Cosmic Exploration on Dynamis needs an adjustment

Help out smaller worlds. 40 min to fail a necessity over and over is so disheartening. And then by failing we don't get mech ops or red alerts until completed? Absolutely awful design. Think about Dynamis and small dcs before releasing content like this please
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GpqV0LYa...jpg&name=small

An actual valid complaint.

I was here on Maduin for this. A lot of people figured very early on that unless more people logged on, we weren't clearing this. We were making progress way too slow, it took us until a bit under halfway (if I remember correctly) to get 25%. We have a linkshell set up and everything, people were telling their friends to come help, and yet it just wasn't doable. We spent 40 minutes and got to 98%, and this was at around 6pm central. The next one will be at 2am, and there just aren't going to be as many people online.

(I couldn't check directly, but people in the chat were saying we had around 150 people in all the instances combined, who were getting around 75-90 contribution if they were playing the whole time.)

This has happened with the first attempt of every upgrade we've had to do - the first one failed with 40%, and the second one (where a lot more people participated) succeeded, at least in Instance 1 - and then failed anyway because of some server tick issue. It's extremely demoralizing. It makes the last 40 minutes of running around feel entirely wasted.

Especially with the 8-hour lockout - I could live with an 8-hour wait, it's not the end of the world for me, but the fact that it also locks us out of the mech ops and red alerts is just... horrible. I can't understand why this design choice was made.

Clearly, these CE fates weren't suppposed to feel like a Savage version of themselves, since other (populated) data centers are clearing these within 10-20 minutes, but it really does feel like every single player has to be there and be going at 100%, robot-like efficiency for us to even have a hope of clearing.

I really like Cosmic Exploration so far! It's just being dampened by the extreme difficulty that low-pop servers have for seemingly no reason. This cannot be the intended gameplay experience. It's like SE forgot that some of their servers were smaller.

Also from Maduin and I've been to every single fate. The first one, I understood failing. It was so early in the day, not many people were on. But that 40% failing taking 40 minutes was rough.

The second fail at basically 100% was awful. We really thought we had it. We hit 100% at the very last second. We didn't get the pop up saying the mission was abandoned and we got the rewards you get when successfully completing the mission/fate, but it never upgraded and we got the 7 hour timer.

This most recent one, failing at 98% at a good time of day, was so frustrating. The next one would be around midnight, meaning less people. If we fail that one as well, that'll be 16+ hours with no red alerts or mech ops. It feels like we are being punished for not having enough people on our worlds. We're already suffering taking up the entire 40 minutes to complete these fates that take other worlds 10-20 minutes to complete. There has to be some way to scale the progress. Aether already has worlds on 7 while Dynamis and Oceania has worlds still stuck on 3.

Materia is having the same problem.

On the first day 4/5 Materia servers failed the stage 3 upgrade because the second upgrade fate popped at midnight when everyone was asleep. On Sophia we then went 16 hours without a single red alert or CE because of the failure cooldown....on the first day. Because the midnight failure, the next one came at 8am on a weekday. Then the third came at 5pm ish and finally we cleared that to get to the third. Now to get to stage 4 we've failed again because it came at 10am on a weekday.

Feels like we are just being punished for being on a low pop server at this point.

It's just incredibly stupid. I'm sorry, but it is. There's no reason this can't scale with participants. WE already take so much longer to fill our bar- at the very least make the fate easy enough to succeed. Adding to that how boring they are it really does feel like a punishment.

Mind you, they're locking Dynamis members off of other data centers to get us to play on it- and when we do, we're unable to enjoy an expansion feature fully because they didn't account for the low population.

Agree with this thread, it's hard not to feel left out and completely an afterthought as someone from Marilith. I've been feeling incredibly disheartened and tired from all the time spent toiling away at the upgrade fates in a nerve wrecking pace, only for them to fail - and the following one happening in a very unfortunate time for NA players means we are pretty much guaranteed to have fates failing in sequence (this has already happened to us).
We are calling friends, pinging everyone on linkshells and shouting in cities and it stills seems like it's not enough to advance. Feels like a punishment for all of our time and effort pushing for our upgrades.

