Done!

[Phe]

The amount of people in this thread believing that waiting 2 hours for a fate to spawn = challenge O.O

It's the stupidest game design ever, forcing people to do NOTHING for hours. You can't play or help your friends, nothing. How is it challenging exactly? Give me that damn fate so I can do real content. Even mindless grinding is better than this.

absolutely.

and i also don't see how repeating easy content umpteen times makes the easy content suddenly challenging.

it's just investment of spare-time. anyone who has a relic has achieved nothing special.
except invested very, very, very much time into easy, monotonous stuff.

"so you hit that red button 100 000 times and got a virtual reward for it? WHAT A CHALLENGE! YOU'RE SPECIAL!"

[Yukiko]

Sorry Phe:
Was trying to point out this, but i guess i was not as good as you...

"so you hit that red button 100 000 times and got a virtual reward for it? WHAT A CHALLENGE! YOU'RE SPECIAL!"

[hallena]

Sorry Phe:
Was trying to point out this, but i guess i was not as good as you...

Alright, you got my curiousity. What's the definition of a challenge to you? Since titan 2.0 supposedly wasn't one. I'm sure those who can't kill T5 will probably complain about it too
Keep in mind that when you come up with your challenge. Zodiac is lvl 125 with customisable stats which make it better than 130 ironwork to some class while ironwork is 120 and require minimum T11 down and only one person per week have access to it aswell as waiting 3 weeks worth of poetic caping.
But you also need to make your challenge accessible to everyone or else people will complain.

[NyarukoW]

The amount of people in this thread believing that waiting 2 hours for a fate to spawn = challenge O.O....

If you insist on stubbornly camping a FATE then the challenge is a test of your patience. But the challenge to solve this problem more effectively is to network with other players. Do you think hunts operate well when people camp zones for spawns or does it work better when people share information and track spawn times together and work together to spawn S rank. The challenge is to solve the FATE camping problem, and the solution is the same as how you do hunts. Communicate, coordinate, and play together, isn't this how a MMO should be?

And if you insist of solo-ing the FATE camping, get several sets of gear prepped for spirit bonding. Might was put that waiting time to good use, because you will need those mats for melding later, and while you are at queue one of those dungeons you need too. Only the foolish insists on singularly stubbornly waiting for the fate. The challenge is to find creative solutions to the problem, and that in itself is fun.

[Aurora-Pendragon]

snip

I'm playing PLD, so I have insta queue for dungeons. I can't "wait" during queue times. Now, my game is in french, and fates names are a lot different from english one. The chance a french player is doing the same fates as mine is very low. And when I'm 2/3 fates completed with everything else done, I'm forced to wait for the 3rd while all my friends are doing cool stuff. It's surely fun and entertaining ! Fortunatly, I'm 7/9 books, so I'm almost done with this. Without the fates, this relic step would have been the best of the 4.

I've played MMOs where end game items were hidden behind dumb time gates, but at least, they were on a predictable schedule, so you could still play while waiting. If you ever played Aion and did the Miragent quest line, you know what I mean and you know how stupid the RNG was at this time. But there was a reason, korean players were paying/ minute. Now, with a sub, there's no reason at all to time gate content this way.

[Kiara1]

The only part I agree with is that the fates in the books are stupid. Sitting around for hours really sucks and it's a stupid timesink.

As for the rest of the game, it is really easy for an MMORPG so I don't really think easier versions are needed. I don't have the time myself to raid but I'm completely fine with it even though I wish I had the time. But it's not the game's fault

[Demeos]

Waiting is not grinding. It IS boring as all hell though. Waiting hours on end for a mere chance at progressing only not to be able to progress is frustrating and feels like a waste of time. Relics are many things, but certainly not for casual players who want to feel like they're genuinely progressing.

You'd be better off doing pick-up raids in Duty Finder if you want a sense of accomplishment within a 2 hour time frame.

[NoahArks]

I am done, insane relic quest lines,waiting hours for fate spawns for books/allied seals, no easier mode for raid content so I can see the whole game, crafting items that take a million mats to do.

Listen most of us have real jobs we have to work and a life we want to live.

Basicly this, but I'm not quitting the game, just boycotting the whole relic stuff, even though I really want my Yoichi bow.

[Zumi]

Relic is fairly hard core in the amount of stuff you have to do and time it takes. The casual weapon choice is the gerrot masterworks weapons or shiva weapons.

[BreathlessTao]

While surely dramatic and at best arguable in several points... I can relate to OP's grievances.

