Quote Originally Posted by Lersayil View Post
If you don't consider grind content, then yes, I guess you are correct.

This relic step clearly used up more dev resources... but on the other hand, it barely adds anything to our daily playtime. Judging in a vacuum its a questionable use of resources. The investment will only bare fruit in later steps.

For the moment its a lot of dev work for an EX trial, roughly an hour of story, and a few incentives to do poetics roulettes... which many people do anyways.
I dont consider a grind content, yes - I would consider a grind an incentive to do content. The relic quests in ARR and HW were basically one huge incentive for us to go through whatever outdated content needed reviving. Sending us back into LotA, ST and WoD didnt mean we got three new 24-man raids that patch, it just meant we got a reason to go back to content that was over a year old at that point.

To me getting some new content, developed specifically for the relic quest (with an actual meaning in regards to the quest - not some flimsey excuse like "You get light from killing lots of things" or "This person will only exchange the stuff you need for this specific item that you can find in this dungeon that you've visited 50 times already but never saw the item in question") is much more preferable and does a relic weapon more justice than just being an excuse to bolster our daily playtime and shorten queues .

But I generally like quality over quantatiy - I would have done my daily grind, had the relic quest required me to run an alliance roulette and collect the daily rewards 10 times (or whatever nonsense they could have come up with only to generate playtime, not to actually add anything meanigful), but it would have felt very... unispired to me and more like "Ah, this is the current content not enough people are queuing for... okay...".
I understand the disapointment when comparing Stormblood and Shadowbringers - I dont understand it in regards to HW and ARR... I'm happy the relic quest has become something of its own - and isnt stuck being a way to make us repeat Wanderers Palace.