Yeah, so new and beating the crap out of FFXIV, especially since that is something similar to what we had like 5 stages back in our ARR relic quest already..x)
Sorry, got a bit sarcastic there. The point I'm trying to make is that the things an MMO can use for their relics is limited. As your example shows, even the praised things other MMOs do are nothing new or different either, it's still things FFXIV did as well or at least in a similar fashion.
The range of different things to do to finish the relic step has never been so vast; but of course it's going to involve the existing content in some form. After all, the relic quest is just that, a quest. It's not a big new patch that brings new dungeons and trials and raids with it. And the ways you can let the players interact with the existing content are limited, that's why we get the dreaded recycled relic steps.
I'm not happy with all of them either, but I want to commend SE on actually taking the problems into consideration that they faced before (way too incredibly low atma drop rates, RNG on dungeon runs, forcing players into just one specific type of content, including a trial that many many players couldn't clear at the time, and so on) and avoiding them this time. It's not perfect, but if you take the possibilities into consideration, they did fairly well.
But all of that doesn't matter, at least not in this thread, because it's not a discussion about what should/could be better about the relic quests (there are a billion other threads out there for that xD). This thread was more about the hysterical behaviour people had in most threads, and I'm pleased to see that those who do bring arguments about the relic quest to this thread do it in a calm manner
That's actually something I thought of xD
The time you stated was super busy, that's when I was doing the second step and for every dungeon I had about 6 different parties to choose from (well, except for me having the wrong role to join, but yeah xD). I remember very clearly how many first and third stage parties were there as well, because I refreshed df many times and scrolled through all the entries since I was using df to go through those dungeons.
But of course I didn't take any screenshots of it, because I never thought I'd need to prove that later on..?xD Now it's 7 am, everyone is either asleep or at work, so yeah. But I will take a screenshot today during the specified time
Maybe you did mess up the timezone after all? Ragnarok is such a lively server, even before 3.15, during 4-11 pm European Time we close to never have below 8-12 pf entries.