Cosmic Exploration Bugs/Poor Planning (*VENT*)

CE would be a great experience...if I were on a larger server. I don't understand why small DC's like Dynamis are getting punished when you have Aether and Primal clearing in just 20 or less minutes.

The worst part isn't even being locked out of Red Alerts and Mech Ops for days at a time due to the wide window for the FATES to pop (and normally 2/3 attempts are during normal work hours) but that on Maduin we constantly have instances breaking and so we lose anywhere from 10 to 30 people who could help every. single. time.

Again, the idea behind CE isn't bad. Even the rewards are fine - but the fact that the FATES are given a "one-size-fits all" approach when you have such a drastic population difference between DCs on top of instances constantly going down is sad and poor planning on SE's part.

Sincerely, everyone on Dynamis who WANTS THEIR RED ALERTS BACK GOSH DARN IT

Nah even on a larger server the luster is starting to get lost, the overall content design is horrible and I don't understand what gave them the idea to make a community based content solo-content. Because at the end of the day this is just solo content with sprinkles of people doing the same objective together but not exactly interacting with one another.

Where do players interact in this content:
Mech FATE, Progression FATE, that's it. Red Alerts are just missions where people do solo missions to fill the progress bar.

What happened to gathering materials, trading amongst your fellow players and working together to gather materials to build complex objects? Why does the core concept of what "Cosmic Exploration" should be about not exist? Why am I not gathering wood, to give to a carpenter, who in turn produces materials a blacksmith might need in order to finish a complex object designed by a goldsmith that uses resources from armor/alch/weaver?

It blows my mind just how single-player focused this content is, that progress bar to get to the next stage is not a multiplayer experience, it's a carrot on a stick that everyone puts their progress into but players aren't actively working together to progress, they are doing solo missions to progress that bar. It's all solo, and honestly that's why I see the progress bar for most areas not going up as much as others because people are burned out by it. How is it that I can spend half a day progressing, getting nearly 100k points in a craft and yet that bar doesn't even move up once. Worse yet, within that same time frame even on a "rank day" there were only under 200 people between all the zones that are suppose to support 200 each and even now the number is at 111. The fact that that many people are engaged with this content 2 weeks in speaks volumes of how poorly designed it is since the only way to engage with this content is in the zone, you can easily see just how many people are interested by the content by who is logged in and even then those numbers aren't accurate because in the current instant I'm in 19, I can see 8 people are afk, so even those 111 currently inside might only amount to 40-50 people actually doing the content while the rest are afk waiting for red alerts, mech ops or weather/time missions to appear.

And the reason this occurs is because the Gathering Missions are too time consuming to be worthwhile, so you wait on Red Alerts and for Crafting missions, the weather/time nodes give you the best gains for your time so you might as well wait on those knowing you can consistently pick to do that mission.

Red Alert fishing is about 615/turn in, within a 20 minute time frame you can potentially 7 times for like 4305 compared to doing the actual missions where you could get anywhere from 0-1000 for something that could take 5 minutes meanwhile the Red Alert is a guaranteed 615 with 0 ranking and you can just keep doing them until you run out of time.

Similar with crafting, if we go based on about a 20 min comparison with someone who is fully melded, with the current missions available our best per minute missions are 205/167/166 which in 20 minutes would be 4100, 3340 and 3320.

Now with the weather missions, their per minutes for getting silver since it's way faster than pushing for gold are 486/516 per minute which comes out to 9720 and 10320 every 20 minutes, and while yes they are random you have to ask yourself as a player, do I really want to grind gains to get less when I could be doing other content and waiting on the weather nodes to appear.

Even the timed nodes are another decent one to wait on as they are about a 6-9 minute investment if you can squeeze in that 3rd synth where you can get 2670 points for 9 minutes of your time.

Because SE made this content just a numbers game with no human interaction that's how players are going to look at it, at least that's the way I'm looking at it, I look at how I can progress my class rank the quickest and that route becomes

Gatherers=Red Alert
Crafters=Weather/Timed Nodes

It's as basic as that, the only reason you do the other missions are to get gold rank for the achievement and to unlock new missions but past that there are no reason to spam these missions when you can allocate your time better by doing the content when it gives the most rewards.

last weekend i spend some time in CE, around 3-6 am, the zone was dead empty.

I got into every single Mech-op that happened, and those happened more often than i could farm 1000 moon money o buy a new ticket, i also had a red alert with less than 10 people participating.

All the fates scale with player numbers to my observation.