I'm begging SE to take worlds with a small population of endgame players into consideration, since the cooldown after a failed upgrade fate means we're completely cut out from a big part of the new content inside cosmic exploration.

at least I'm not alone. our next shot is here in 20 min and I'm already prepping myself for a potential fail due to the time but damn it i'll be there trying

12am post update for Maduin: second attempt, about 30 less people because of the time, and we were at 50% with 7 minutes remaining. Most of us gave up. Next attempt would be about 8am pst. Expecting to fail it too.

Also just came from the failed fate on Maduin - I overall like Cosmic Exploration (getting to develop and use skills & strategies for crafting & gathering! Awesome!) and I like living on a lower-population DC/world for a variety of reasons. But these advancement fates... the tedium of the gameplay (just clicking and running? Not even letting us use our classes like for red alerts?), the lack of scaling for server size/active players/etc, and lockout from mech ops/red alerts is pretty demoralizing. And I want to contribute to my homeworld, so it makes me hold off from doing stellar missions since I don't want to have that not contribute to the next stage of development advancement.

There's a bit of an urban legend going on with us now, that the third time's "the charm" and it'll just let us progress after a third failure. I really hope we succeed, but 8 AM PST on a Tuesday is not Dynamis peak hours.

I try to stay pretty positive and I don't like to be a doomer. I did not anticipate Dynamis progressing CE at the same rate as larger DCs, but I would prefer if people felt less demoralized/disinterested about Cosmic Exploration (as many in shout chat, linkshells, and Discord servers have been) due to failures after various tedious grinds.

I hope in the next stages of Cosmic Exploration that different server population sizes are taken into consideration. I hope that all of us who are putting in the hard work to help see Dynamis succeed will be allowed to have the fruits of our labor grow. I hope to see Sinus Ardorum completed on Maduin and other Dynamis worlds! I hope that people continue to show up, but I think that unless this is balanced for our circumstances (and SE knows we have a smaller population and has made use of it - remember the 7.0 travelling restrictions), each stage will be harder and harder to achieve for us.

It would be great if this could be balanced more appropriately for us smaller worlds.

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Originally Posted by cidfox

Help out smaller worlds. 40 min to fail a necessity over and over is so disheartening. And then by failing we don't get mech ops or red alerts until completed? Absolutely awful design. Think about Dynamis and small dcs before releasing content like this please
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GpqV0LYa...jpg&name=small

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So I'm guessing this content will also be fomo. Because that will be all world's once it's old.
Which I don't give sht about tbh.
But it seems, completely wrong for ' " 'Casual' " ' content.
Why is scaling so apparently impossible to achieve?

Also, they have thought about it. And decided 'to do' nothing, for now. Generally make everything as easy as possible at first thought, and if what emerges from that doesn't work out, well it's just a shame it 'has' to be that way and nothing else is workable.
In life and in software especially, there is generally only one way of doing things (irony).

I just came here to gloat because Hali has been killing it! Hali comes through! Get good nerds! PEACE!

I love that last night as well we had a group of people do a mech op fate which made us probably lose a lot of progress. Why spawn other fates during this event? Some people aren't kind on helping. And it's not fair to us Marilith players who wasted 40 minutes of clicking and almost had it done only to fail. I wish it did a thing like saved progress over for the next try so we could just be done with it. The next window it open was 4am on a week day!!!! We only had 18 people online and failed yet again. Then we have Data centers like Aether/JP that are already powering through it with no issues. Hali just because you won this one thing doesn't mean anything. One win over many losses don't prove a good server or community, the Kindness of not gloating to others it what makes a good group and place.

I wonder if they could at least add an Echo as a temporary measure, and shorten the timer for trying again to maybe 4h or so? (Obviously proper balancing would be a better method but it might take a while longer to adjust a somewhat flexible system, I could imagine.)

It blows my mind that the devs still can't make dynamic systems. These FATEs should be dynamic on how many people are in the instance at the time the FATE starts. If more players enter it adjust on the fly.

