Are We Really At The Point We Consider The Classic Relic Steps Engaging And "Fun"?

[VerdeLuck]

Why is that bad thing, when it comes to relic weapons though? Ultimate Weapons require clearing Ultimates. Extreme Weapons require clearing Extremes. They take effort and commitment. And even then, relics aren't exclusive. Anyone can get a prior relic. If they put the time and commitment in. That's what makes them special?

Because there's no satisfying that mentality. Ultimate players will say anything older than the current ultimate weapon "doesn't mean anything because it's easy now". No matter the difficulty, it's just a constantly shifting "well that piece of content means nothing now because too many people did it"
You can't satisfy those people when everyone wants content to be just easy enough for them to do it but hard enough to gate everyone else. It's just an outdated and flawed way of thinking about content and game design that MMO players seem to hang into.

It's just really weird to be someone who actively criticizes content because too many people can enjoy it and it's not exclusive enough. The current Relics are great, I can make progress without feeling like I have to drop absolutely everything, I can feel like I'm making tangible progress every time I log in and work on it, something that previous grinds did not have.
sitting around for hours and having to log out because I couldn't get the atma drops fell awful. Doing dozens of runs of raids to get drops, and then seeing I have triple digit more completions of it before I could start the next grind felt awful, trying to run DR and it being empty over and over felt awful when you needed that for a step.
those all "mean something" I guess since they're miserable grinds that take a long time but I don't particularly enjoy those steps as much as I enjoy these current ones.

[ChrysOCE]

Because there's no satisfying that mentality. Ultimate players will say anything older than the current ultimate weapon "doesn't mean anything because it's easy now". No matter the difficulty, it's just a constantly shifting "well that piece of content means nothing now because too many people did it"
You can't satisfy those people when everyone wants content to be just easy enough for them to do it but hard enough to gate everyone else. It's just an outdated and flawed way of thinking about content and game design that MMO players seem to hang into.

Where are you gated, in prior relics? There's nothing "hard" in relics. It's just time and commitement?

[VerdeLuck]

Where are you gated, in prior relics? There's nothing "hard" in relics. It's just time and commitement?

Why do you think I mean "hard" when I say gated? Most of the gating in relics comes from the sheer frustration of things like Eureka, atma farm, potd farm, hoh farm, books, and waiting to get people together so you can actually attempt dead content like DR.
Those aren't fun, they're just padded out an artificially long amount of time to gate the average person out and keep them from doing relics. Because for some reason it comepletely "cheapens" the relics of everyone who has an old relic in their dresser if too many people can earn one.

[TaleraRistain]

The current Relics are great, I can make progress without feeling like I have to drop absolutely everything, I can feel like I'm making tangible progress every time I log in and work on it, something that previous grinds did not have.

I have to disagree with this point. There are options for steps of previous relics tied to daily roulettes. So long as you had the quest active, you could make tangible progress toward your relic and passively collect the items you needed just doing normal things. Not all steps had this and some did focus on doing specific content, but this concept did exist in previous questlines. I'm completely against relics tied to exploratory zones for exactly this reason, that you couldn't make tangible progress toward anything on any step just doing some of the things you normally did.

[ForteNightshade]

Because there's no satisfying that mentality. Ultimate players will say anything older than the current ultimate weapon "doesn't mean anything because it's easy now". No matter the difficulty, it's just a constantly shifting "well that piece of content means nothing now because too many people did it"
You can't satisfy those people when everyone wants content to be just easy enough for them to do it but hard enough to gate everyone else. It's just an outdated and flawed way of thinking about content and game design that MMO players seem to hang into.

This myth really needs to die. Are there people like this? Of course. The vast majority of Ultimate players don't give a hoot when you cleared. We don't like the content becoming easier for our own enjoyment not because "oh no, the dreaded CASUALS will be able to do it!!!" I love UCoB, and it saddens me that I cannot enjoy it at its peak anymore because its been power crept into oblivion. That doesn't mean I'm suddenly looking down on others who got their clears in EW. Most raiders have that same mentality.

People like to show off their accomplishments, be it completing a difficult challenge or putting together a cute outfit. That doesn't mean they care one way or another if someone else has it. Just that it took an effort to achieve. Hence why Achievements/Trophies are so popular. It isn't the supposed rarity they care about but the effort. The relic being reduced to a welfare weapon you get by turning in your spare uncapped tomes you got for your roulette chores takes away that effort, thus making it no longer an achievement worth talking about for a lot of people.

Put it this way, in Baldur's Gate, there are a handful of bosses you can defeat in various ways. Everyone knows each of the methods now that the game has been out but it's still fun to talk about how you approached the battle: Did you RP them to death? Did you fight them (they have huge HP pools)? Did you figure out the gimmick? That conversation doesn't change regardless if it's the first person killing them or the 100,000th. What would change is if everyone installed a mod that let you one shot them or auto select the best dialogue to guarantee they die. Now there's no effort or cool gimmick involved to these challenges. You essentially "won" by showing up. Nobody would talk about these bosses in that became the standard way to win. It's no longer something cool.

That's the EW relics in a nutshell. You were handed a cool weapon while barely lifting a finger. Which, in turn, makes people care much less about them.