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

[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.