EW Relic Grind is just a streamlined version of ARR/HW Grind

[Jojoya]

If you want players to vary their play, you have to incentivize them — or force them — to do it. This was baked into the design of previous Relic quests, but it is unfortunately absent here.

I haven't seen SE mention anything stating their intent was to have players vary their play. They said they want players to choose how they earn the tomestones from our normal options.

If a player chooses only what they consider to be the most efficient route, then that's what they do. If someone wants it to be grindy, they can always run the same trial 100+ times. It's a decision the player gets to make for themselves instead of SE making it for them.

Trying to force players into specific content may result in the player not participating at all, which can lead to other problems.

There is no automatic win strategy to adopt because different players want different things. If SE's own goal is to increase player participation, this is the best way to go because the player has some control over what they do.

As many complaints as we've heard about the tomestone design, I don't think I've heard anyone say "I'm not going to participate in this because it's just a tomestone grind". That's not to say that there aren't a few, I'd be surprised if there weren't, but it doesn't seem to really be discouraging anyone from participating.

On the other hand, players who have skipped the relics in the past because they didn't like the content they were asked to do or thought it was too grindy are participating this time because they're getting to choose content that is fun to them. Because it's become fun instead of tedious, they're taking an interest in it.

Was this experiment a success in their eyes? We'll have to see how the relic series is designed next expansion assuming they don't give us a specific answer in some interview before then.

[DixieBellOCE]

I mean, i can't get tomestones doing older content so i cam kind of 'forced' to fill that void in current expansion 'dead' content by their design.

So no, i don't have the freedom to 'obtain a relic by doing anything'

[AmiableApkallu]

I mean, i can't get tomestones doing older content so i cam kind of 'forced' to fill that void in current expansion 'dead' content by their design.

You can do, or have a chance to do, older content for those tomesones via

• Level 50/60/70/80 Dungeons roulette
• Leveling roulette
• Trials roulette
• Main Scenario roulette
• Alliance Raids roulette
• Normal Raids roulette
• Mentor roulette
• Frontline roulette

My own hot take might be that SE decided that they didn't need to encourage running a specific expansion's content, so they just fell back on the familiar, all-encompassing roulettes.

[Supersnow845]

You can do, or have a chance to do, older content for those tomesones via

• Level 50/60/70/80 Dungeons roulette
• Leveling roulette
• Trials roulette
• Main Scenario roulette
• Alliance Raids roulette
• Normal Raids roulette
• Mentor roulette
• Frontline roulette

My own hot take might be that SE decided that they didn't need to encourage running a specific expansion's content, so they just fell back on the familiar, all-encompassing roulettes.

Wow I can do the same roulettes I’ve been doing since the roulettes were introduced

What if I want to earn my relic doing eureka, what about POTD, ocean fishing, PVP, gathering, crafting, beast tribes, variant dungeons, Bozja

Saying “here your choice is one of the roulettes” isn’t a choice at all

[Renathras]

...

Don't mistake me, I agree with you on some levels - having done a lot of Relics, a lot of them ARE just Tome grinds with extra steps. Especially HW. There are two parts you have to do actions in a specific order (run through the dungeon gauntlet at the start, then the Primal gauntlet at the end), but the rest of the time can be summarized as "Get Poetics, trade Poetics for something, SOMETIMES trade that something for another something, SOMETIMES combine several somethings into another something, either way turn in the somethings, progress your Relic."

But I will say that those Relics often included more...I dunno...story?

In ARR, lost in all the grind, is that you start off by going to the site of where a legendary warrior of the past died or likely lost their weapon of power. You find the thing in a bad shape, and so have to craft a fairly high end item and them meld them together (at one time, the Materia was a lot harder to come by, but I mean the lore sense of combining the essence of the items/bonding them). You now wield a weakened version of a legendary weapon. Then you go on adventures to empower it (somewhat disturbingly, by capturing actual souls from people and animals and plants you kill...but I guess it's okay when good guys do it for power?) and help the people of the realm, which is what most of the other steps involve. ARR was particularly...creative...in its progress steps (other than the last one, which is just Light Farming: The Sequel), such as the FATE grinding, the Book step of doing (at the time) end-game dungeons and open-world dungeons (which used to exist and be FAR more threatening and where most of the kill 10 [later changed to 3] of various enemy types took place), interacting with the Leve system which practically doesn't exist anymore aside from leveling DoH/Ls, and engaging with FATEs, including some rare spawn and difficult ones (albeit less so when people were more running the things and you weren't having to solo them), and the Materia binding step was a pretty interesting (albeit EXPENSIVE) way to customize your weapon's stats.

