Thread: Atma changes in 2.3

Originally Posted by Valmar

There hasnt been many threads flaming Novus, is it just that the casuals havent gotten there yet? I'm only 5 Melds in, but I am glad its less about Rng, but a little annoyed at materia prices atm.

I could probably find things to complain about in the next steps, but I have zero atma still. I'm not sure I fully understand what you do for the Novus stage because I've had no reason to look into it. I know you use materia and alexandrite, but I don't even know if it's one or the other or both, or what else is involved.

The difference between atma and animus/novus is that you can spend a week doing nothing by grinding fates in a single zone and have nothing to show for it, while spending the same amount of time on animus or novus will have very visible progress towards achieving your goal.

I have done about 6 hrs so far on getting Atama and nothing has drop. It gets really dull rather quickly
.

Already said that there won't be any changes anytime soon.

I would personally grind non stop on the animus and novus phases till it was done but I refuse to even start it because I aint doin that atma grind bs. Just like others have said, you can see yourself getting somewhere on the animus/novus stages. Atma stage sucks...period.

That being said, I doubt they'll adjust it just yet.

I doubt they'll adjust it at 2.3, but possible at the first sub patch like 2.35 or something.

Will bug me if they don't. Content that is intentionally not fun at all should never go unchecked for this long. The Atma grind is poorly thought out and poorly implemented. No sign of progress and it's difficult to multitask in game or irl while doing it due to having to constantly race around the map. No real side benefits as the GC/gil gained is atrociously low for the time invested. It's a stall tactic designed to prolong subs and nothing more.

The Atma horror story I think has been one of SE's biggest mistakes. It really is tedious, long and boooooooooooooooring. Killing level 5 flans with ruins for 70 hours is absolutely atrocious and whoever that came up with that idea should've really...thought of something better. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to sound like an hypocrite because I've done the atma quest, I wanted my relic because I like my SCH very much, but the books and the scroll from novus, despite being SIGNIFICANTLY longer, are far more entertaining. I remember, after going through the atma horror story (which took me 2 weeks), I said to myself, if SE does something similar to this a couple times more, I'm out. Good thing they learnt from their mistakes, but they messed it up in the past and can't really fix it now...because if they do people that went through the atma horror story will be butthurt over people having a lot less trouble doing it, and that would be unfair. So they'll probably wait a bit more.

Originally Posted by Gallus

because if they do people that went through the atma horror story will be butthurt over people having a lot less trouble doing it, and that would be unfair.

This should never, EVER be a developer concern. People who work hard toward a goal in an MMO and convince themselves that there will never be better gear, or there will never be shortcuts added, etc, are deluding themselves. To survive, an MMO HAS to keep pushing forward, offering better and better carrots to keep people playing. At the same time, to prevent the game from becoming inaccessable to new players, older content needs to be made simpler and simpler.

The Atma acquisition system will probably not be changed anytime soon, but it will be made easier eventually. The reward that people who did it the old, harder way get, is that they got their weapon done FIRST. Any MMO player should understand this: For any given item X that took you hundreds of hours or hundreds of failed instances to get, two years down the line item X will be handed to newer players on a silver platter. But don't worry - you'll still have item Z to strive for, and you'll have it to wave in the faces of those item X newbies!