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

Originally Posted by Alahra

What I always try to do when I'm dissatisfied is at least try to understand where the developers/Yoshi-P are coming from. Sometimes I don't completely get why they do what they do what they do, but even if I don't, the perspective is useful for constructing feedback. Sometimes, I can't fathom why they're doing stuff they do (I had a really hard time understanding many of the crafting changes in 3.0 and had a hard time providing constructive feedback as a result). But I still think trying is worth it.

I fully understand where the devs are coming from, but it's still ridiculous. The full comments on the Anima weapon can be summed up as such:

• The Anima weapon quest was tuned to be approximately as difficult as clearing Gordias Savage.
• Difficulty was exchanged for time.
• Due to Alexander Savage being (too) hard, the Anima weapon was designed to take a long time to get.
• Revisiting old content was a key component of the Anima weapon quest.

In short, they wanted it to be as "difficult" as obtaining a Gordias Savage weapon (when it's been well-established Gordias Savage is too hard) using time as a substitute for difficulty and using old content people aren't playing anymore. Put less favorably, they made a treadmill designed to recycle old content and seem insurmountable due to the difficulty of Gordias Savage. The problem is that time =/= difficulty, and even discounting the HQ merchant goods, doing 10x Gordias section runs a day and some of the Beast Tribe dailies, it will take an excess of a month to get just the token items. Never mind the merchant goods, which are unobtainable without crafting and/or extremely deep pockets, neither of which casual / solo players are likely to have due to the overinflation of the Market Boards and the difficulty of getting into 3.0 crafting and gathering (even for people who did 2.0 not-endgame crafting and gathering).

It was designed to be a casual / solo friendly way to get an i210 weapon. I feel it's failed in that regard in numerous ways, just as Gordias Savage failed because it was too hard. I mean, it's not like I don't understand why, but that doesn't make it any less ridiculous or seem any less insurmountable. I'm not a game developer, much less an MMO developer, but this is not fun to me (and countless other people) which goes against the stated design philosophy of the game. Given Gordias Savage was deemed too hard, and the Anima weapon was designed to take approximately as much effort as clearing A4S, they had to have known this was going to happen.

Gordias Savage was too hard even for the hardcore, and it's now having a ripple effect on casual / solo content, which is more than a bit irritating. It's OK for me to be understandably upset, is it not?

TL;DR
Due to Gordias Savage being (too) hard, Anima weapons were designed to be (too) hard to get. They had to have known this, but released them as they were anyway, and should have expected the reaction they got.