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

[Xirean]

I seriously think the people who say you can just solo CLL and DRN have never actually tried it at the power level a new player will have, I got that same response on it whenever I ran into the wall of DRN for the story and let me tell you. DRN with 2 first timers took a solid 25 minutes for us to get the first boss to less than half HP because the scaling was just not good.
Same with CLL, you can *technically* clear with 2-3 people IF, big if, you have people who know all the mechanics, have the right essences from farming the zones, and have a full 10/10/10 setup, you can do it, but none of these first timers are going to have it and expecting that level of farming just to then farm even more for a single relic step is pretty absurd.

The timepiece step should be a lesson of what not to ever do again, same with the ARR fates and book steps, or having it locked behind an exploration zone farm like eureka and bozja.

Agreed. However I would like to also add that I would have soooooo much less a problem with it if the instance were on the duty finder and alliance raid roulette. Obviously it would need to be different because of the special actions (which is a whole other conversation) but it would make it so much more approachable if you didn't have to spend a lot of time in party finder only to them spend a lot of time just waiting for the timer to finally let you in.

[Bonoki]

If we're going to be really honest, nothing in this game is special or exclusive since everything can be either botted or RMT'd for a clear.

Want an Ultimate or Savage clear but don't want to do the work? Take out your credit card.
Want all of your EW relics done without even needing to step into a roulette? Take out your credit card.
Want all of your gathering for the next year done for you? Take out your credit card.
Want to skip the entirety of the Pteranodon grind? Take out your credit card.

Nothing in this game is ultimately special or exclusive since you can just pay someone to do the work for you. This is why we have the thriving RMT market that we do and why people with Ultimate clears are often questionable as to how they got them. Not even housing is special since someone who bots can just be paid to buy your placard for you lol.

The worst part about the takeout your credit card logic is that some of these grinds are so lengthy and long, that it's actually faster for me to take a day of overtime at work and pay someone with that money than the amount of time it would have taken me on my days off to do myself. Like think about it, a single 8 hour overtime day for a clear in Savage vs 4 possible weeks of learning the fights and bashing the head against the wall.

That's mostly the ingame community where the strict rule "be nice or else" are enforced. The forums is basically the lawless wild west.

If anyone ever want to conduct a social experiment on the necessity of law and order, they can just cite the contrast between ingame and the forum of FF14 as a source.

Whenever I talk about the official forums to friends or random people I meet within the game, they always seemed surprised or shocked that I interact on here. It's always, "Who actually uses the forums?", "That place is so toxic", "It's just a bunch of unhappy crybabies in an echo chamber who doesn't represent what I really think." "They think they know what they are talking about but they really do not." It's just always forum hate and they really don't care what I have to say that I have seen posted on these forums.

[ZephyrMenodora]

I have a bridge to sell to you.

I'm going to pool my bridge buying funds with this poster:

For a while I was genuinely willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that this was an alt targeting & pretending to be Ren but at this point I think it actually is him.

=D In my defense, I always thought the Threneras account was a troll alt. But yesterday I had a glimmer of doubt when it was pointed out that the Ren account ran out of posts just as the Thren account was posting. So I went and counted how many posts Ren made and it looked to be about 20 - so maybe he was truly out of posts and his mind had actually unravelled from spending too much time here that he was Thren?

Because truly, I thought, "Whose life would be so sad and pathetic, that they would create an alt account of another forum user here on these forums of only about 30 active posters?" And even if that was the case, could that level of patheticness rise to continued use of the account, and posting replies as other alts essentially talking to oneself?

Ren ignored the account before (or simply didn't see it somehow), and his initial silence about it made me wonder. I did see his post yesterday that was removed (but not the harassing toll account, because...well, the mods here make questionable decisions). But we have our definitive answer at last.

I am left with naught but embarrassment as to how much time I put into thinking about this.

[KitingGenbu]

If people found 2.0 light grinding fun, I'm sorry but they are just masochists plain and simple.

[Bonoki]

I'm going to pool my bridge buying funds with this poster:



=D In my defense, I always thought the Threneras account was a troll alt. But yesterday I had a glimmer of doubt when it was pointed out that the Ren account ran out of posts just as the Thren account was posting. So I went and counted how many posts Ren made and it looked to be about 20 - so maybe he was truly out of posts and his mind had actually unravelled from spending too much time here that he was Thren?

