(Relics) What is the lowest-development-cost content we'd still find fun?

[Jandor]

I don't understand the sudden love for Eureka. Pagos was active punishment to the players.

Pagos was by far the weakest part but it still had its fun moments, and there were three and a half other parts to Eureka. It's not like it was all pagos all the time.

[Edax]

Pagos was by far the weakest part but it still had its fun moments, and there were three and a half other parts to Eureka. It's not like it was all pagos all the time.

If you couldn't get through Pagos because you couldn't find people with identical levels as you, then you'd never see what the other parts of Eureka were like.

[NessaWyvern]

I don't understand the sudden love for Eureka. Pagos was active punishment to the players.

Pagos taught me that I actually have a hereditary condition, that I got from my mother.
Turns out, I have worse circulation in my legs than most people, and I only found out after seeing a doctor when I was having blood vessels in my legs burst due to sitting down for too long during the grind of pagos.

It... It really was punishment...

After 20 years of gaming, (and in my youth, I used to play Runescape, which is all grind), it was pagos that revealed it.
I check my ankles almost every day for those tell-tale blood spots, but they honestly haven't re-appeared since I finished pagos.

[RyuSaarva]

I don't understand the sudden love for Eureka. Pagos was active punishment to the players.

There has always been many people who like eureka, I was in a party with a guy who was working on his last pagos weapon before eureka got any nerfs and he liked eureka and so do I.

[Edax]

There has always been many people who like eureka, I was in a party with a guy who was working on his last pagos weapon before eureka got any nerfs and he liked eureka and so do I.

I also made a pie chart long ago about the ratio of likes to dislike per player on a Pagos thread:

[Rufalus]

I don't understand the sudden love for Eureka. Pagos was active punishment to the players.

There's some minority remaining in this game who wish they had something like Eureka a lot sooner. A lot of the old-school farm mobs type of players gave up on XIV before it provided the type of content they wanted. Setting up spots to grind mobs, saying how much xp to next level in chat, moving on to another grind spot when the group is ready; it brought back good memories to the kind of players it was designed for. Unfortunately a lot of toxic players with no interest in the content flooded in there to leech the rewards while harassing people and complaining about things over the shout chat. On the occassions that people didn't ruin the experience it was quite fun sometimes just hanging with the same friends for long sessions and holding out hope of getting rare item drops such as the speed earrings and things to upgrade the magia board. I don't care for the xp loss punishment on respawn, but the rest of the design could be considered more rewarding than punishing depending on who you ask.

[Xtrasweettea]

I don't understand the sudden love for Eureka. Pagos was active punishment to the players.

There are more people who have enjoyed Eureka than what you will see on the forums. Back when Eureka was current content, if you said anything positive about Eureka on the forums the best outcome would be that your post would get ignored. More often than not, you would get the vitriol of the hate from people who didn't like the content. There's nothing like being called "part of the problem" for liking content that others do not like.

Since the hate for the content was so bad on these forums, most of us stayed quiet.

You're now seeing the "sudden love" for Eureka because we don't feel like we have to be silent.

I am one of those people who have enjoyed Eureka. I even got my first Relic before the Pagos nerf. The content, to me, isn't as bad as people described. Yes, the initial Elemental leveling is a chore, though if you could manage it, you could start getting required items for relics while leveling. Once you hit cap, getting the needed items seemed quick to me.

Though, I have a bit of a bias for me liking Eureka. To me, Eureka is a simplified and easier version of FFXI's Dynamis with FFXI's Abyssea elements tied into it. FFXI's Dynamis 1.0 was brutal and required multiple hours of post and prep work to do it. You only did Dynamis two to three times a week, at 2.5 hours a pop, but you spent 4-8 hours outside of each even to get back EXP/levels (there's a chance you would die at least once per run... four to five times if you were a RDM and/or BRD), craft or make gil to get food and items such as Re-raise hairpins, etc.

Of course, just because I liked Eureka, doesn't mean I think it is perfect. There's multiple QoL that should have been added, but were not: like adding Sneak Oils and Prism Powders to allow you to move silent and make yourself invisible so you wouldn't get agro from mobs going from place to place and adding in an EXP cap buffer in case you die, you didn't de-level immediately, etc.

[Alleo]

There are more people who have enjoyed Eureka than what you will see on the forums. Back when Eureka was current content, if you said anything positive about Eureka on the forums the best outcome would be that your post would get ignored. More often than not, you would get the vitriol of the hate from people who didn't like the content. There's nothing like being called "part of the problem" for liking content that others do not like.

And yet the clear rates in the lucky bancho survey shows that you are still a minority. (And these numbers also included the people who only did it because they always do relic, who do it for the huge amount of items you get as a rewards and more.)

