Yoshida-san: Please Give Us a BETTER System for Relics and Future 2.0 Challenges!

[Kiara]

I think they've lost sight of that. They've been so concerned with prolonging content that they made a loot system that has really embittered many people towards the game (at least in our LS)

Another great point Signakan.

In the span of *1* Patch, they went from:

* 1.18 - Dzemael Darkhold & Batraal's 100% Drop Rate Chests (except the middle one) to...

* 1.19 - Ifrit Weapons with Super LOW Drop Rates, *and* you can't pass any Weapons to anyone from the chest.

It's the most extreme, short-sighted knee-jerk reaction I've ever seen in an MMO. As if Yoshida-san and the Dev Team saw how fast Dzemael was being cleared and thought, "Oh no! We have to keep them busy longer with each patch... what do we do? Oh I know, let's change it from 100% Drop to 0.01% Drop *and* they can't pass the Chest Items to anyone... it'll go directly into their inventory! That'll keep them busy until 2.0!" (>_<)

[Velhart]

Hi Velhart,

Great post! Very well worded and summarizes many of the people's feelings on this. (I bolded some of my favorite points by you above.)

I'm in the same boat as you regarding stuff like Darklight from Aurum / Cutter's and even the original Ifrit Weapons. I have beaten Ifrit well over 250 times (I stopped counting), and I STILL don't have Ifrit's Harpoon after all those attempts. I know people who got 7/7 Ifrit Weapons in less than 75 Wins. How is this fair? Or fun?

For Darklight, I've never even seen most of the pieces drop. At some point, people stop caring.

And an excellent analogy rebuttal to Yoshida-san's "Theme Park" description of FF XIV originally. At least at a Theme Park, when you wait in line for a ride, *you will get to experience it* (each "person in line ahead of you" is like a Totem / Point in Measurable Progress towards your goal). Here with Darklight, Materia Melding, Relic Weapon Quest (multiple steps), etc., it really is a CASINO. You're standing in front of a slot machine just mindlessly pulling the lever, hoping one day you might get LUCKY, or just end up looking like those soulless, empty-eyed gamblers sitting in front of a slot machine forever just pulling and pulling the lever until you quit or lose everything.

There's no skill, NO ounce of fun in rolling the dice. It's more of a sense of pent up RELIEF if you actually get a lucky dice roll now (if you happen to get a Seal, or a Double Meld, etc.).

I sincerely hope the Community Reps pass along our thoughts to Yoshida-san and the Relic Weapon Design Team.

Thank you, and I do really hope we get a response on this. The game's concepts are simply not fair to the hard working player and it does need to change now, and not at 2.0.

[Munba]

Great OP and posts around here. 321 likes is enormous and surely 'heard'.

[Delmontyb]

So you're saying Ifrit, Moogle and Garuda currently dont have a token system and im just "assuming it does"?

I cant even talk with you if you think that and are unaware of the tokens....

No, I'm not saying that at all. I'm very well aware of the "token" system that they have in place for primal fights. Your assumption is that just because those exist means that:

a. It's easily to implement in other areas/systems (it might, but that is still an assumption)
b. The same team that worked on the primal fights is the same ones that worked on the relics quest and system (again, it's possible, but more then likely the work was divided up into sub-teams - (an assumption on my part))

While I think you have some good ideas about how the system should work, you present it as if theories were facts, and unless you are a team member on the FFXIV 1.xx development team, then you are assuming that things should be one way, or things are easy to do, when they might not be the case at all.

Now, I also get that it is perceived that these should be simple changes, and that is SE's fault in not communicating effectively to the player base on this very subject. And so you and I end up arguing two completely different ideas.

Did that help clear things up?

[Babydoll]

WTB Dev response for this thread. Lol

[Enfarious]

Relic isn't solo content, and non of it is solo content. The design of Relics is heavily based on the idea of community and while the "lucK" may suck it's only as bad as your weakest link when it comes to completing each task.

If you have a stable group of 8 any of the melee content is easy to do.

If you have crafters who can supply you with gear then you can have an easier time bonding gear to obtain IV materia.

If you have crafters who can make the weapon then you can get said weapon for a greatly reduced price and double melded on the spot.

