The Current Status of FFXIV Patch 3.1 and How to Address it Moving Forward

**Eul** · 12-23-2015 09:46 PM

Originally Posted by Kallera

Its a scam dressed in a pretty weapon, to enforce the vision that players should only do raids.

It's not pretty at all for SCH, only ilv 200 is the good one compared with 210. Totally turned off for grind it to be honest :/

**Fyce** · 12-23-2015 09:49 PM

The lenght of the Anima quest isn't the main issue I have with it.
It's the lack of new content around it.

Yoshi-P mentionned Ifrit, Garuda and Titan... but there's also the Hydra and the Chimera. These last two were created only for the Relic and that was great...

... but now, we are just asked to do some 2.X stuff alongside with Alexander Normal which we already did for a long time in otder to gear up our alts when Eso were still devoted for our main.
Since the Anima is focused towards people with a lot of time, it's easy to assume that these people already did the 2.X stuff and Alexander quite a lot, so, it feels very unpleasant to do that again for the Anima.

New grind content should've been made to fit this new weapon. It wasn't, and this is a part why it was a dissapointment.

**TheGrimace** · 12-23-2015 09:54 PM

Additionally, Titan may have been hard on release, but it wasn't a completely insurmountable wall. It definitely took a few days, but it felt earned and the process was very fun. It took practice. Of course, armor added after 2.1 and later patches would make Titan Hard (and the other relic-related primals) less of an issue, but at release it felt like a reasonable challenge.

This could certainly be compared with Alexander and Coil, but I do feel that there are differences.

**Lament** · 12-23-2015 09:59 PM

Personally, I dislike the notion that this relic appeals to players who don't like difficult content.

Tomestone weapons can fill that need. They take no skill, only time and some grinding. It's perfect for casual players without much time to play daily and it has a weekly limit to progress, meaning the super hardcore players can't rush it.

They could have kept Anima on the same level of difficulty as the original relic while making the grindy option the tome weapon upgrade (which instead remains locked behind A4S).

**Nathair** · 12-23-2015 09:59 PM

Originally Posted by Kallera

Its not horizontal is the result is objectively worse than its equivalent, which is whay SE is suggesting here for Anima weapons.

Its a scam dressed in a pretty weapon, to enforce the vision that players should only do raids.

But it's excatly what they said.
They said the relic is supposed to be the "easy" way to get i210. It doesn't requires skills this time, just you to have nothing to do and enough patience.
Still, my problem is, comparing i210 and i210, some are better than other depending on the stats they give. If they want the relic to be the easy alternative, the way they blindly slap sub-stats on gear needs to change.

**RiceisNice** · 12-23-2015 10:06 PM

The absence of mentioning the use of old (or even 2.x) content in the anima quest, it's context in it being so delayed because it wasn't finished, is worrisome. I'm just afraid they'll still repeat the threadmill of the same content again for 3.2's dungeons and quests. Beyond the novelty of it being new, it'd only last about a week or two for the typicalplayer to see everything a few times (or 7 times for expert dungeons) before they had enough of it. There's also no mention of alleviating problems that smaller servers have because of the transfers.

I'm also not sure what players you are listening to since it only seems like a small group of players (or does that went to fanfest) are the ones that demanded "harder content". While at the same time, Yoshi seems very adamant on not making any other content that isn't a raid have some resemblance of difficulty when it's fresh out of the patch. That's what gives it shelf life, and that's where you can nerf and ungate overtime with the process of gearing from tomestones. I really don't get his thought process when interpreting things like clear rates, especially when it's as soon as content comes out (and this is directly in response to when he felt that alexander normal's clear rate was very high and thus he was satisfied about it)

My patience is personally at an all time low in regards to 3.x updates, and even after the liveletter I don't get their design philosophy or approach with content. Do they honestly thing going back to do 2.x content (in the upmost literal sense, you're doing 2.x beast tribes and 2.x hunts) during a 3.x patch cycle is fun?

**Granyala** · 12-23-2015 10:08 PM

Sorry Mr. Yoshida but there has to be an alternative between:
"Brick wall super hard content that makes you cry for your mommy" (A4S)
and
"Mega dull grind of content you already did 1000x that makes your skull implode from sheer boredom and you better no-life if you want the rewards while they are not outdated" (current Anima / Crafting).

