, but they honestly haven't re-appeared since I finished pagos.

[Edax]

Going into Pagos over a month late, I still had no problem finding people of similar levels. If anything, it was far easier to find them there than in Anemos. And grinding camps felt a fair bit better to me than just cycling the map, underleveled half the time, according to NM spawns.

That was the opposite case for me.

[Catwho]

Back to the OP's original question: The merit system from XI.

All 80s and nothing left to do? Grind yourself some bonus stats. An extra 1% bonus damage on certain actions or weapon skills, for example.

The merit system from XI would not require any asset changes - it would only require some damage calculation changes, some additional tables on the characters, and a few other programmatic changes in the game's service layers that don't actually require the art team, the lore team, etc. UI team would need to get involved for a menu change, and that's it.

[AnimaAnimus]

I could really go for some XI style weapons where they use new and old content together and there is not necessarily a particular order you need to do things in. Turning them in yes, but you can collect the items at any time in any order as long as certain requirements are met. They just need to keep their hands off fates. They have exhausted fate farming to the point that it just feels lazy when they inject them into content. Heck they had to give them their own currency and lock a whole lot of items behind them just to bribe people to be more active with fates in this expansion, I think that speaks volumes about how unwelcome they are.

Or, in the case of primals or other mobs, we could have mechanics that version 1 had, where doing certain combos broke Ifrit's horns which caused a change in something, idr what, but it did change something, but maybe having fights where things like that needed to be done could be a good way to do things.

Or they could reuse the city maps and make content similar to Dynamis that dropped gear and currency for gear upgrades from trash and bosses, which was just a great time back in its day.

[AnimaAnimus]

Back to the OP's original question: The merit system from XI.

All 80s and nothing left to do? Grind yourself some bonus stats. An extra 1% bonus damage on certain actions or weapon skills, for example.

The merit system from XI would not require any asset changes - it would only require some damage calculation changes, some additional tables on the characters, and a few other programmatic changes in the game's service layers that don't actually require the art team, the lore team, etc. UI team would need to get involved for a menu change, and that's it.

Oh, I second this too. Meriting always felt so much more rewarding than leveling or even getting gear sometimes.

[ElazulHP]

First off I just want to say #NeverAgain for Eureka. The absolute worst content I've played in this game to date. I'll quit this game before ever doing something like that again. It was boring and it was extremely grindy to the point where I physically started to get sick from it in Pagos and had to pull back on the amount of time I was spending there. And at the end of it all the rewards were not even worth it. Relic designs got more ugly every step of the way and the final glow on the Hydatos relics was terrible and ruined the models that did look somewhat acceptable. I regret every last second I spent there and would take it all back if I could and just go play another game. THAT SAID what I did like about Eureka was the social aspects. People talking and joking in chat and in general making good as much they can on a terrible experience. The people were the only reason I kept playing it so a big thank you to everyone who made it bearable.

NOW as for future content I'd like to see more story, more story, and more story. I'm always down for story. Which is why I really like how this step has gone thus far. The look into Cid's past was a nice touch and I hope we get to see more of it. That solo instance was also a gem. If you need something more 'Hardcore' perhaps give us some new difficult boss fights, ect. You guys rock at those.

[Edax]

Maybe I'd tie relics to treasure maps so it would be more Indiana Jones esque. Not only do you get great loot from treasure hunts and earn good gil, you can earn relics and it's upgrades over time. This would encourages players to cooperate with their own FC instead of the duty finder. But at the same time I would put a system in place to prevent bad-RNG from players getting relics, so perhaps a token system would also be in place so players could manually trade for relics if they do enough treasure maps.

This idea is based of Runescape's treasure map system where all the best stuff in the game could obtained from them.

Or here's a modification of my original idea. You get the relic and it has 5 universal upgrade slots. Any upgrade will bring it to the next level but the sequence at what you get the upgrades are not linear. The idea is that you can get one of the upgrades from Fate Grinding, one from Treasure Maps, one from Raiding, one from Deep Dungeons and one from Crafting. Thus fully upgrading a relic would require a whole variety of gameplay.