While this article specifically references Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, I’d consider it applicable to anyone who’s ever played an MMO before.  To anyone who has ever had to grind for something in any sort of RPG.  I’m not going to lie to you, though: this is going to be dry reading for most.  If you feel like enduring a rant, then read on, because this past week or so, I have come to an understanding of sorts with one of the more annoying aspects of this otherwise fantastic game.  Initially, I felt it completely unfair, but as time has progressed, my views have changed somewhat.  Let me talk to you about Atma.

Some background is required.  In FFXIV, you have the opportunity at max level to go on a special quest to obtain a powerful weapon for your class, known as a Relic.  For me, as a White Mage, this was a staff called Thyrus.  The quest is comparatively epic, at least in terms of what you have encountered thus far.  First, you need to find the “broken” remnants of the weapon in hostile territory.  You then need to craft or buy a suitable donor weapon to “graft” onto the broken relic.  Not only must this donor weapon be a specific item, but it also requires enhancement in the form of attaching specific materia – special gems – to it.  This either requires you or a friend to have one of the various crafting classes of a high enough level, or simply paying extra on the market board for one that comes suitably prepared.

Next up, you need to defeat a giant bloody chimera in a group with seven other people to obtain special salts required in the grafting process.  Even after this, the blacksmith doing the work for you still thinks there’s something missing and has you go find a book about your relic.  The woman who has it will give you it, but only in return for an item sitting at the end of another high-level dungeon.  The book seems to satisfy the master craftsman, who eventually gives you the “Unfinished Thyrus” to allow you to become familiarised with it.  This involves killing a respectable number of specific enemies with it equipped, followed by another 8-man battle, but this time with a hydra.

After returning to our resident smithy, he insists he finally knows the last things we’ll need.  You need to kill three Primals: Ifrit, Garuda and Titan for some special elemental fire, wind and earth items.  These are all individual 8-man encounters, the last of which can be particularly tricky even nowadays when most people may out-gear it, since you can be instantly killed if you’re not quick on your toes.  After all of this, you bring the items back to the blacksmith… who now says he just needs some special oil to quench the weapon afterwards.  Said oil is only purchasable using special tokens, obtained through running dungeons at max level.  Luckily, most people will likely already have plenty of these.

Finally.  FINALLY I have my Thyrus.  It’s an amazing weapon.  I loved just about every minute of the quest line that got me here.  It felt suitably arduous and epic and the result was a weapon that I could be proud of.  My issue in this article isn’t with any of the above, but what comes next.  Because you see, the Relic is only the beginning.

In one of the early patches for FFXIV in the past year, we were given the next step in the Relic quest line.  An upgrade mechanic was to become available.  It would be the first of many.  If you obtained 900 Allagan Tomes of Mythology, you could buy three special items from a vendor and combine them with your Relic to create a stronger, shinier version!  Back in the day, these tomes were obtained only by running the highest level dungeons over and over and had a weekly cap that prevented you from farming them.  I came to this section of the quest later in the day, when these were slightly easier to come by.  I was soon the proud owner of a Thyrus Zenith.

That was, at my best estimate, half a year ago.  Since then, there have been several further “upgrades” made available in successive patches… but none have come close to re-capturing the adventurous feel of the original quest line.  It is here, after 700 words, that we have finally come to the bit I have a problem with.  I repeat: let me talk to you about fucking ATMA.

Put simply, Atma are special gems you need to upgrade your Relic.  There are 12 in total and you need all 12 before you can do the upgrade.  No problem, you might think… until you learn how you need to obtain them.

They are scattered throughout the world of Eorzea; the land of FFXIV.  12 specific zones are named in the quest, each one holding a single Atma.  Is it the travel cost?  Oh my no.  Are they difficult to find?  Nope, you know exactly where to get them.  Does it take a long time to get them?  Well, that all depends, doesn’t it?

Because to get an Atma, you need to participate in a special area quest called a FATE – Full Active Time Event.  Each zone has dozens that spawn on timers, with between one and four active at any time, depending on the size of the zone.

Each time you participate in any given FATE, you have (approximately) a 2 to 3% chance of getting that zone’s Atma.

WHAT.

