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

[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.