YES fates are broken.

[Sho86]

People sure are impatient these days. Who remembers waiting 12+ hours for a mob pop in FFXI with a single digit chance for a drop?
Pepperidge Farm remembers.

The entire game itself of XI was slow and grind-like. It was expected in XI as that is simply how it was(before abyssea anyways), as to here the style in gameplay is much faster and caters towards people who have less time on their hands. Not to mention games have evolved since our older MMOs and the 'sit and wait' method can be avoided easily by putting another uphill battle in there. Even the 'stronger' primal battles were better than just simply sitting and waiting. Your not learning anything, your not advancing anything, your just sitting there.

[Tupsi]

If you're sitting and waiting, you're doing it wrong.

Get out there and complete other fates in the same zone.

This is true to an extent, however FATEs that are tied to things like Animus/Novus/Hunts have been altered for whatever reason. Menos for example used to always spawn at a consistent rate but now it seems to be fairly rare at times. (And yes I've timed it pre/post patch.)

[Gerolan]

This is true to an extent, however FATEs that are tied to things like Animus/Novus/Hunts have been altered for whatever reason. Menos for example used to always spawn at a consistent rate but now it seems to be fairly rare at times. (And yes I've timed it pre/post patch.)

Some fates might of been, taste of fear is not on that list,their was someone else waiting there when I turned up and they said they had been their for an hour, so that's 4hrs at least since last spawn.
I'm not asking for SE to give me instant credit for the book (as the person implying I was impatient for waiting 3hrs) I'm just asking for it to spawn in a reasonable time frame.
From what I have read, taken seems to be causing issues too.
I done a tally
Giant saps 4 spawns.
Svara fall 5 spawns
Roc of ages 8 spawns
Baa baa black sheep 8 spawns
Taste of fear 0 spawns
That really is not working as intended

[Verranicus]

FATEs aren't broken.

[Shneibel]

i remember waiting for 6 hours on the one roselet FATE in east shroud.

that is about right

[TomTom1968]

FATES can spawn as rare as they want as long as they are not used for quests. It is ok to have some spawning more often than others but not if we talk about quest related FATES. SE did it quite right with the beastmen tribes. All the FATES you have to do in the different tiers spawn really often, there are barely waiting times longer than 10 minutes. But when it is about FATES for Animus or FATES for the hunt, there are FATES that spawn once in an hour or even longer, no matter if you participate in the other FATES or not.

There should be a mechanism that enhances FATES spawn timers as soon as they were chosen for quests. Or a mechanism which detects if there are players waiting in the zone the FATE will pop and spawn more regularly if the zone is not empty. It is beyond me how some defend the actual usage of rare FATES and even compare them with Coil lockouts to justify them.

We are soon facing the 1 year anniversary but SE still did not understand that many people do not like the overusage of FATES for everything per se AND if they have to use them, they still do not get that many do not want to be confrontrated with ridiculous waiting times.

When the Game was released, FATES were something for inbetween and nothing else. You could do them or not, your choice. If you had Fun doing them, you could zerg them down for hours, if you didn't want to, you could completely disregard them. And it was good like that because they offer no challenge.

Then suddenly, a lot of newly introduced Game elements like side story quests (Hildibrand, Crystal Tower), Beastmen tribe quests, upgrades for Zenith weapons and most recently the daily hunt marks used FATES as a base element and you HAD to do them. As a consequence, players began to complain and SE made already a few changes (remember how rare the CT FATES where when they were released?). But it seems, whenever they make new elements where they chose FATES again because they are so easy and cost effective to implement, they forget about those complaints and just use the rare ones again and again.

For the daily hunt marks, this is really ridiculous. For 2 seals you are supposed to wait for an hour or longer? Hunt ONE B mob down in that time and you have 5 seals. Balance? Thoughts on design? Not seeing it. Waiting for FATES longer than a few minutes sucks and if you like it this way, go see a doctor. Pun intended.

[Gerolan]

@tomtom I really wish I could like your post a thousand times, so very well said

[BloodPact]

...There should be a mechanism that enhances FATES spawn timers as soon as they were chosen for quests. Or a mechanism which detects if there are players waiting in the zone the FATE will pop and spawn more regularly if the zone is not empty. It is beyond me how some defend the actual usage of rare FATES and even compare them with Coil lockouts to justify them.

We are soon facing the 1 year anniversary but SE still did not understand that many people do not like the overusage of FATES for everything per se AND if they have to use them, they still do not get that many do not want to be confrontrated with ridiculous waiting times... But it seems, whenever they make new elements where they chose FATES again because they are so easy and cost effective to implement, they forget about those complaints and just use the rare ones again and again.

I agree with all that you said. However, I'm afraid that although they won't admit it, the changes to the FATEs used in the progression of things like the Animus relic weapon and other content were intentionally done to increase the life of such content. This has been discussed many times, with people stating that they've participated in FATE name "A" 7 times and FATE name "B" 9 times while waiting for FATE name "C" and it never spawned or spawned after an absurd amount of time and all (or most) of the other FATEs in the area spawning multiple times and all we've gotten is: we double checked with the team and they said that all FATEs have the same chance to spawn so please keep trying.

It is the same deal as with the success fail ratio on almost everything in this game. Most of the playerbase has "really bad luck" apparently. After many complaints development even went ahead and had one of the lead employees on the team write a detailed post about how FFXIV handles this and the algorithm it used in it's random number generator. Still, many of us can't come to agree because after almost a year of dealing with it and seeing the trend, yes, it is POSSIBLE that we could all have horrible luck, but it's very unlikely. Or it could be the case that most people who never post in here (or other places like Reddit) are the ones with good luck and we never hear from them. :P

In the end, I also think they are unbalanced, but this is a lost cause as the results we are seeing are technically possible and they can just revert back to their usual "it's just the rng and gotta keep on trying, mate" statement.

[Tsuwu]

I crafted.
And played Pokemon.
And did laundry.
Whenever the fate music would play, I'd hop on.
Was pretty painless.

[Gerolan]

I crafted.
And played Pokemon.
And did laundry.
Whenever the fate music would play, I'd hop on.
Was pretty painless.

But that's the thing, to enjoy a game you shouldn't have to go do things not in the game, the whole point is to be logged in having fun not doing laundry