And I'm not talking about "meh just slap another way to get a 210 in there". I am talking about the CONTENT ITSELF. Games should be FUN and ENTERTAINING, stuff that makes us go "yeah, can't get enough of this!" and not "Ugh... I better do X for Y amount of hours, totally boring, totally NOT FUN but I want the Item Z".

It is your job to ENTERTAIN us... not to provide a second job (or first one for unemployed players)!

**Yshnal** · 12-23-2015 10:13 PM

Alexander: Coil worked more than fine and, while I understand that you listened to some players, you should have noted that they weren't the majority of the playerbase. You always talk about looking at the statistics and all that, didn't you see what happened with Savage Coil? Why did you design Alexander like that then? As has been said countless times, all that was needed was the "story" version with lesser rewards (or none at all, people were fine with it when it was discussed in the forums) while keeping in the main raid the same difficulty than the previous raid series. You could even release them at once that way, and we would do whatever we like instead of having people farm the "same" raid twice and getting bored (more on that later).

Diadem: At this point I thought that you would already know what happens with that kind of content (FATEs, hunts, etc.). Let's see what you're going to change.

Anima weapon: Well, this is related to the other two points too. First, and most important, we pay (or paid) you because we wanted to log in and have fun, so if something feels like a chore you should go back to the drawing board and think about something better.

Second, right when ARR launched we didn't have these ilvl issues at all. We're back to what has happened with Savage. Just because some people complained about "John has the same ilvl than me" you broke the whole game, and now you have all these problems (the primary motivation should be having fun, not the carrot in the stick, so forcing people into something that they don't enjoy WON'T work, as seen with Savage). Moreover, if you focused a bit less about "ILVL ILVL ILVL", forgot about this insane vertical progression and moved to a diagonal progression instead, it would fix a whole lot of these issues. Players would feel that their efforts matter for more than a couple of months, their effort would be more worth it in their eyes, there would relly be a real sense of progression, and you would also keep content relevant for more time (multiple paths to get equivalent -not the same- gear) without trying to keep it artificially by "forcing" us to farm it 99999999 times.

And finally, and as Alexander_Dragonfang has explained more than fine, that whole time = reward is a very VERY bad idea. As I've said, the focus should be "having fun", be it by having a challenge or by playing something else that you enjoy. Doing again for another whole lot of times content that you have already done a million times before, or relying on insane RNG or gil sinks for a reward that will last one month, is not fun, it's a chore and it burns people. I don't really know what's wrong with how the relic worked in 2.0, or even in FFXI, as getting it wasn't as hard as completing Coil and, as it's difficulty was in the middle, it also prepared people to get into the harder raid. We had the choice there, and the way it worked it made people get a true sense of achievement once they got their relic and even encouraged some of them to try Coil, the "next" step (and also were we used said weapon). Also, what we did was content that was fresh, as we were doing it for the first time while doing the relic quest and, even if we wiped countless times in Titan, we didn't feel the same amount of burnout that we feel(t) with later relic questlines.

TL;DR: As you said some time ago, fun comes first. If something isn't fun you're doing it wrong, and it doesn't matter why you're doing it.

**Granyala** · 12-23-2015 10:30 PM

Just a random thought:
If you ask me, they seem a little overly obsessed with item level and savage raiding if they held the relic back for THAT long because of it.
Seriously how hard can it be to just bump up the item level of the savage raid loot by 5 on the fly?! Blizzard has done something like that in the Blackrock Foundry Tier to compensate for "balancing derp" w/o problems.

**Velhart** · 12-23-2015 10:36 PM

So your solution is to cut out the difficulty of Savage and keep Normal on hand holding mode? Yea, people will not get bored after they finish your raiding content fast. Making Normal more on the level of Final Coil and Savage brutally difficult is what makes the raiding content last through two patches. Seriously, does this team know what is good for the raiding scene? The answer is not casually.

As always, good job SE. - -;

EDIT: Also, no interesting content in relics because it is too hard for some people? Why are these people you speak of even getting relics to begin with if they are not going into any content that it is for? Just buy a ilvl180 weapon and you can do everything except Extreme Primals and raids. The statement Yoshi-P made about this feels just like an excuse to go into lazy mode on the relic quest content.

Even if that is what they want to do with relic, they could of at least made it interesting and made new content for it between recycled content. Nope, just 100% recycled content.

As always, good job SE. - -;

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