Lately, I've been doing some Cosmic Exploration. I'm not a craft oriented player, but I like gathering enough so I choose to concentratre on those 3 relics. And I must say... I'm surprised, because everything I complain about fighters relics has been done mostly right with crafting relics. For more context, I'm part of the people that think the DT relics are a failure, and still failed to capture what older relics meant and why it was pleasant to farm them... And surprisingly, the tools relics did procure that feeling.
I can't help to wonder why the fighters relics, which are relics for the core gameplay of the game, got done so dirty compared to the crafters and gatherers ones.
First of all, there is the fact that tools relics are still prestige weapons : getting one is still an accomplishment that means something, and that ask you to work for it (I'll never shut up about the importance of long term objectives in MMO, even in XIV that doesn't want to be too time consumming : it's important to give players that want to spend more time in the game to have things to do, even if that means most players won't do that). Relics are 100% linked to the relic zone, while still giving you a long term objective. We don't have the full cosmic exploration yet, but from where we are, we can guess that we'll need 15 to 20 hours to get a full relic, which is fine, especially with the bonus making the subsequent one faster.
Then there is the kind of grind it propose : Every activity you do makes you progress toward your objective. If you achieve the activity, you get points. RNG is still there, but the whole progression is not based on it. Most of the time, the rng will determine if you'll get silver or gold. Sure it will sometimes make you fail your activity (especially with fishing), but you'll have a constant feeling of progress. RNG has it's place in a mmo, for rare mount drops or thing like that, but farm based on RNG (the atma one) are awful. If you have a bad RNG, you'll just get frustrated and it's not gonna be fun.
The whole thing about rng is to know when to use it. Use it to determine the bonus of completion, or for a one time drop, and it's fine. Use it for a repetitive activity, and it gets frustrating. The worst use of RNG is still the timeworn artifacts in PotD : not only did we have an awful rng farm, but that farm was in a content that was mostly dead : that brought the worst of both word : not only it took forever to enter, but after that, you weren't even garanteed one item, which made whole thing look like a huge waste of time.
But cosmic exploration, I feel like RNG has been done right. You'll sometimes have fail an activity because of it, but most of the time, you'll still get some progression despite it.
Now the second place where things have been done right is the pacing. Granted, the nature of craft and gathering helped a lot. But overall, we are not in this constant rush, which is nice. You can take your time, have some off time where you can discuss with other. I always felt that the charm of exploration zones came from the other people you met and spend a little bit of time to work together for a similar objective. Peers that like you engaged in this time consumming activity, and more than the gameplay itself, it was those people that brought variety to those activities. This might be where Cosmic exploration has some room to grow, because doing thing alongside each other is different from doing things together. Overall, I feel SE limited communication to a minimum, and to me, they should stop that. The infernal rhythm of OC is part of that. Eureka and Bozja both had their down time, which made the whole thing breathe. That's what cosmic exploration has, and OC doesn't, even if it's mostly due to the kind of content it is.
So I wish they will take inspiration from the Cosmic exploration for the next relics. I don't know why they don't feel everyone has to have the relics with tools, but they clearly don't bother with that, while it seem to be important with fighter relics. Maybe it's because the fighting is the core gameplay of the game, but this lead to this weird situation where it feels like the side content get more care than the core content. Cosmic exploration relics feels far more satisfying than normal relics.
Even worse, exploration zone are bad for farming relics, and this was already the case during ShB. Bozja/Zadnor options was systematically the worst choice. The content linked to the relic feels like the secondary option to get thing done. 7.4 one time step still suffer from that. I mean you need to do 240 CE to get all the items needed. That's 115k of OC xp, while the total needed to get the current 15 phantom jobs to max lvl is 237k. And that's considering you don't do ANY fate between the CE. Completing a CE takes between 5 and 7 min in average, and it takes nearly as much time for another to spawn. The time needed to complete that objective just has been designed to ignore completely the content it linked to.
