Quote Originally Posted by Jerichai View Post
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I appreciate the well thought out post. And I can understand your points and where you are coming from.

Even so I have to respectfully disagree on a few things. I don't think the zodiac quest chain was lazy/bad design. It was well thought out design based on the feedback that the player base had been given them. (or at least I can follow their thought processes). It was a design that ultimately was badly received by many though.

Two major feedback points the playerbase was giving SE was 1) relic’s are too easy to get and 2) there is a fundamental lack of open world content.

So they wanted to give relics a bit of a grind. There are two ways to add grind, RNG and token. You have pointed out the con in RNG systems which is a very valid con. But there are cons in token systems as well. I personally hate token grinds. Like I honestly HATE them.

So I guess I’ll just rant on why I hate token grinds. Firstly they make the game feel very monotonous. There is no anticipation no excitement no “did it drop?” moments. It’s just “God I have to do this 22 more times. Ugh.” Which leads to my second gripe. It makes the grind too transparent. When I’m not counting the grind in tokens I don’t notice it as much. I’m running dungeons or doing whatever gameplay without thinking about the long term time investment. I’m just playing. But with a token system the grand total is etched in Neon lights. It can make a task look far more daunting at the start which can be discouraging. You want me to do how many of these? Screw it.

So when it comes to token systems or RNG. I feel it’s very much a ymmv thing on which you prefer. There isn’t one is inherently better than the other. So imho the better design choice is to use a little of both. Which is exactly what we got in the zodiac weapon chain.

So back to the player feedback. The other major feedback point was lack of open world content. Well what is open world content. The game has established it as Fates/Leves/Mobs. And so that’s what the bulk of the zodiac quest entails. I know not everyone likes fates. But the game released with Fates being the core method of open world content. So it’s only logical that this would be the meat of the zodiac grind.

And so we have the Atma grind which everyone seems to hate. They thought ok the core component of our open world is fates. Let’s have the first stage be about fates. But we don’t want to overpopulate a zone so let’s spread it out and have them need to do fates in multiple zones. They then had to decide will this be the token grind or the RNG grind. Really they could have gone either way on this I guess but they went RNG. And I don’t see it as being that terrible of a choice.

To make an RNG grind take a significant length of time you need to have a low drop rate. But low drop rates also increase the con of RNG the large variability. To counter that some you have the collection of multiple items like say 12 in this case. This will shrink the standard deviation some lowering the variability. Now ultimate it didn’t lower it enough to prevent the rage on these forums apparently. I’d have to run the math to understand why but I haven’t done that nor will likely too as I just don’t have that much interest.

If they went the token route say do 100 fates per zone, then they’d want to do a more RNG route with the books. Maybe have them as rare drops in the new dungeons oh wait that’s not open world though. Well who knows but some kind of RNG drop either in dungeons or in the open world to collect. They likely made the choice they did as they wanted a nice sink for myth tomes with the books as phil tomes became pretty useless towards the end of its life span. And they wanted to counteract that happening with myth tomes some.

Sorry for the long winded post that many probably won’t read lol. But I honestly think SE did put a decent amount of thought into their Zodiac quest chain and the design had solid logic. It’s just hindsight is 20/20. Some tweaks may have made the design of the quests better received which is no doubt what they are discussing over right now as they delay the Novus update.