Data from lucky bancho about participation in field content

[Jojoya]

If relics are such a powerful motivator for doing content why did they give us these (tomestone) relic weapons in EW rather than tie them to the new content that dies on arrival

Many players have been asking for more choice in how they grind the items needed for their relics.

This expansion they were given choice.

Now they're angry because they opted to do the most efficient option to get it done faster and so the relic doesn't feel meaningful to them because they weren't forced into doing a single specific dungeon 20 times instead. Players could have done Variant/Criterion to farm the tomestones so the new content wouldn't be dead on arrival but chose not to because it wasn't efficient. They could have created their own grinds with content of their choice but chose not to because it wasn't efficient.

Some like to say efficiency is fun. Ironic when they then start complaining that they don't have things to do or how much they hated getting what they wanted.

There's some truth when you hear people say "players don't really know what they want". For some cases, it's that they're trying to use a game to bring some meaning to their life when they would be better off getting that meaning outside of a game. Otherwise, they wouldn't be so insistent that the relic grind has to be an uncomfortable grind. The game is filled with other content if all they were really looking for was something to do.

If someone forces themselves to do something they don't like, that's on them. Seriously, is this game first MMORPG people have played? Does carrot and stick not ring a bell? Even in 2014's GDC panel Yoshi himself said that rewards are important, yet here we are, with criterion having virtually no rewards.

Rewards are there even if they aren't the rewards that some are looking for. Most of the reward complaints come down to "give us gear".

So let's say criterion did reward gear. Either the gear would have to be bad or they would add a weekly gear lockout to it. Then what?