In the meantime, Cosmic exploration do the things exactly how a lot of us have been asking the relics to be. So please, take inspiration from that for the future, it can be tweaked, it can be upgraded, but please take the general design of progression of tools relics for weapons relics.
Continue reading...
I can't help to wonder why the fighters relics, which are relics for the core gameplay of the game, got done so dirty compared to the crafters and gatherers ones.
First of all, there is the fact that tools relics are still prestige weapons : getting one is still an accomplishment that means something, and that ask you to work for it (I'll never shut up about the importance of long term objectives in MMO, even in XIV that doesn't want to be too time consumming : it's important to give players that want to spend more time in the game to have things to do, even if that means most players won't do that). Relics are 100% linked to the relic zone, while still giving you a long term objective. We don't have the full cosmic exploration yet, but from where we are, we can guess that we'll need 15 to 20 hours to get a full relic, which is fine, especially with the bonus making the subsequent one faster.
Then there is the kind of grind it propose : Every activity you do makes you progress toward your objective. If you achieve the activity, you get points. RNG is still there, but the whole progression is not based on it. Most of the time, the rng will determine if you'll get silver or gold. Sure it will sometimes make you fail your activity (especially with fishing), but you'll have a constant feeling of progress. RNG has it's place in a mmo, for rare mount drops or thing like that, but farm based on RNG (the atma one) are awful. If you have a bad RNG, you'll just get frustrated and it's not gonna be fun.
The whole thing about rng is to know when to use it. Use it to determine the bonus of completion, or for a one time drop, and it's fine. Use it for a repetitive activity, and it gets frustrating. The worst use of RNG is still the timeworn artifacts in PotD : not only did we have an awful rng farm, but that farm was in a content that was mostly dead : that brought the worst of both word : not only it took forever to enter, but after that, you weren't even garanteed one item, which made whole thing look like a huge waste of time.
But cosmic exploration, I feel like RNG has been done right. You'll sometimes have fail an activity because of it, but most of the time, you'll still get some progression despite it.
Now the second place where things have been done right is the pacing. Granted, the nature of craft and gathering helped a lot. But overall, we are not in this constant rush, which is nice. You can take your time, have some off time where you can discuss with other. I always felt that the charm of exploration zones came from the other people you met and spend a little bit of time to work together for a similar objective. Peers that like you engaged in this time consumming activity, and more than the gameplay itself, it was those people that brought variety to those activities. This might be where Cosmic exploration has some room to grow, because doing thing alongside each other is different from doing things together. Overall, I feel SE limited communication to a minimum, and to me, they should stop that. The infernal rhythm of OC is part of that. Eureka and Bozja both had their down time, which made the whole thing breathe. That's what cosmic exploration has, and OC doesn't, even if it's mostly due to the kind of content it is.
So I wish they will take inspiration from the Cosmic exploration for the next relics. I don't know why they don't feel everyone has to have the relics with tools, but they clearly don't bother with that, while it seem to be important with fighter relics. Maybe it's because the fighting is the core gameplay of the game, but this lead to this weird situation where it feels like the side content get more care than the core content. Cosmic exploration relics feels far more satisfying than normal relics.
Even worse, exploration zone are bad for farming relics, and this was already the case during ShB. Bozja/Zadnor options was systematically the worst choice. The content linked to the relic feels like the secondary option to get thing done. 7.4 one time step still suffer from that. I mean you need to do 240 CE to get all the items needed. That's 115k of OC xp, while the total needed to get the current 15 phantom jobs to max lvl is 237k. And that's considering you don't do ANY fate between the CE. Completing a CE takes between 5 and 7 min in average, and it takes nearly as much time for another to spawn. The time needed to complete that objective just has been designed to ignore completely the content it linked to.
In the meantime, Cosmic exploration do the things exactly how a lot of us have been asking the relics to be. So please, take inspiration from that for the future, it can be tweaked, it can be upgraded, but please take the general design of progression of tools relics for weapons relics.
Continue reading...