Because truly, I thought, "Whose life would be so sad and pathetic, that they would create an alt account of another forum user here on these forums of only about 30 active posters?" And even if that was the case, could that level of patheticness rise to continued use of the account, and posting replies as other alts essentially talking to oneself?

Ren ignored the account before (or simply didn't see it somehow), and his initial silence about it made me wonder. I did see his post yesterday that was removed (but not the harassing toll account, because...well, the mods here make questionable decisions). But we have our definitive answer at last.

I am left with naught but embarrassment as to how much time I put into thinking about this.

Same. I had my doubts until that exact moment as well. It was just extremely bad timing really and I apologize that my I let my guard down even for a moment.

[ZephyrMenodora]

Same. I had my doubts until that exact moment as well. It was just extremely bad timing really and I apologize that my I let my guard down even for a moment.

What do we have to apologize for? We're not the crazy person who behaves like this to begin with lol.

[Denji]

i always liked eureka/bozja despite the criticism and i do absolutely have criticism for both those things. (we hated light farming in ARR, why bring it back for eureka??)

i didn't like the stages of it that boiled down to running antitower like 50 times because even if you weren't currently working on a relic, someone else was and it meant leveling/level 50-whatever roulettes were just antitower. over. and over. and over. and over. and over.

every time i hear the antitower theme i just have this visceral revulsion and have to resist the urge to leave.

that said, i miss the FATE grinding. kind of. it was also good because it made the world feel alive for new players getting to the area for the first time. the rainbow gem system/shared fates might as well have been a wet fart in comparison since nobody does them so now the world's empty again. thanks square.

[SannaR]

i always liked eureka/bozja despite the criticism and i do absolutely have criticism for both those things. (we hated light farming in ARR, why bring it back for eureka??)

i didn't like the stages of it that boiled down to running antitower like 50 times because even if you weren't currently working on a relic, someone else was and it meant leveling/level 50-whatever roulettes were just antitower. over. and over. and over. and over. and over.

every time i hear the antitower theme i just have this visceral revulsion and have to resist the urge to leave.

that said, i miss the FATE grinding. kind of. it was also good because it made the world feel alive for new players getting to the area for the first time. the rainbow gem system/shared fates might as well have been a wet fart in comparison since nobody does them so now the world's empty again. thanks square.

For me it wasn't antitower every day. It was the Aetherial Research Facility every damn day for weeks. This being through roulettes. I wasn't like an FC member or two who did that willingly for all of the relics. I don't mind a fate grind or two it's why I chose to it for the Bozja steps that allowed you to do so. I however didn't and won't enjoy the way Atma was before getting nerfed. Almost made me quit my static back then due to my rotten luck with rng that I normally have to deal with.

[TomsYoungerBro]

No I don't find the old relics steps particularly engaging past a half dozen or so. The new ones are actually pretty nice since it doesn't make me feel punished for doing things in game I want to when I'm trying to do a relic.

I understand for you specifically you don't feel punished, but for others they do. For instance, current level 90 savage and ultimates do not give the correct tomes to progress the relic, meaning those that enjoy that content don't get to progress the relic like the roulette enjoyers do with their time.

Secondly, the tome step is lazy game design since a lot of content is already tied to the uncapped tomes. Crafters for instance are punished since those tomes that could've went towards materials have to go towards the relic instead. Roulettes already have enough incentive to do as is lmao.

Edit: Third, we already have a tome weapon that can be achieved by anyone that has a decent ilvl. Why make the relic tome weapon 2?

[Raven2014]

Whenever I talk about the official forums to friends or random people I meet within the game, they always seemed surprised or shocked that I interact on here. It's always, "Who actually uses the forums?", "That place is so toxic", "It's just a bunch of unhappy crybabies in an echo chamber who doesn't represent what I really think." "They think they know what they are talking about but they really do not." It's just always forum hate and they really don't care what I have to say that I have seen posted on these forums.

Uh, I'm on this forum quite a bit, and I wholeheartly agree with your friends. I mean ... they are not wrong. Sure, there are meaningful conversation is here and there, but your friend impression is accurate for about the majority of the forum. Like, if you buy a newspaper and it come with 9 pages of adds + 1 page of actual news, the people who dismiss that newspaper as "just an ad flyer" is not exactly hating.