Design Flaws with Atma, let me count the ways

[Tsuga]

While i agree the grind is..less than fun. The moment you get the notification that you got an Atma..that does feel wonderful.

Not for everyone. I have a friend who runs dailies with me, we do sahagin dailies every day, and we do every single fate in the area as they pop. We've been doing it for a month or so, now. She has 5 crab atmas, now, I have zero. She feels terrible every time one of them drops, and I've become slightly bitter about it.

Another example. I grinded in north shroud for 2 hours last weekend to get my atma, finally got it. My SO walked into the zone that night, did one FATE and got a drop. The same thing happened for their crab atma, which they got after farming 3 FATEs with us when we tried to grind the area last month.

I've determined that I do have terrible luck in regards to this system, but that isn't an excuse for bad design - actually, it's a perfect example of it. One person can put in literally hours, days, weeks of work and get nothing, while another can spend five minutes in the zone and get the drop. There's not even any kind of challenge involved, so the drops don't feel rewarding at all (the ones that I've had drop only made me happy because I could finally leave the damn zone, I felt no sense of accomplishment).

tbh I'm fine with low drop rates on items. I played XI for years, it had abysmal drop rates in some cases. The thing was that with so many drops in XI they would AT LEAST drop into the loot pool to be lotted on. If nothing else I'd like it if the atmas were not untradeable. It would create a viable market for the people who have gil and don't have the time to grind FATEs (or would rather be doing something, y'know, fun?), and give those lucky few who get 5 atmas during their dailies a source of income. Right now one person can go months without getting a single atma (or literally never get one at all, since it's a dice roll), which is kind of silly considering that alternatives to the relic are getting easier to obtain than the atma weapon alone, not including animus.

My last point - Yoshida himself pledges that the game is supposed to be about fun more than anything (it's one of their four(?) core pillars), but so many people (even those defending it) describe atma farming as work. You have to work for this super special item because "that's MMOs!". It doesn't have to be that way. Items can still be gated, still be difficult to obtain, and not be tedious work - and if the game is about fun then SE should be making strives to correct, and avoid implementing content that fosters bitter players. ATMA can still be gated, still be difficult to obtain, but at least make it fun to do, and not grindy busy "work".