HW was a bit more bland as you're just trying to make powerful weapons for Rowena to mass produce and sell to the masses, but you do create life with, it seems, a soul - something even the Ascians had trouble doing, come to think of it...the soul part - and this did involve you traveling the realm doing good things (FATEs), "reliving your memories" (dungeons past, ARR, and then-present, HW), collecting a lot of parts (which you could do with Tomes or GC Seals or Tribal Quest currencies; imagine, for example, if we could by the Mandarite with Best Tribe currencies in EW, not just Tomes), collecting a lot of parts AGAIN, but this time you have so many ways to do it. Sure, people use Poetics for it now, but you can also use DoH seals, DoL seals, or even Leves (some drop the Amber Encased Vilekin from the random chest spawns) or by trading in parts from the 8 mans. So you DID have more avenues of progress on that particular step than Tomes, and at the time, people did use those other avenues. I've personally built at least one and possibly two HW Relics from Crafter/Gatherer Scripts for that step. Of course, then we end it with Light Grind: The Threequel, but the Primal gauntlet at the end was at least a victory lap that was a bit different.

EW and Bozja were very different - you can't build an EW Relic even now off of just Tomes, and having to go back to the prior zones encouraged more replayability of them instead of them being abject ghost towns, as did some special spawns in them like Cassie and King in Pagos. Bozja fixed most of the problems of Eureka - namely that people didn't like you could ONLY progress the Relic in Eureka - by allowing a parallel path for a lot of the Relic. The problem was (1) it was still tied to the Bozja story (good for lore, bad for future proofing), and (2) the place it mattered most to have an alternate progression path, the last two steps, it ALMOST didn't, and the main progress (DR and Dal) were not very well future-proofed AND behind the CLL bottleneck, which was a bottleneck for a long time due to initially being limited in how many people could do it, and then later, so few people doing it because the rewards to do it more than once were so low (and the penalty in Mettle on death so high vs the payout at the end) that groups weren't making or were too small to succeed until they did the buff. Arguably you can do PotD/HoH for the drops, but the chance was pretty low for something that still took a decent chunk of time to do (a 10 floor set of PotD at the 51-100 floor range where the drop rate is decent tends to take 30-50 minutes, depending on Job, and you can only spam random que the 51-60, which doesn't have as good a drop rate; HoH is similar)...but it didn't solve the problem people must have gotten through CLL and DR (and later Dal) to get to that stage.

And saying this as a person who loved Bozja (and Eureka) and DID get through Bozja with the first wave so I didn't get terribly bottlenecked...I can understand how that would frustrate people later.

I feel like Bozja with a few tweaks would have been a good foundation for future Relics - have an Exploration Zone with a story, make it the most efficient way to get the drops, but also have less efficient outside ways. Make the Relic building part take place in the outside world (as it did in Gangos) but not require story progress in the content itself directly (maybe you get extra bonus dialogue if you are progressing the story with it), that way both camps can enjoy the content and progress their weapon.

.

THAT, or make a second kind of Tomestone weapon for "normal people". Technically this already exists - the 8 man drops - but it's not the same in people's minds since those don't get glowy and they don't "progress" so much as you chunk/desynth that legendary sword 8 months later when a new one comes along. It's like the meme of the guy walking with his GF/wife looking at another woman as she passes them by and the GF/wife looking shocked at him. Just make it an upgrade process instead of a "buy new weapon" - in practice it's the same thing, you just have the old husk to sell/desynth; just make buying the later one require it OR the 8 man drop. So like you either buy the 1000 tome thing + run the 8 man 7 weeks in a row OR you buy the 1000 tome thing + turn in the prior stage's weapon.

