Quote Originally Posted by Ath192 View Post
Video games literally exist to consume time. That is their sole reason of existence. That is what you pay for.
I agree.
I'll give you an example. Zodiac weapons were design to be so time consuming they would be special weapons you would only farm for your main job if you were a regular gamer.
Those are alright on the basis you can stop any time. What you can't stop doing so easily is:
  • Social as it may be, needing to form a party manually without PF or DF could potentially take hours. Which is why Yoshi-P decided the game had to be remade, because he said the old version wasn't capable of cross-world DF.
  • Needing to travel places manually (yes the lore of traveling is realistic but it makes you tap your foot irl and delay your party, a feeling that barely happens for long in this game). Of all the games I'd played it had never felt faster to actually get where I want.
  • A challenging raid consuming hours of your time due to the boss rooms being in sequence like Alliance Raids (and that's after potentially hours of forming an alliance). If you stop at any point in this process you're letting everyone else down, thus grumbling stomachs and lost sleep. Which is solved by segmenting them into 4 instances.
There were some sick people who decided to do all of them for an unknown reason
Achievements, which is another problem. It's fine if achievements are realistic, but many games including this made crazy goals such that if anybody actually tries to get them, it will bore them to death from repeating battlequest leves, treasure maps, deep dungeons and ocean fishing thousands of times. Yet there is a motivation for people to do it to "complete" the game so they create an unhealthy situation for people. Developers often don't really care and there's no chance they are doing those achievements themselves.
Queue into manderville relics, where you didn't have to do anything out of the ordinary and could farm all of them in a week probably. That is trash, even the zodiac book grinds that people hated were more creative than this latest relic.
It wasn't meant to be creative. Players were split on "how" they wanted to get their relic weapon. Some of them wanted a grind doing old content like the Anima weapons. Some of them wanted to do new content similar to Eureka. And a lot of people tried to get "all" the relics as you previously mentioned. At first they tried to solve this by letting people choose (via Bozja) but these two camps still complained.

So their solution was tomestones which drop from almost all content and thus allow people to choose their content and get more rewarded for doing it. Of course this ended up being gaslighting in practice because people had capped their tomestones already from merely doing their Tuesday hunt trains, but I understand the intention.

They are solving this in Dawntrail 7.2x though so we should move past Endwalker.