I remember in World of Warcraft Legions how a world boss would adjust on the fly with how many people are attacking it. The more players the more HP it had. If the boss spawned during a low time it would have much less HP allowing the current players to still kill it.

I appreciate that there's a mechanism that makes it so we don't fail our third attempt. I wish we weren't locked out of mech ops and red alerts while we wait to fail twice before finally succeeding, though. Could we please have scaling that gives us even a chance to succeed on our first attempt and/or not lock us out of other key content while we wait for the third?

Even Seraph, the most populated world in Dynamis has failed a few times because of too little people when these pop up around 5 AM Mountain Time. Please make them dynamic because we failed a battery one yesterday despite having over 100 people in the instance and we barely got to 40 percent when we failed it. Fortunately we passed it once it was in the afternoon but the issue remains that even Seraph has these issues as the most populous server in Dynamis, so please make them dynamic like they do for normal Fates.

I think they can't just adjust the difficulty of the upgrade FATEs because they want it to be the same on every server because of the rankings. Otherwise it would not be fair for rankings if some servers get treated differently. What they could do however is increasing the time for the FATEs to 60 or even 90 minutes so that servers with low participation have a better chance to complete them too.

Kinda feel they should have upped the required input on these things, while either making the time limit extremely generous or removed it entirely.
Could have been neat to have this 'fate' thing going for several hours, players coming and going, chipping away at it.

Rafflesia reporting in for our second out of third mandatory fail before we /actually/ clear.
As many others have said, it stinks for us to have to take literal days to just progress to a big FATE anyway, only to be locked out of mech ops and other engaging content for a minimum of an additional day just to progress because of how the big FATEs work. Additionally, the actual big FATEs are boring - I sure do love encouraging my fellow Rafflesians to just grit their teeth through a 45 minute drone charging session that we know we'll fail just for some measly bonuses.

It feels like Dynamis and other low population servers were just forgotten when the balance design for this was introduced.

Failed at 33% on Kraken. You really need to adjust them based on server population.

Ragnarok also just failed at 86 % or so. Next one will probably fail again.

I really hope the devs are looking at their own statistics and telemetry data carefully and don't wait until the next bigger patch until they do something about this.

I don't need to be on Dynamis to know that this is a big problem. Most other servers worldwide are around the progress point you see on the few Primal DCs I added for comparison.

https://imgur.com/4cl7Zj8h.jpg

https://imgur.com/tcM9NaBh.jpg

OK, that is so not fair. They need to adjust these to the amount of players within the zone like they do with fates.

Or better yet - look at Dynamis population across all servers and disable the split instances for dynamic alone.

Dynamis has been struggling since it's creation - and this just shows it.

When DC transfers opened up to Dynamis I hopped over to help with ques and party finder stuff. (My ping was terrible)

I hope this gets sorted for you guys, I've seen you struggle alot and it's most likely putting newer players off from buying the game.

The progression should not have actually been server contribution based, but just phased releases. Maybe weekly. Keep everyone on the same page.
I say this from a large server. It didn't feel like community progress, especially since the first few phases were complete before I even got to play.

If it just phased every week for all servers, larger servers could have a chance to see it, and smaller servers wouldn't fall behind.

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Originally Posted by DivineP

OK, that is so not fair. They need to adjust these to the amount of players within the zone like they do with fates.

Or better yet - look at Dynamis population across all servers and disable the split instances for dynamic alone.

Dynamis has been struggling since it's creation - and this just shows it.

When DC transfers opened up to Dynamis I hopped over to help with ques and party finder stuff. (My ping was terrible)

I hope this gets sorted for you guys, I've seen you struggle alot and it's most likely putting newer players off from buying the game.

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I agree with a lot of the things you've said - but especially the fact we shouldn't have split instances. It fragments an already scattered and small playerbase. Myself and a few others are working hard on community building in the face of CE being as rough as it has been for us. If you aren't shoved into the single busiest instance, you're likely to join the new zone for the first time and believe it's dead. Which isn't true, either. Dynamis DOES have active CE players like everyone else, our contributions just feel like pittances because we have to compete with the other data centers.