Of course, then you get into the Savage upgrade and all that, but just make it where either can upgrade and we're no worse off than we are now (just people can get their weapon earlier in the patch...but not a ton earlier, as you still need all those Tomes. Or is it 500 now.....)

Or just have a parallel upgrade path vs Savage there so we have "midcore tome grind path, Savage token/chest path, Relic grind path" paralleling each other.

.

Anyway, I think there are solutions, and I think Bozja was a good foundation. They just got so many complaints that I fear they got burned. I hope they come back to that model one day and make the changes to make it work (or do the Tome weapon parallel upgrade path, either one works), but I'm not sure they will.

And also, the I see both sides of this one. MECHANICALLY, it's just the same as before without the facade. SUBJECTIVELY, it's different to people because they don't feel there's a story attached to it (Hilde quests/lore aren't for everyone - not even the big bombshell reveal this last patch). [I'm also a semi-Hilde fan - I enjoy it in small doses - so I've not hated the current Relic quests/story, just the "Go get three meteors. Go to the moon and mine/collect them yourself?! Don't be silly, just buy them from a vendor!"; I feel like in past Relic grinds, we would have gone out into the world to collect at least some of them, possibly on the moon or in Ultima.]

Some people miss the effort, some people miss the memories, some people miss the grind, some people miss the Exploration Zones, and some people miss the story/lore. Some miss a combination of the above.

Mechanically, a night light may not protect you from monsters...but it may very well help people sleep well.

[Shurrikhan]

Older relic grinds involve steps such as doing dungeons, trials and other duties to farm hundreds of thousands of points of "light" or to awaken mahatmas or whatever. These resources are really just thinly veiled: "do this old content repeatedly for a specific resource". What they did in EW is remove the specific restriction of forcing you to repeat the same duties instead to Tomes, which allow for you to do ANY relevant content.

So previously you had to do 60+ Garuda HM to maximize light. Instead of spamming the same duty, you have the freedom to do any duty and the relic just requires the common currency they all award. It's literally the same difference, they are just not pigeon holing you into only doing dungeons and trials and 24mans, which btw were content that already gave tomes. Instead of making a separate light, it's just tomes. You're still doing duties for them, you just get to pick your poison.

With the 'small' difference of no rotating incentives, which means that people are able to (and will tend to) degrade their own experience by spamming only the significantly more efficient methods, which becomes a problem when there are only, say, two of them.

Or, more squarely put, EW's relic grind is like ARR's with any content-diversity made so optional as to be non-choices beyond just two dungeons... and Hunt Trains.


The lesson the devs can take from this, if the intent of the changes were as you suggest: Complete freedom of choice is not necessarily better for fun if a couple otherwise-restricted choices would thereby push out all else -- especially if those always-best choices aren't particularly fun in themselves (even before you grind them into doldrum).

Trying to force players into specific content may result in the player not participating at all, which can lead to other problems.

There is no automatic win strategy to adopt because different players want different things. If SE's own goal is to increase player participation, this is the best way to go because the player has some control over what they do.

Are the differences in intrinsic wants enough to outweigh large disparities in efficiency towards achieving extrinsic wants, though? Because otherwise, over the course of progressing a relic, players will feel obliged (or, if seeking any decent efficiency, outright "forced"), to grind a far narrower selection of content than they did when their choices at a given individual step was more restricted.

Even if I limit your choices to just A, B, and C, if I also append a unique reward system by which to level out their relative efficiencies, you at least really have all three options. But if I leave the rewards of each option in their default unbalanced amounts (as per the EW grind), no matter how many choices players are "allowed", they'll effectively have only The Best Option, one to few Options That Aren't Too Terrible, and, for all else, Effectively Not Options.

So, if they're going to allow all options to compete with one another, they need to better make them competitive with each other, not just leave things at their current Tome-reward-per-minute disparities, etc.
Tbf, that'd probably also be helpful for the game as a whole, as weekly currency caps themselves --time-locked though they be-- are also something of a grind-progression system that currently pigeonholes those with few hours of play per week towards Expert Roulette because of its hugely outsized efficiency, which in turn allows the devs to point at its participation and go "See? It must already be perfect!" to the detriment of that content mode.

