Quote Originally Posted by Amused View Post
You may not like it, but it is not poorly designed. It fulfills the purpose it was intended to perfectly, which was to get people doing FATEs.
I'm willing to say that there is a distinct difference between something fulfilling it's intended function and something being well designed. In the case of the Atma grind, you are absolutely right. It fulfills its intended function of getting people to do a thing that the development team has even acknowledged that a lot of people dislike having linked to progress. The bad design kicks in when you realize that there is no hard upper limit on the number of FATEs you will have to do to get even one Atma, let alone all twelve. It makes little sense at this point not to relax the grind for this stage, and this stage only. The other stages are fine and serve very nicely as a long term goal with actual, trackable progress. But you still have the Atma grind, and the very concept of a potentially (though I will allow highly improbably) endless grind just to get to the entry level of the upgrade chain is kind of unattractive.

Hell, if nothing else it'll get people over this hurdle so they can stop moaning about it and start moaning about the Animus books.