Cosmic Exploration on Low Pop Servers

Hiya!

As title suggests, I wanted to talk about how miserable it was failing a Fate not long ago on Marilith- Dynamis. It was the section where you must place new batteries as a group into rovers....

These things are not scaled properly to these low pop servers and we failed it with a 91, 92% or something. It feels pretty bad to be clicking on these things for 35+ mins of my time just to end up failing. I know that bigger servers are having quite the opposite issue, and I totally understand and emphasize with those who have jobs too, but now we're even locked out of trying again or getting instances with mechs for another 7-8 hrs.... and it'll start to be slightly out of NA primetime on the east coast once this is possible again.

I'm usually not a complainer, I can't even recall if I've posted on the forums before now other than asking fanfest questions for the dev team -- but this is a massive problem and its Day 1....

After it failed, there was definitely people flaming others for quitting out so early or being afk and/or crafting instead of partaking in the fate. This is definitely not the way to bring together low pop servers that already server hop to raid or pf things.

I'd love to hear yalls thoughts on this. I know the first Fates also failed this morning too, but I wasn't able to get on until 12pm est anyway.

Thanks for taking the time to read this <3

Overworld fates scale depending on active participation. I'm surprised that CE fates don't follow the same internal rules.

Hello, Materia player here. Similar problems happening here too.

I happened to be in CE with some friends when the same progression FATE OP mentioned popped on Sophia, it was about 12:15am when it happened and we unfortunately failed the fate at ~75%. The next pop was 8:30am this morning and that failed too.

At the time of me writing this, I've been told that 4/5 of the OCE servers are stuck, except for Ravana due to numbers. We might get lucky with the afternoon pop but overworld FATES not spawning until the progression FATE is completed is also really unfortunate and punishing for servers that just don't have the numbers available right now. If scaling or something similar could be added or adjusted to alleviate this, that would be awesome.

Also I think instances might not be needed on lower population servers, though I understand that it's maybe not something that's allocated per DC/server and needs to be blanket applied, but it would be nice if that can be changed/considered!
[EDIT] Now learning that each instance needs to clear the FATE for it to succeed, I seriously think that needs to be reconsidered for low population servers! This just isn't possible if everyone is spread that thin.

I recall Ishgard Restoration didn't have these issues, but since then I understand there's been more servers added and dilution of player population. I'm glad to hear Materia's problems aren't isolated, sorry to hear about how things are going on Dynamis. My friends and I are keen to make progress on this content and get some of the fun rewards/titles, but at the moment our hype for it is dying pretty fast due to a bunch of stacking factors. Hope something can be done.

This problem is even worse for the lowest pop servers (Zurvan and Bismarck on Materia, Cuchulainn, Golem, Kraken, and Rafflesia on Dynamis). None of these servers have been able to advance past phase 1. I've already seen people saying they're going to quit doing Cosmic, because it feels pointless knowing there just aren't enough bodies on their server to advance.

Sqenix needs to add scaling for the rank up FATEs to ensure lower pop worlds don't get completely shafted.

I would like to request SE does an Emergency Maintenance to address this.

My suggestion is to allow percent progress made in the Base Leveling FATEs to carry over to the next FATE 8 hours later (to a maximum of 80%).

That way worlds can slowly make progress and not have Mech FATEs permanently stop while waiting for it to upgrade indefinitely.

This is like my first time posting on the forums as well. I've been enjoying CE so far, personally - I like how it is challenging level 100 content for gatherers and crafters, and it really makes you lock in. I also enjoy Dynamis' small-town feel for many reasons! I like that there is an option for people who want a lower-population FFXIV experience.

However, I too wish there had been more consideration for smaller worlds in CE's rollout. If it is the case that FATE completion depends on every instance meeting requirements, maybe lower population worlds could have less instances (5 is a lot! On Maduin, we've been averaging around 90 in I1, and around 30-40 people in the other instances).

I think Cosmic Exploration is a great step up from Ishgardian Restoration and Island Sanctuary. I just hope that there is more consideration for the diversity of social environments on different worlds moving forward, and that hopefully things can be evened out for those of us who have less hands working because there are just less people here.

(Also - I'm really missing the item text and fish lore! I always take the time to read those because there's some really excellent jokes and bits of lore tucked away in there. I want to know what's up with the eyeballingway fish!)

This requires an emergency-shutdown level maintenance on so many levels. It's either feast of famine. Either servers blow through it so quickly you can't participate unless you took PTO or servers cannot progress. It's exceedingly rare that MMOs experience such a completely disjointed progression that this simply cannot be allowed to progress.

