Interesting Metric

Not sure if any of you are interested, but I thought it would be informative to report that for the past couple months, we've been adding about 4 new verified relic owners to the system per day, every day.

The number of relic-owners in FF seems to be following an exponential growth curve, not a linear one.

I think it's because deflation is making the currency easier to buy for people with a "steady" income (like, my friend that fights Titan Prime every day)...
That, and all the merits/new equip is making it easier to kill off the animated weapons compared to when they were implemented approximately 4 years ago. (I mean, when Dynamis-Xarcabard was first implemented, nobody would have believed you if you said you can kick DL's *** pretty safely if you had 40 people... so the same can be said for the animated weapons too I'd think...)

From my experience in development of MMO's, I just hope that they don't hit a certain level which has killed every RPG to date if it happens:

Whenever you code in an "ultimate weapon" or similar, especially when you do it as early in your game's history as Dynamis, you're confronted with two choices:

1) You can continue to Monty Haul early and fast, releasing even better weapons early enough that players don't invest potentially years of their lives into an item that will eventually be outclassed. This is the WoW model.

2) You can scale back and maintain those weapons as "ultimate" in your content release, relative to other weapons, allowing players to work on them slowly over years, and still be incredibly powerful once they finally get them years down the line. This is the FF model so far.

The problem with 2) is that while it maintains subscriber loyalty for awhile, you need to be very careful that the weapons never cross a certain level of commonness. They need to still be incredibly rare. Otherwise, if even 1 out of 4 of your players in end-game has one, they quickly become seen as "mandatory" to be taken seriously. As a good 75% of your endgame players don't want the time investment (or they'd have one already), their other accomplishments suddenly seem eclipsed, and you start hemorrhaging subscriber numbers. If it happens past the point where your new player acquisition rates have fallen off, it can mean the death of a game.

It's happened to a number of MMO's to date, and it makes me worry when I get sometimes 8-10 new relic reports per day.

The fact is, relics are the only "realistic" rare endgame weapons for the average joe who doesn't have the time to go camp out the latest HNMs for hours each day or three. (example: Hauteclaire is unrealistic for my pld char, as I dropped out of the HNM scene approximately two years ago - but I still can harbor hope for Excalibur given I have enough gil, as my co-founder status of my Dynamis linkshell should still amount to something.)

From what they mentioned at the pre-WotG fanfest, they're coming up with a second "build your ultimate weapon" that starts with the Nyzul 100F drop -- whether or not this "outclasses" the relic weapons, or any other HNM weapon thereof, is yet to be determined. I'm kinda hoping that they tweak it well enough that having one of the three (relic/uber-HNM/nyzul) should suffice in terms of "ultimate" gear...

Are you sure the exponential growth is due to exponential growth in relics being achieved or in exponential growth in awareness that this site tracks them?

In other words, of the reports you get each day are they all of the type, "Hey, I got my relic today" or are more of them "Hey, I see you track relics and wanted to let you know I've had mine for a long time now"?

I personally don't see the rate of relic acquisition to be all that much higher. Deflation doesn't make them any cheaper. In fact, in relative terms currency is a whole lot dearer to obtain now.

The one recent change that may have helped make currency cheaper was the Thief's Knife change. Now most dynamis shells have all thiefs with TH3 and a few TH4 whereas in the past you'd have a few TH3, but TH4 was exceedingly rare. This may have helped currency drop rates a bit and dragged the prices down.

That's an extremely good point, but checking back over my message log, most of them imply "just got" or explicitly mention a timeframe. "Today," "yesterday," etc. Dunno what that means though.

i'm thinking mythics are gonna be sweet