The relic questline, after actually getting the weapon, is no sort of fun. Hell, it's not even challenging - how anyone in their right mind can call being sent back to farm (or camp at) old content that they've already done a million times (or just plain forced to spend millions of gil) "challenging" is way beyond me. It's tedious, it's mind-numbing, it burns people out, heck it even poisons the atmosphere when an unfortunate first-timer gets into a dungeon only to have a tank rush forward without saying anything or waiting for anything and just pulling five mobs at once because they just want to get through it. And ultimately, it really isn't even rewarding: new licks of paint and a different glow effect, finally an actual new weapon that isn't even BiS (because hardcore raiders would whine about not having the strongest, because why do casuals even need such), so much so that it's 10 ilvl below that. Yes, the frustration is understandable. Sure, it's not compulsory; sure, nobody's holding a gun at anyone's head to do it. But consider this: if you have any sense outside doing math for stats, you'd want to do it, because it's a supplement to your job; if you have the slightest of OCD, you'd want to do it because the quest is there, will be there, either on duty list or in open world above the NPC's head, because it can't be turned off. And yes, people want something to do, but they want to have fun doing it - that's why they play a game. All in all, it takes too long of doing stuff that is simply not fun (and not even challenging), for something that doesn't even feel rewarding. And you know, this is only one piece of such content, that feels more of a job than entertainment.

Sure, there are alternatives. Much harder content that can't be done without people forcing you to watch guides until you know them backwards by heart woken up in the middle of the night - and even then it's an immense lot of practice, IF you even find people to take you on. Because this oh-so-much-friendlier-than-that-of-other-games's community is like that, they expect all the experience from randoms they'd take on, and kick them at the first mistake. (While at the same time forcing people to skip actual in-game cutscenes, irony anyone?)

As for challenge: no, I don't think people in general play games to be challenged. If someone wants challenge, they take up a difficult project at work or do sports. A game can havea challenging difficulty, can have content that is challenging, of course. But the whole of it? On a general level? No. Not after a day at work when you arrive home and want to kick back and relax. And as it was pointed out, the relic is nowhere near being a challenge; it's much more just work.

Also, please don't tell me SE couldn't win here. Between "everything being spoon-fed" and "one year old content still an impossible mess", don't tell me there is no middle-ground there. Quite a few threads have already pointed out that it's exactly that mid-tier difficulty that's missing from the game, and quite honestly it's such a wide gap it shouldn't be so hard to fit stuff in there. (Sastasha HM and the Ultros trial do feel like they're getting there, actually, at least at certain points.)

About crafting: well, not million mats, probably, no. But too many different materials that are gated behind not even a single, but often times two or three instances of RNG, only to keep stuff "exclusive"? Hell yes. And once again, it's a problem, because it's either a) insane amount of work again to get them, or b) insane amount of gil to get them. For something that is, many times, simply an item for glamour purposes, like why on earth should exactly the few pieces of casual clothes be among the hardest to obtain? (Yeah, I know, because they apparently can't keep DoL/DoH relevant in other ways.)

To sum it up. The game's been touted as "casual friendly" ever since (before) its launch. The devs (I think even Yoshi himself) have said that when they come up with something, they consider whether they'd find it fun to do, because if they didn't, then surely the players wouldn't either, so it needs changing. Yet, for I don't even know how many patches now, what have we been given? Incredibly mind-numbing and long time-sinks, one right after the other, that feel more job-like than fun and in several cases, not even rewarding. (Personally, by the time I finished my first atma, well before the nerf - I was so brain-dead, I haven't played for a week, and I can't even say I rushed it, seeing how there were days I didn't even touch it; when I finally beat Garuda Ex on the 9000th try, I almost broke my keyboard, I felt anything but a sense of achievement, because it'd gotten so frustrating beforehand.) Everyone seems to crave newer and newer and newer content continuously. But why? It's taxing on the devs, because the team is admittedly very small. The content itself suffers, with anything ranging from bad design to awful bugs. If someone does do it casually, there already is more than enough (relic, gearing up DoL/DoH, all the logs, ex primals, Coil, etc). And those who burn through them - they burn out, many of them generate a toxic environment with bad social interactions (either in-game or even on here), they complain about not having anything to do. Barely a year old, but the item level is almost three times of the actual character level now, while at the same time there still is several content (even as old as the game itself) that cannot be done via random DFs, maybe only with a great lot of luck. Is OP dramatic? Maybe. Is their frustration understandable/justified? Definitely. And it's easy to see how the relic itself is only a last drop in a glass full of water.