Fucking random chance.  That’s all it is.  This section of the quest is a literal road block that has people in fucking fits.  Most people don’t even bother, citing the hours upon hours they’ve spent running around a single zone – just the one! – trying to get an Atma.  The developers have confirmed that it’s entirely luck-based.  There’s no special tricks, no modifiers: nothing.  You take part in a FATE and, if you complete it, you have around a 1 in 50 chance of getting the Atma.

One.  In.  Fucking.  Fifty.

Let me assure you, these numbers mean fuck all.  I have personally counted the number of FATEs I needed to run in a single zone before the Atma dropped.  My highest is sitting at 148.  That represents hours of repeatedly running the same content, over and over, with minimal benefit.  Because these FATEs don’t actually give you anything upon completion except a token amount of money (which doesn’t even cover repair costs) and an equally tiny amount of another special currency.  Your entire existence is reduced to watching the map for the FATE indicators, then running to them, hoping you get there in time to participate and roll the fucking dice to see if you can finally leave this bloody zone I’ve been here for three days why won’t it just fucking drop AAAAAAAAAA-

The real kicker?  Even when you do get all 12 Atma, you don’t actually get a tangible upgrade.  Your weapon simply gets renamed to Thyrus Atma.  Oh sure, it changes colour a bit, but it retains the same stats.  Hell, it actually gets objectively LESS shiny until you complete the next stage of the upgrade process, which I won’t discuss here because it’s not as terrible and I’ve not finished bitching about Atma yet.

Looking at it from the outside, there are a few things readily apparent about the Atma Grind.  It’s lazy quest design for starters; there’s no complexity, challenge or even fun to it.  It’s engineered to be arduous, but not in a way that bespeaks any actual adversity to overcome.  The only true test you encounter is your patience, which is slowly sapped away as the hours drift by.  But despite its inherent evil, you have to appreciate the genius that went into the design of this stage of the Relic quest.  It required almost no effort to implement, necessitating only that a very rare drop was added to the loot table of a handful of special encounters.  It ensures that not everyone will try to obtain said weapon, due to the horrific prospect of wasting day after day doing the same thing over and over, meaning that the Relic Atma is still considered “special”, even in the future.

Some people say that the Relic Atma and beyond is a weapon for casual players, who can’t (or don’t or won’t) raid with large groups.  Make no mistake: you can get BETTER weapons in FFXIV than the Relic.  Regardless of how much you upgrade it, it will never surpass the highest-level raid loot you can obtain.  What the Atma Grind does – and it took me a while to realise it – is it replaces the larger randomness of loot drops with a personal randomness.  In an end-game raid, you have a chance that an item will drop from a boss, but not a guarantee.  Even if it does drop, you might have to roll for it against another player or players.  In essence, you are enacting the Atma Grind on a different but striking similar scale, but without the group involvement.

I contest the implication that getting a Relic Atma is in any way a “casual” achievement, but I can understand why it needed to be this way.  Anything less at the time would have been a gateway to free loot and would have both removed the incentive to run high-level content and caused strife amongst those who did anyway (“omg free epix”).  The Atma Grind is terrible, but in the end, it’s no more or less terrible than standard MMO fare when it comes to obtaining the highest level loot.

Should the Atma system be changed?  Yes, but not as drastically as I’d once thought.  I think if they implemented a feature whereby, if you don’t get an Atma from one FATE, you get a buff that increases the chance of finding one by 1%.  Have this buff accumulate over time.  You could start it off small, with the maximum right now being a 5% bonus chance, but increasing to 10, 15 and so on in future patches.  This would emulate the increasing chance you get in raid groups of obtaining the item you want if you don’t get it in the first place; since other people won’t be competing for it with you, your overall chances are higher.  Without other people in the equation with the Atma Grind, this seems like a fair compromise.

So I have come to a sort of peace with Atma.  I know that I still have a ways to go, since I still only have seven of the buggers, despite playing for days.  There are people who get them all easily; who have them on every class.  There are those who don’t strive for them and simply do a FATE or two while they’re on their way to and fro, getting an Atma now and then over the course of several weeks or months.  There are still others who have been relentlessly grinding for weeks on end with no success, who may end up burning out because of it.  I know only that my eventual success is guaranteed and that my patience is being tested.  I will have my reward.

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