Thread: 5.0 Relic Weapon

Wholeheartedly agree. In fact, I'll go further: SE needs to re-learn what a decent grind looks like. A decent grind should have a proper balance between the reward, the time invested, and the mental boredom inflicted upon the player. The longer the grind, or the more painfully boring the activity, the better the reward has to be to make it a worthwhile endeavour that players engage with in a positive fashion.

Thus far, SE just hasn't managed to pull this off very well in FFXIV, and the Relic weapons are exhibits A, B, and C. Horrible creations such as the Atma stage for the Zodiac weapon, or Light farming for the Zodiac and Anima weapons, are just bad. They take lengthy amounts of time, they're horrifically boring for the player (because they involve doing the same tasks we do every day and are already borderline sick of, but in large quantities). And the reward? The reward is more or less trivial until the last six months of the version cycle, after which it's completely invalidated at the start of the next one. Bad. Just, bad. And Eureka is even worse: its time investment isn't as bad as it could be, but the tasks we do are absolutely mind-numbing. I cannot for the life of me stay awake through more than about 30 minutes of Eureka without putting on Netflix or something. It's the gaming equivalent of watching paint dry.

So please, SE, please re-learn what a decent grind looks like, and build it into the 5.0 Relics. Heck, build it in to other aspects of the game, too: I'd love to have some more meat on content like the Beast Tribes, or Levequests. Tie it into something besides shallow one-off reward boosts. I'll gladly chip away at it. But don't, for the love of Hydaelyn, give us another version of Diadem. At all. You've done it multiple times in both expansions to FFXIV, and it's gone over like a lead balloon in every single case. Stop it. Go back to the drawing board, or better yet, poll the players, and then listen to what we have to say.

Originally Posted by Kirsten_Rev

poll the players, and then listen to what we have to say.

They do, but you know it fanny how the number of ppl that do the polls don’t every = the number playing 9/10. It take a lot more then a few 1000 players getting upset over it, to make SE stop doing something, they take the most of what ppl say on the forums and go form there to see if it will work and or help, not everything the players want can be add, do to it making it to easy for some or to head for others. Also you have to post you’re ideas in the right part of the forums to ever have SE look at it in the 1st places. Sometime you see polls on the said parts of the forums... lol

Originally Posted by Kirsten_Rev

poll the players, and then listen to what we have to say.

Give the players 3 choices and you'll end up with a 4-way tie and 10 mutually antagonistic factions that don't really care what they themselves get, as long as the others don't get what they want.

Originally Posted by Hazuki87

They do, but you know it fanny how the number of ppl that do the polls don’t every = the number playing 9/10. It take a lot more then a few 1000 players getting upset over it, to make SE stop doing something, they take the most of what ppl say on the forums and go form there to see if it will work and or help, not everything the players want can be add, do to it making it to easy for some or to head for others. Also you have to post you’re ideas in the right part of the forums to ever have SE look at it in the 1st places. Sometime you see polls on the said parts of the forums... lol

SE could easily post a form into the XIV launcher, Twitter feeds, etc. They could incentivize users if they wanted to, such as offering some sort of in-game bonus for providing feedback. There are plenty of options. Passively listening to the most opinionated members of the community can indeed provide skewed information - but they can fix that by asking.

Originally Posted by Bonbori

Give the players 3 choices and you'll end up with a 4-way tie and 10 mutually antagonistic factions that don't really care what they themselves get, as long as the others don't get what they want.

If so, than SE asked the wrong questions. Properly structured questions will provide usable feedback for them - it has in the past, it has for other companies. This isn't some new idea - it's just one that SE has abandoned ever since ARR released, to the detriment of FFXIV, in my opinion.

Also, the community isn't nearly as fractured as your post would have people believe. It comes off that way on these forums because users are generally more opinionated, and because discussion is almost completely undirected. SE taking an active hand in framing the conversation would resolve both of these issues to a large extent.

Originally Posted by Bonbori

Give the players 3 choices and you'll end up with a 4-way tie and 10 mutually antagonistic factions that don't really care what they themselves get, as long as the others don't get what they want.

Pretty much this, especially in a game where players only know what was placed before and clamor so hard for it that it bars devs from allowing new ideas to enter the series because players that want their "good ol' days" simply have no clue how XIV works.

At this point though, I wouldn't mind it if 5.0 either didn't provide a relic or only offered an actual item at the absolutely end of the expansion.

Originally Posted by Kazrah

Pretty much this, especially in a game where players only know what was placed before and clamor so hard for it that it bars devs from allowing new ideas to enter the series because players that want their "good ol' days" simply have no clue how XIV works.

At this point though, I wouldn't mind it if 5.0 either didn't provide a relic or only offered an actual item at the absolutely end of the expansion.

The development teams behind more or less any consumer-facing piece of software have to deal with these types of issues. The vast majority have learned to solicit feedback. Even Microsoft solicits feedback now, and on a piece of software as complex as Windows - because they know that they have to. It's how products improve.

Regardless of that fact, I honestly can't understand this apparent inclination to throw in the towel just because people have disagreements on the forums. How does giving up and/or canceling entire segments of content help anybody? I intensely dislike Eureka, but I think FFXIV is better with it than without it - content is content, and there are plenty of people who managed to enjoy Anemos.

Also, as an aside: the FFXIV development team is never barred from doing something based on user feedback. They're the developers, and the buck stops with them. If they're not introducing new ideas, it's because they either (a) don't have them, or (b) aren't confident enough in them to take the risk. In either case, going back to the drawing board is probably a good idea. Feedback solicitation is to inform development, not control it.

Originally Posted by Kazrah

At this point though, I wouldn't mind it if 5.0 either didn't provide a relic or only offered an actual item at the absolutely end of the expansion.

Other idea : Apparently, people really like the concept "upgradeable glowy weapon", to the point of doing a content they despise.

So, they could make several weapons of that kind. You could have a Primal weapon, where steps are tied to doing primals, Raid weapon for the normal raids (24 and 8-man combined), and the Alternate weapon for Alternate content like Eureka. This way, whatever content you like most, you'll always be able to build your own glowy weapon.
And you'd still have the tome weapon, that should be kept 10 ilvl lower than all of the others (Basically, no upgrade)