You can also say that not everyone that disliked it went to the forum to vent. The forum will always be a minority of the playerbase but it had been a good indicator..a lot of the content that was more disliked on the forum also was death quite fast ingame. The only saving grace for Eureka was that you could go there all alone and theoretically solo it. But it was still nerfed quite fast.

So yes the forum will never 100% give the view of everyone but if something is greatly disliked or greatly loved then its probably that way in the game itself.

[Maeka]

I get tired of the hate Eureka got. it was by far my favorite content ever in this game. It offered exploration though dangerous, open world area to explore. Can't say that about dungeons or raids. By the time I was finished I had the best summoner weapon in the game. I had some good gear, lots of fun items from mounts to minions, glamors. I got tomes far faster then grinding roulettes every day. Plus it had a good story behind it. Of course it was hard and had some grind to it but no more than any other grind in this game. Not to mention free materia. and I made many millions from it. And I made new friends.

The problem with Eureka, is that for every moment of fun you had, you had to endure hours of mindless grind of doing the same thing over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.

Yeah, exploring the lands was cool. There being some danger was a novelty that could be fun.

What wasn't fun, was the fact that you sat in huge FATE train groups and your individual contributions meant almost nothing and for some parts of Eureka, you were basically a one-shot affair where if anything looked in your direction because you accidentally pulled aggro, or you got hit by one of the tons of AoEs that you could hardly see with all the crap going on around you, you were dead in one shot. And/or if you're following one of these trains, sometimes you would aggro a mob the rest of the train wouldn't because the mob decided to turn and saw *you* and you died in 2 seconds and the train kept on going.

And of course, required grouped content is an instant "no" for me. I hate being forced to group outside of a Duty Finder system. IMO, Eureka could have been broken down into several duties you could Q for, or something, to make it easier to get groups. And/or I hate feeling useless and I hate feeling like I'm being carried which is what those FATE train groups always felt like. It was pretty much the only way to levelup, but yet you spent most of your time feeling useless because you were significantly lower level than the rest of the group and so your own contributions meant nothing unless you were a healer (and if you were a healer, you were in danger of drawing aggro and getting one-shot). Basically the only thing a lower level person was good for, was being a rez bot. Yaaaaaay. Your sole, singular purpose is to cast Raise. Awesome.

This is not fun gameplay.

I never got to find out if there was anything more fun, and more meaningful to Eureka after Anemos, because quite simply I couldn't stand the grinding. I think I got to about Elemental level.... 7? 8? something like that? And I was like "you know, this is just a terrible waste of my time. I'm going to stop wasting my time now, when there are other, more fun things to do either in FFXIV or outside of FFXIV. Nearly Anything, including a dentist visit, would be more fun than this."

I tried Eureka, I gave it several hours, and each time I sat in an FATE train, I found myself bored to tears waiting around while everybody killed junk around me and I just collected XP for doing nothing but waiting for the occasional time I could cast Raise. I could throw DPS spells.... oh wait, I did 10% of the DPS everybody else did because my level was low.

EDIT -- Onto the Topic at Hand (sorry for the digression, but I had to comment there):

What I would find fun content?

I think the Roulettes idea on the first page would be a great starting point. We have all kinds of content in the game, it'd be nice if we would have reason to revisit it. Especially a lot of the trials. I feel that Trials Roulette doesn't reward all that highly, especially and not very many people do it, because sometimes it can take awhile to get groups for it. At Level 79, you get maybe 2-3 million or so, and sometimes it takes upwards of 15 minutes to find a group if you try on off-hours. In that same 15minutes, I could have ground out FATEs for the same amount of XP to be honest. So I would support giving people more reason to run Trials and perhaps Normal Raids (something else that doesn't give a whole lot). Though Normal Raids have been better thanks to the Poetics needed for Scale Powder, though, so I feel the Relic Weapon system already buffs those.

Other than that idea... something more solo-able would be nice. As mentioned above, what I hated most about Eureka was the fact that it required groups to get anywhere.

Here's an idea.... what if there were some sort of... material on The First that was imbued with lots of light energy and you could buy these with gemstones, and so you could do lots of FATE grinding to buy these? Maybe there would be like... for the first step of a weapon you need 10 Purple Light Crystals and you can buy these from the FATE Vendor in Lakeland for 50 gemstones each. And then you need 10 Green Light Crystals from Rak'tika's Vendor, etc.

I know in past relics we had FATE grinding, but that was RNG, and nobody likes RNG. This system would not be RNG and it would give you reason to do more FATEs in ShB which would give you more reason to try and max out your Shared FATEs as well.

[SamRF]

The grand roulette

That would be all I need to play this game indefinitely as long as new dungeons get added.