If you lack the pillars which support the objective of a Relic of course it'll seem like a tough task, but when you have a group that works together to get the task done it's much easier.

Even when it came to relic/mythic/empyrean it wasn't one person who worked on obtaining the weapon, it was the LS working as a group to obtain the weapon a majority of the time, while there were those who did do it solo through earning gil and buying everything themselves they still needed help when it came down to doing the battle portions of said content. With the above it's not like it was done in a month (cept for empy) but to obtain the relic/mythic took months of work/luck to find what you needed through bazaars and to spend your money as wisely as possible.

Stop thinking of relics as "Man this is so tough to do by myself" and think of it more as something you do with your community of friends to accomplish. Are you going to deny the fact that it's easier to obtain relics when you have friends to help you then if you are someone trying to do it through pickup groups and lving your own crafts to do it all by yourself rather then the aid of your community of friends?

You do of course realize that no one has said make it easier/shorter?
All that's been said in nearly 50 pages is, make it not random.
All of your examples are built on systems where while drop rates did apply not one of them was maybe 1 drop to a party each run. Dyna was hours of farming for ~50 currency, did every mob always drop, no, but enough did to always have progress. Nyzul you got tokens if you won, not you maybe get em this run. Empy, really that's a terrible one, but it always dropped 1 or 2 of said item when you killed [whoever], never 0.

To do a all those was never a matter of this persons will take maybe, if we get lucky, 6 months, unlucky 18 months. It was that guarantee that kept you going back and not just getting frustrated and giving up. 6 months farming Dyna for a persons relic where all you get is a 100 piece after beating the zone boss, just that one chance to beat the RNG, not a guaranteed 100 piece, would have driven people away, when you consider that 6 months might be less or more depending solely on the slot machine. So in 3 hours here you get at most 8 chances w/ all <20 min speed runs to beat the RNG 64 possible drops. In 3 hrs in Dyna you had >1000 chances at the RNG with mobs all dropping 0~3 coins and that 100 piece on a .1% drop rate just made you smile when it dropped. The gear ok that's also bonus for all those going just to help with the relic farming.

[Hypnotic13371337]

WTB Dev response for this thread. Lol

no kidding, this thread has gotten pretty big over the past few days

[Sigmakan]

WTB Dev response for this thread. Lol

"Coming in 2.0 . . ."

Done.

[Len]

"Coming in 2.0 . . ."

Done.

Maybe the developers will slightly increase the chance to obtain seals; I can't see much else being changed before 2.0.

[Enfarious]

I agree 100%, it is possible to do that, and yes they could have done this better. But that still comes down to a list of priorities.

At the end of the day, the system is what it is, from the interviews I can see them bringing in some updates in the c patch or even 1.23, but I don't see any real changes until the 2.0 beta and then the release. And by real I mean the big changes.

It's not a big change to re-implement something that's already present, it's a mater of a function call or 2. Changing a chest to have 1 100% item isn't possible but would require a lot of work, it's already a mechanic that's present in every primal, we get DM 100%. I'm not sure what exactly these changes you speak of are.

Let's just call this for what it is. Poor design plans, had they taken what is already there and moved a decimal point this thread would never have started. They chose to backpedal from the system that people thanked them for in Garuda to what people have been outraged by since the first dungeon/Primal. That's just bad planning and a bad idea for a game that's "For the players"

Edit: Keep in mind that they have modified drop rates many times before and it does not involve months of rewriting the instance. I'll make an assumption, and probably not horribly wrong one, that they have a map design and script for each of the instances that we have at present, those scripts while they may be long should be seperate for each instance and therefore not all that hard to modify. Again assuming good coding practices those scripts are relatively well documented for future devs that work on them. What's more is that in the name of streamlining content development, and this may or may not have happened for 1.xx, you'd typically make a stand alone content builder for designing and modifiying those scripts making it still easier to modify a thing. To assume on further thing, drop rates for each item are set and can be relatively easily modified at a later date, making something 100% under certain circumstances should not be that hard to add to your scripts, running drop rate variables for each of the big items and as you complete scripted conditions those variables are increased. If they can do it to add chests to the win they can do it to change drop rates for those chests.