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

[Gwenkatsu]

Though I have nothing to say on the matter (as I happily ignored any field operation so far), you really should not use this as a challenge:

If you’re in denial, go play Shadowlands for a week. You’ll see exactly why that expansion failed Blizzard

ShadowLands was at its worst when it started (ripcord, anyone?). Blizzard made a myriad of tweaks since then, so that the experience now cannot be compared to how incredibly crappy Shadowlands was when played from the beginning.

[Jeeqbit]

The geniuses at Square Enix actually brought back the Atma grind.

If this is the direction they are taking, then by every metric, I firmly believe Square Enix wants their game to fail. I cannot wrap my head around this design philosophy.

Because everyone complained that there was no grind in Endwalker. Relic weapons were handed out like crafted weapons, for merely tomestones. They are meant to be earned, prestigious weapons. People said "there's nothing to do". The game "does not keep me playing". Relics are "too easy" to get. It was seen a major content for non-raiders to give them something to do in prior expansions. Grinding relics has always been a big thing for them. So SE decided to go back to basics - to ARR, for inspiration. A reset on their relic philosophy.

Why would you take an incredibly unpopular system—one that is hated to this day—and reintroduce it as the core of a new expansion's content?

A lot of people complained about Atma, but the fact of the matter is, obtaining a relic has always been a content of choice for many players. To this day, people feel proud when they have gone through the grind to obtain ARR relics. They still get Anima weapons. People are still in Eureka getting the weapons there. I haven't checked if people are in Bozja but that had life returned to it when people wanted to level newly released jobs.

You are incorrect that they have copied ARR relics though, and here's why. There is a 20% droprate from Critical Engagements, which means it hardly takes any time at all to get Demiatma compared to ARR. Moreover, the droprate from FATEs is 5%, which is more than ARR (I think they told us it was 2% in ARR, in a recent live letter, which is a bigger difference than you think).

There’s a reason you don’t see everyone rocking the "Z" title or carrying Zodiac Brave weapons. They are some of the rarest glams in the game because nobody wants to do the work. Outside of an exceptionally rare few who enjoy slamming their heads against a wall for the most monotonous, poorly designed grind in Final Fantasy XIV history, the community has always loathed Atma.

Actually, nobody complains about Atma (at least not anymore due to nerfs). Atma isn't even the problem. The Atma grind is the easy part, and for me, was even the fun part.

The problem with ARR relics is the books are tedious and exhausting. At least when I did them, the dungeons weren't really unsyncable. I ran out of leves from spawning S ranks. Waiting for a specific FATE was annoying (before World Visit was added) and some of them only spawn under certain conditions. All of it just got pretty tedious. Whenever someone talks about tedium in ARR relics, they talk about books, not Atma.

Not only did I enjoy Atma and the similar FATE grind for the Anima relics, I also enjoyed farming FATEs for the Yo-kai crossover to get every single minion. Part of the fun is partying with others and doing them "with" others. (So you know, droprates were made more likely since ARR and HW).

Another problem with ARR relics is there is a part of the quests that is confusing. I got stuck on a quest objective that asked me to interact with someone, and it wasn't working. I couldn't figure it out until I re-read the original dialogue from the NPC online. They wouldn't poorly design the quest structure like that now.

Then there is needing to obtain items from others. This can be quite expensive, especially if it's a new player that decided to do a relic before progressing to Heavensward, which they occasionally do.

How do we go from Shadowbringers, which gave us amazing content like Bozja and Zadnor, back to 2.0-era mechanics?

You can do most of the relic progression in the Bozja-like content called Occult Crescent. I don't know what you mean.

I welcome anyone to compare the player counts who still do Bozja/Zadnor versus this new content in when 8.0 drops. The results won't be pretty.

Everyone predicted Eureka would die after 5.0 release. I predicted otherwise, because I know that in the long-term, grinding relics is a popular end-game content for non-raiders. I saw it in my linkshells and FCs. Over time, Eureka's population increased again, to where I see people that joined the game post-Shadowbringers still talking about it in linkshells, FCs and discords. Eureka doesn't let you level your jobs either.

MMOs are a dying genre

I disagree. The type of people that play MMOs were almost the only people using the internet in the past, whereas now those same people are a minority of internet users thanks to the iPhone. In raw numbers, the audience potential for MMOs is far bigger than it used to be. New MMOs are just costly to make. You can argue they don't innovate much, unless you expand the definition to cover other live-service games, and by that definition they have innovated and are wildly popular.

most of their players are in their late twenties and older, with jobs and/or families.

Many people want a grind to do when they come home from work. It's a way to unwind. Do an hour of grinding a day. Not everyone can or wants to do that, but for some, it's a way to unwind and have a goal to work towards, and actually always has been - even decades ago, people with jobs came home to grind something a bit after work.

[Brandr]

OC took the worst aspects of Eureka and Bozja and combined them.

I completely agree with this statement.
At least in Eureka not only there's time to get in time, but people actually wait to start.
Though, I only started Eureka grinding in late-ShB and finished it (as in, got elemental lvl70), a few days before DT launched. I don't know how it was while it was fresh.
Bozja while it still has fun battles its environment inst original and very same-y.
The idea is cool (we're in a warzone!), but it should be more a medieval fantasy warzone than a Medal of Honor warzone.

[CaptainLagbeard]

They've tried many things for the Relics over the years, and some of them have been worse than others...

