Why is "It's something to do" apparently a valid defense?

[RiceisNice]

But most of the content used in the Anima line, outside of the dungeons for the 170-200 stage, is still "new" content that came out this raid tier, which has been par for the course with the questline ever since they introduced the Zodiac Saga during SCoB. It's almost never engaged with the absolute newest content except in indirect ways. As I said above, I'm still rather surprised Diadem doesn't have anything as of yet to do with the Anima questline, but I'd lay money that it will be involved with whatever the next stage we get in 3.2 is (if there is one in 3.2, anyway).

The circumstances between the two are different though, mostly due to the expansion (and the expectations that well...come from an expansion). Zodiac has you revisiting level 50 content. Most of the approaches in anima requires you revisiting 50 content at level 60. Even if you exclude the dungeons, you have four 2.x beast tribes, 2.x hunts, and 2.x tomestones, while leaving the "current tier" or even 3.x content mostly un-utilized, specifically the EX primals and the level 60 dungeons.

Beyond that, they're kind of in a catch-22: one of the longstanding complaints about the game is that it is too quick to abandon old content. The Relic's a rather effective way to create reason to run some of the older stuff, as people aren't going to run outdated content without suitable carrots (cosmetics simply aren't enough for a lot of the population). However, putting old content in the Relic line is seen as a disappointment to some players--but if they didn't, they'd also have to find suitable ways to get people interested in the *older* stuff.

Again like I mentioned above, there's a difference between when they were making old content in 2.0 be relevant for future 2.0 relic steps. We're in the 3.0 cycle now, it's backwards thinking to make people go revisit 2.0 areas, especially for something like beast tribes that doesn't make you interact with other players like you would for dungeons or even FATEs. Is there a pressing need to make something like 2.x hunts (which in hindsight actually give more than 3.x since you use allied seals for relic, but not centaruo seals) or beast tribes more lively?

And they also have financial incentive to milk content for as much as they can, since the team is small--I don't mean that as an excuse for them, but just a reality of the situation. Given the team's size, we're lucky we do have so many things to do with what content we do have (hell, WoW's team is probably 3 or 4 times the size of FFXIV's, and they have *less* content).

There's going to be times where this just won't fly anymore with the players, especially if they're not meeting the standards that they themselves have set in the past. Even if you're trying to argue that WoW gets less content (because their patch cycles, while longer, add a lot more content which lasts a lot longer, including a new area, daily hubs, and the such), there's always the aspect of Quality > quantity.