I'm on marilith and we just failed again at 90ish%- we have to wait till 10 AM to maybe have a chance. Making it worse it's nearly an hour of doing one menial thing over and over again only tail because despite everyone there- you didn't have enough people.

Who thought this through? did they test it? Why don't these scale by participation or server pop? You have have half the player base mad they can't experience it because it's over too quickly and people on the "preferred" worlds not even to do it. What a joke.

If the fate was fun and engaging it maybe wouldn't be so bad, but it's actually legit stupidly mindless on top of being slow. I'm actually impressed by this game's ability to be unimpressive at this point.

Echoing other people's complaints. Marilith doesn't deserve to hit a 90%+ only to fail both times and start from zero. That's nearly an hour and a half of the day of 100+ players gone to waste.

"Get more people to help" won't solve this issue. The CE base has more activity than I've ever seen in a single zone outside of 7.0 hunt targets and that's because every other server's players COULD come to us.

It doesn't take an expert game design team to know this implementation didn't account for low pop. Scale it down.

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Originally Posted by Andanie

I'm on marilith and we just failed again at 90ish%- we have to wait till 10 AM to maybe have a chance. Making it worse it's nearly an hour of doing one menial thing over and over again only tail because despite everyone there- you didn't have enough people.

Who thought this through? did they test it? Why don't these scale by participation or server pop? You have have half the player base mad they can't experience it because it's over too quickly and people on the "preferred" worlds not even to do it. What a joke.

If the fate was fun and engaging it maybe wouldn't be so bad, but it's actually legit stupidly mindless on top of being slow. I'm actually impressed by this game's ability to be unimpressive at this point.

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Yuup -- I stayed up a little bit later after my static raid night to craft and do the Fate one more time. It REALLY feels bad to fail at 91% and get maybe some scripts I could've gotten the same way, if not more, had I sat down and crafted the whole 40 mins... plus all my doh/dol are 100 so its not like the xp incentive is applicable to me. I'm definitely going to be still asleep by the time the next event rolls around.

I come from one of the lowest pop servers, Rafflesia. The balance is terrible. Locking even basic missions behind the first FATE locked all of our world out of even the most lightweight of engaging content outside of simple crafting and gathering. It's hard to keep people excited or feeling hopeful when we spend 20 minutes for 5% on a FATE. But hey, don't worry guys, we will fail it so maybe the next one will be easier. It's clear that accounting for low population worlds wasn't in the cards. It's incredibly disheartening seeing other Data Centers enjoying the full breadth of the update while most of Dynamis struggles to even see past the introduction. Friends from other DCs can't even help us as it's world gated. It makes Dynamis feel even more isolated than before. I met several people tonight considering moving off of Dynamis simply so they can actually enjoy the update.

And on the flip side, I have high population server friends absolutely gutted they missed all the progress. What I want to know is; why wasn't progress put behind a regional or global barrier? Have /everyone's/ contributions help everyone. Or, actually do what Bozja does and scale the content to who is in the instance. Even with all hands on deck, it wasn't close to enough. It's disheartening.

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Originally Posted by Exmo

Overworld fates scale depending on active participation. I'm surprised that CE fates don't follow the same internal rules.

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They should, i mean in Bozja they do at least.

I think i remember something with Ishgard where if a FATE failed, the next one was the same, but much easier, or like a "second half" to the previous one, that was guaranteed to finish, people just had to show up. might be the same with this.

So what if it is easier? This is downright shameful that they have designed it this way. We managed to get the 1st fate done by banding together and, yea, likely the requirements eased. Then the 2nd one failed due to nowhere near enough people being available. The next chance to do this fate, for Bismarck, is 2am NZ time. Midnight AU west coast. How many do you think will be up at that time? And after that? 10am. So likely, it wont happen till 8pm tomorrow night. In the meantime, we can't do any other activity, than levequests, because some genius designer seemingly decided to lock the mech missions if the fate is pending. Meanwhile, other more populated worlds/DCs get to enjoy the wider content.

It's pathetic and we should be expecting CBU3 to do better. How can you not even account for low pop worlds? They have all the data. They should have foreseen how this would play out.

Yea... yesterday we got the rewards for succeeding at stage 2 with one second left to spare on Maduin, but the game put us back on an eight hour cooldown. It was just extremely disheartening and I had to log off in disbelief.