Personally, I don't mind some grinding being involved, but I want it to be a quantifiable amount of grind. Having a low drop chance for the atmas isn't really grinding, it's just a matter of getting lucky. Specially with the Demiatmas for EW if you do it in Crescent as you also have to hope the game spawns FATEs and CEs in the correct part of the map.
Adding RNG to the grind only makes it artificially longer.

I think HW generally did the Relic the best, aside from earlier on in the expansion where you needed HQ items from Crafters to finish a step... Since not everyone is an omni-crafter or has unlimited gil to spend... But overall, you had multiple things you could do for progress on the Relic, and you had a generally clear measurement on how much grind you had left.

[Aviatorhead]

I genuinely hate atmas/demi atmas. Don't want an rng grind and it's exactly why I haven't finished ARR relics and why I stopped partway with DT ones. It feels like it's disrespecting what time I have for this game.

[PercibelTheren]

I seen this point be brought up a lot, and "hard" is perhaps the wrong word, but "intensive", it is a lengthy grind, and one that requires some commitment to complete, something that may not be for everyone, and every relic barring the EW ones require a lenghty grind to get, it has always been that way, and that's why people say it is "supposed" to be that way, and that grind also becomes an experience, a journey, something you don't necessarily need to do at once, but you can slowly chip away at over the course of months, I can even agree that the RNG behind the Demi Atmas is a mistake, it's hard to "chip away" at something that comes in 5.5% progress chunks that are extremely erratic in their nature, but not the intensity associated with it.

The journey of *checks notes* grinding FATEs while doing something else on my other monitor. I guess I just really don't like grinding for the sake of grinding. I'd stop complaining if OC at least gave XP because then it would be progressing towards a distant goal and also something immediately useful.

[PercibelTheren]

I disagree. The type of people that play MMOs were almost the only people using the internet in the past, whereas now those same people are a minority of internet users thanks to the iPhone. In raw numbers, the audience potential for MMOs is far bigger than it used to be. New MMOs are just costly to make. You can argue they don't innovate much, unless you expand the definition to cover other live-service games, and by that definition they have innovated and are wildly popular.

They genuinely aren't that popular, though. And we haven't had a decent new MMO in about a decade. What MMO is there to play, even, if you don't wanna join any of the big 4 of FFXIV, WoW, ESO and GW2? Plenty of MMOs with great ideas like Rift have been left behind. Some are on life support, some have since been shut down.

Every time something looks promising, it turns into a garbage fire or just ends up being vaporware (hi, Ashes of Creation) I wish it wasn't like that because I like MMOs but the genre is definitely not doing any kind of well and hasn't in a long while. And I do think it's partly because they desperately cling to a lot of conventions that just hurt them.

[Kaurhz]

I would pretty much agree... OC is probably the worst exploratory content we've had, at its core..

I would also say, I wouldn't use Eureka as indicative of how alive or not this content will be.. Eureka has the benefit of... To do the relics, you must do Eureka.. Not only that all steps for the relic are contained in Eureka..

Step 1: You can do FATEs or you can do OC... They are probably going to increase the rate in 8/0 for FATEs.
Step 2: Has no involvement in OC whatsoever... Do a bit of crafting, do your roulettes (which you were doing anyway)

Who knows with the next steps? But the fact that subsequent relics after the one-time steps is just Tomestone grind... I would say would suggest that OC is probably going to fare worse than Eureka in terms of survivability going forward.

[Brandr]

They genuinely aren't that popular, though. And we haven't had a decent new MMO in about a decade. What MMO is there to play, even, if you don't wanna join any of the big 4 of FFXIV, WoW, ESO and GW2? Plenty of MMOs with great ideas like Rift have been left behind. Some are on life support, some have since been shut down.

Every time something looks promising, it turns into a garbage fire or just ends up being vaporware (hi, Ashes of Creation) I wish it wasn't like that because I like MMOs but the genre is definitely not doing any kind of well and hasn't in a long while. And I do think it's partly because they desperately cling to a lot of conventions that just hurt them.

You forgot to mention RuneScape, especially "Old-is-Cool" RuneScape LOL

[GraceHorizon]

On demiatma: RNG-based grinds with low probability of drops are frustrating to me. I got all my demiatma in a week and a half, but friends of mine have had much worse luck. At a 20% drop rate from CEs and … what, 5% from DT FATEs? … you can expect to do *on average* 15 CEs or 60 FATEs of each type, so I would have preferred to just make things certain: guaranteed demiatma drops, 1 from FATEs and 4 from CEs, and you need 60 of each type. Just let me be certain of making some progress each time and I would have been happy. (And I was reasonably happy with the second stage: there was RNG in how much my aetherwells filled, but every time I did a roulette I got some guaranteed progress.)

On Occult Crescent as a whole: I find the story intriguing, and it was fun at first to wander around the place, but it got boring to me long before I finished everything there was to do. The gold pieces in particular stand out as un-fun because I never found a good way to get them quickly. Each Enlightenment Gold Piece item I bought represents an hour or so of tediously grinding monsters as though I were in an old school Dragon Quest game, and it dissuaded me from even trying for anything I didn’t strongly want. I also didn’t even try Forked Tower because I heard rumors it was extremely difficult, and it didn’t sound fun. Beyond that, in terms of fairness to different jobs, OC heavily favors tanks for survivability on the overworld, which was fine for me personally but was unfriendly to my Monk friend who always needed to get a tank to escort him before he went wandering.

I will say I enjoyed exploring, doing CEs, and getting showered in glam pieces by some of the treasure chests, but I feel pretty meh about adventuring in the Occult Crescent any more.