Alliance raids have no business being a relic step.

[van_arn]

So balancing the game isn't SE's problem? The drop rate issue is causing a massive mechanical imbalance, and most game companies, although apparently not square, when they see a situation where one method of achieving a result is massively more effective than the other available methods and they would either significantly nerf the good method, or significantly buff the bad method(s).

Besides, this is an apples to oranges comparison. Ivalice isn't hard, the issue is that it's not at all fun for me, and generally I prefer to actually enjoy the time I spend playing a game, especially when I'm paying monthly to play it.

I encourage you to play exactly what you want. If the relic steps provided aren't fun for you, then I absolutely encourage you to skip the relic. I did exactly that for the Eureka relic.

The steps are balanced, though. 18 runs of Ivalice is a substantial amount of time if you consider queue times, and 12 hours of fates is a good failsafe if you can't get the queue to pop.

Before this relic, it was difficult to get any Ivalice dungeon to pop outside of prime time (at least on my datacenter) so I'm happy to see encouragement offered to queue.

[Arkevorkhat]

Before this relic, it was difficult to get any Ivalice dungeon to pop outside of prime time (at least on my datacenter)

If a duty isn't popping because the duty finder can't find enough people, is it possible that it's because there's something wrong with the duty?
Perhaps the duty is dead because there's insufficient interest in the duty; the plurality of people don't want to do Ivalice and Mhach raids, for their own personal reasons.

[Doozer]

If a duty isn't popping because the duty finder can't find enough people, is it possible that it's because there's something wrong with the duty?
Perhaps the duty is dead because there's insufficient interest in the duty; the plurality of people don't want to do Ivalice and Mhach raids, for their own personal reasons.

Lots of people will only do something if there's loot at the end, no matter how fun or interesting it is. Why do you think they had to hotfix Bozja stuff? No one was doing Castrum except for the relic and there was never enough people. A lot of "gamers" will only do something for the incentive, not because it's fun. Oh also because the HW/SB/ShB raids aren't the total faceroll that the ARR ones are (not that they're hard, but some people would rather sleep through the raid), so they avoid it whenever possible.

I personally disagree with that way of playing, but that doesn't mean it isn't true.