Sincere Question...No Troll...Has SE Gone Full Regress?!?!

[theunhappypotato]

Braindead grind is a bad game design when it has nothing else to offer. Simple as that. Considering that huge grind are mostly done with bots and 3rd party tools, that explains how "fun" they are.

it has glowy weapons to offer at the end, and most people here make the first relic step out to be the worst thing they ever did even tho if you just do it for like an hour or two each evening (not even in OC) you can have the relic together by the end of the week, its not that hard and the second step is also done pretty fast so i seriously dont know why people complain about it here we finally have a piece of casual content thats not done in 2 hours and thats also wrong

[Kaurhz]

it has glowy weapons to offer at the end, and most people here make the first relic step out to be the worst thing they ever did even tho if you just do it for like an hour or two each evening (not even in OC) you can have the relic together by the end of the week, its not that hard and the second step is also done pretty fast so i seriously dont know why people complain about it here we finally have a piece of casual content thats not done in 2 hours and thats also wrong

IMO, the issue I took with the grind is that RNG-based ones simply are annoying to make measurable goals on.. You either get the thing, or you don't.. By contrast doing things like a Light farm objective-completion oriented ones (e.g., complete dungeons xyz).. It's the presentation of it that matters a lot, IMO.

Also LMAOO... These relics are only marginally better, like marginally marginally... Sure, it's a small step-up from Endwalker, but it's still a massive step down from Bozjan relics which made better use of the one-time steps... Also step 2... You mean roulettes? Which people are doing anyway for their tomes? Yep, great design.

"We finally have..." -- How far have our standards fallen exactly?

[LaylaTsarra]

I'm a relicaholic and I spend no time in Crescent. It's simply not fun. Atma forget it not way I'm running my alts though that over and over again.

[GraceHorizon]

… most people here make the first relic step out to be the worst thing they ever did even tho if you just do it for like an hour or two each evening (not even in OC) you can have the relic together by the end of the week…

I’m going to call this out as not representative of my experience at all. I spent an hour and a half grinding FATEs in Urqopacha and got zero demiatma for my trouble, so I gave up on FATEs and did CEs in Occult Crescent instead. I did an hour or two a day _on top of my other activities like roulettes_ and it took a couple weeks to complete that step. It was far from the worst or grindiest thing I’ve done, but it was more time than I wanted to spend and the RNG was maddening. The process was adjacent to a good design, but it needed to be a bit faster and a lot more predictable.

[Daralii]

I’m going to call this out as not representative of my experience at all. I spent an hour and a half grinding FATEs in Urqopacha and got zero demiatma for my trouble, so I gave up on FATEs and did CEs in Occult Crescent instead. I did an hour or two a day _on top of my other activities like roulettes_ and it took a couple weeks to complete that step. It was far from the worst or grindiest thing I’ve done, but it was more time than I wanted to spend and the RNG was maddening. The process was adjacent to a good design, but it needed to be a bit faster and a lot more predictable.

The drop rates seem to be higher in OC, but the problem with verdigris specifically is how little activity there is in the corner of the map it drops in. 2 FATEs, 1 pot FATE, and Calamity Bound is it.

[Deejudanne]

it has glowy weapons to offer at the end, and most people here make the first relic step out to be the worst thing they ever did even tho if you just do it for like an hour or two each evening (not even in OC) you can have the relic together by the end of the week, its not that hard and the second step is also done pretty fast so i seriously dont know why people complain about it here we finally have a piece of casual content thats not done in 2 hours and thats also wrong

people complaining about grinding in an mmorpg will never not be funny to me

[Absurdity]

I’m going to call this out as not representative of my experience at all. I spent an hour and a half grinding FATEs in Urqopacha and got zero demiatma for my trouble, so I gave up on FATEs and did CEs in Occult Crescent instead. I did an hour or two a day _on top of my other activities like roulettes_ and it took a couple weeks to complete that step. It was far from the worst or grindiest thing I’ve done, but it was more time than I wanted to spend and the RNG was maddening. The process was adjacent to a good design, but it needed to be a bit faster and a lot more predictable.

I want to focus on that for a moment, has nothing to do with you I just use it as an example. Even with probably some of the worst RNG it took you a couple weeks, and it's not like you were grinding OC like there is no tomorrow.

I honestly can't remember the patch release dates anymore but there were something like 3 months and a few weeks between the first and second relic step. That is plenty of time to finish even casually since you only need to complete the step once.
Is the RNG annoying? Absolutely. But this is not some insane grind.

[TheRealMadruck]

people complaining about grinding in an mmorpg will never not be funny to me

This has nothing to do with people complaining about grinding in an MMO. As I stated when I first made this post, I have completed every Bozja Relic, 85% of the Heavensward Relics, and three Zodiac Brave weapons—so I certainly know what it means to grind!

Any version of a grind that relies on pure RNG rather than progression is lazy design. Instead of giving players a clear goal to achieve, developers who create grinds like this are essentially saying, "We can't come up with a meaningful step for this stage of progression, so let’s just put a slot machine into the grind because we care more about subscription numbers than the quality of content because the RNG will keep players playing to get this done."

So please, stop defending Square Enix on this. If you think putting slot-machine-style progression into an MMO is good design, then, with all due respect, I feel you are lost. Even in FF11, which had a lot of RNG, the Job weapons and armor relied on a deterministic progression system where you acquired currency to unlock your gear. You had a clear, direct way to gauge your progress.

In FF14, both Atma grinds offer no such thing; they are based on pure gambling. If it were another light grind, for example, would I be saying, "Oh yeah, this is the best ever"? No, of course not. Yet, I would be ten times less vocal because you would actually know where you stand! That is the difference between pure developer laziness and competent design.

[GraceHorizon]

I honestly can't remember the patch release dates anymore but there were something like 3 months and a few weeks between the first and second relic step. That is plenty of time to finish even casually since you only need to complete the step once.

The time until next patch is a poor basis of comparison. The relics become obsolete except as glam and the raw materials for the next step as soon as the next major patch drops. In order to be useful, they have to be available for a large fraction of the time between patches. So two weeks isn’t absolutely terrible, but it’s obnoxious; I and all the people I play with resented the process, and some of them just didn’t complete the quest because it was too much work. But the most significant indictment of first relic stage quests was that iirc SE themselves mentioned they’d listened to feedback on the first stage and made the second stage easier in response.

[Absurdity]

The time until next patch is a poor basis of comparison. The relics become obsolete except as glam and the raw materials for the next step as soon as the next major patch drops. In order to be useful, they have to be available for a large fraction of the time between patches. So two weeks isn’t absolutely terrible, but it’s obnoxious; I and all the people I play with resented the process, and some of them just didn’t complete the quest because it was too much work. But the most significant indictment of first relic stage quests was that iirc SE themselves mentioned they’d listened to feedback on the first stage and made the second stage easier in response.

They become pretty much obsaolete as soon as you get them, until the very last patch in an expansion. There is no point in going for a relic as an actual gear upgrade until patch X.55, it's a glorified glamour stick. It is, at best, slightly better than an unaugmented tome weapon, most of the time it is worse than an upgraded crafted weapon.
If you're looking at it from that angle then every relic quest so far has been a horrible grind, because the amount of work you put into getting one is infinitely more than buying a weapon for 200k from the marketboard that easily gets you through 8 months of casual content.

And their so-called "fixed" second step was just making you run roulettes for the 500th time, which I guess is technically easier.