Even then, diversity of content, and (indirectly) thereby how long it takes to feel grindy, may actually be better served by slightly less choice overall across the progression of a Relic.

[Reimmi]

Oh really, then please enlighten me how I get to do any ARR duty, any HW duty, any Stormblood duty, any Shadowbringers duty or half the Endwalker duties to get my Allagan Tomestones of Causality...
Any relevant content? You mean the same 2 expert dungeons or hunt trains?

Well, in reality it's really just hunt trains because they're the most efficient option. The same thing we've been doing every week to cap tomestones, gain hunt nuts and materia since 6.0 anyway.

Then i'd say the problem is the lack of content that gives the tomes not the structure of the relic weapons
i prefer it being tomes, but more things need to give a reasonable amount of them so it feels less like a pigeon hole

[dspguy]

Older relic grinds involve steps such as doing dungeons, trials and other duties to farm hundreds of thousands of points of "light" or to awaken mahatmas or whatever. These resources are really just thinly veiled: "do this old content repeatedly for a specific resource". What they did in EW is remove the specific restriction of forcing you to repeat the same duties instead to Tomes, which allow for you to do ANY relevant content.

So previously you had to do 60+ Garuda HM to maximize light. Instead of spamming the same duty, you have the freedom to do any duty and the relic just requires the common currency they all award. It's literally the same difference, they are just not pigeon holing you into only doing dungeons and trials and 24mans, which btw were content that already gave tomes. Instead of making a separate light, it's just tomes. You're still doing duties for them, you just get to pick your poison.

This is what I've been saying for some time. You just said it more concisely. Instead of doing leveling roulettes for singing clusters... you can do ANY content and get the equivalent of "EW Singing Clusters." Instead of having to do 24-man for a ShB memory for that relic, do whatever content (new or old).

The thing is this... in a game like EQ1 or FFXI, a "relic" meant something. For starters, it was a unique piece of gear far beyond what other gear had to offer. It was a long grind - both involved multiple steps where you needed a raiding guild to back you up. Then there were a lot of steps done with a smaller group. And at the time, it was fairly rare for a player to have more than one relic. In FFXIV, they give them out like candy and they aren't anything all that special really.

Think back to the ARR relic. Nearly the entire questline required you to be on the job for the relic gaining no experience or any other benefit along the way. Thankfully over time they realized that maybe not all steps should be like that. And by the time we got to ShB, many of those "be on the job you want the relic for" restrictions were gone. And in EW they were removed entirely. Honestly, given that the "relic" only reaches its final form when we are exiting the expansion and it just becomes another glam piece, if it winds up being 6000 tomestones, that is probably about right.

[dspguy]

Wow I can do the same roulettes I’ve been doing since the roulettes were introduced

What if I want to earn my relic doing eureka, what about POTD, ocean fishing, PVP, gathering, crafting, beast tribes, variant dungeons, Bozja

Saying “here your choice is one of the roulettes” isn’t a choice at all

You can get your tomes by running Hunts. It doesn't have to be a roulette.

And I really don't get that logic anyway. Instead of saying "to earn your relic you have to run Dungeon A, then Dungeon B, then Dungeon C" - now you can run any of Dungeon ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOP. How exactly is that a bad thign? And on top of that, there are so many ways to earn tomes, you don't have to do roulettes at all. Let's say you never got your Starbird from The Dead Ends. You can still run that dungeon, earn tomes for the relic AND do something else.

It used to be "if you were working on your relic, that's ALL you are working on while doing it." Remember one of the later ARR steps? It had to do with running level 50 dungeons in the hopes that the final boss would drop some token that you needed. It was a random drop (not 100% like it is now). And you had to be either on the relic-earning job to get credit OR another level-capped job.

[DiaDeem]

Huh?

All Manderville steps: Grinding Tomes.
Zeta: Grind ATMAs, meld expensive materia, buy the 4 100K gil vendor items, get all the crafted items for the Zodiac stage, which means you either craft them, or you buy them for a billion gil.

Did.. you ever actually make a Zeta?

For the Anima, despite not agreeing entirely I kinda get what you're saying, but for the Zeta?? There's nothing quite like that mess, not even close.