Just a further thought: Given that you say the design team anticipates additional ways to collect relics in the future, I suspect you have given the tiniest bit of thought to what that rate of collection would be on these future modes. To the extent that any of them are participatory (items gained through effort as opposed to purchases), why not adjust the drop rate on relics from chests to compensate for the absence of relics by other means? Drop rates in theory are actually very flexible and easy to adjust from a coding perspective. Would this create a false sense of “drop rate from chests” than intended in the long-range outlook? Maybe, but it seems like it would certainly be a better approach than what’s happened thus far. Given the current absurdly infinitesimal drop rates, increasing them by a factor of 2, 3, or even 5 in the short term clearly would not negatively impact your early access approach and you could always draw them down in the future. We know you have no problems taking something away! cough Gems cough
P.S.
I’ve updated this post with @Cyrup’s overview of the Evolution changes. It very explicitly addresses the challenge of the older system with evolutions and the increasing difficulty in the future; this makes sense as it would be harder to evolve epic to legendary than rare to epic because of the disparity between drop rates of rare and epic gear. That would imply to me that the new system would have a drop rates of relics that would at least approximate the existing system which was acknowledged as being too difficult already (I should be able to find enough resources over let’s say a few days to do an evolution of uncommon to rare or rare to epic and then have a better chance going forward of being able to do evolves to legenadary and mythic.) But again, and I can’t repeat it enough, that is not the result of the new system. NOT EVEN CLOSE. I really must stress how much of a communication failure this is and how disconnected from reality the pitch on this update has been.