I agree with Titor as well. Phased releases would have kept everyone on the same playing field. My friends from Aether waking up on release day were shattered that they couldn't be part of each progression stage. We do get a chance to revel in each tiny update stage....and it's something we all collectively celebrate. I do think those in larger servers should get to experience that excitement we are so lucky to find.

They dont know how to make content scale down to the number of people that doing the content. WoW does it better

I feel like it's super punishing on a personal level here too. The grind dyna players have vs big servers. Without Mech ops/Red alerts to break up the missions feels super punishing and not for a lack of trying. Taking content away for simply being a lower pop server, is frankly just mean and not a purposeful mechanic nor is it conducive to growing the lower population servers.

We understand we're going to be slower than larger servers, I don't mind the slower growth. It's nice to get the chance to see everything too. However, punishing us for what we legitimately cannot control is just asinine.

I kept an eye on the status report and noticed everyone in Dynamis is on stage 5 now, but also fairly equal in standing otherwise. Does this mean there is some failsafe in place after all or was the duty spawn time and the power of anime in your favour this time?

(If there'd be some sort of failsafe for attempt >9000 this would be at least *some* relief but of course the point remains that it shouldn't be so damn imbalanced that people require it at all. You all are already giving 110% for this.)

We're coordinating in DC discords and linkshells to get enough people to pass the hurdles. The upgrade fates last the full 40 mins and still are only being won by the barest of margins. People are recruiting fc mates and other friends who aren't even trying to do this stuff to pass these. We have main city shouts, pfs alerting the server and everything happening and we still can barely clear. It's ROUGH.

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Originally Posted by Minali

I kept an eye on the status report and noticed everyone in Dynamis is on stage 5 now, but also fairly equal in standing otherwise. Does this mean there is some failsafe in place after all or was the duty spawn time and the power of anime in your favour this time?

(If there'd be some sort of failsafe for attempt >9000 this would be at least *some* relief but of course the point remains that it shouldn't be so damn imbalanced that people require it at all. You all are already giving 110% for this.)

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I think you automatically succeed at the 4th attempt if the first 3 fail, but that's a very long time to wait just because SE insisted on a needless DC.

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Originally Posted by oreorion

Especially with the 8-hour lockout - I could live with an 8-hour wait, it's not the end of the world for me, but the fact that it also locks us out of the mech ops and red alerts is just... horrible. I can't understand why this design choice was made.

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I guess this kind of "punishment" is needed to make more people participate in these events. Most people probably dont care about the fates, unless you take their beloved critical alarms from them

Yeah but people who don't craft/gather are getting roped into this to help clear these stages. That's the level of desperation and it shouldn't be making people call in favors with friends to "clear" these and get the server's progress going. They should be scaled enough so the population can clear it without feeling like they're being punished for being on a lower population server, especially when SE did ask people to move there.

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Originally Posted by ServerCollaps

I guess this kind of "punishment" is needed to make more people participate in these events. Most people probably dont care about the fates, unless you take their beloved critical alarms from them

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That would be fair enough, but if they have to take the alarms away they should have shortened the wait somewhat. If we lose a fate at 6 in the afternoon, there are going to be way less people online at 2 AM, and even those that are probably think "ah nobody's going to be here, so what's the point of showing up?" and so we're stuck for 16 hours (or a whole 24 if people are at work or aren't awake at 10!) without any of the mech ops or red alerts. 4 or even 6 hours would make that way less painful.

We literally had 2 of our 5 instances break! This is ridiculous and should have been obvious from the start. I literally HAVE to go to zalera to even be able to do my daily/weeklys in a timely manner. Maduin is not scaled correctly for the upgrade FATE's and needs to be patched. Immediately. If we can't go to other moons, make ours worth staying on!!

Also, suspending Mech Ops and Red Alerts during the 8 hour wait for the construction FATE to begin is bad. When we have to wait 3 failed FATEs for the mercy mechanic to kick in, and there are 2 construction phases back to back, that means 2 full days of no Mech Ops and no Red Alerts.

I'm absolutely willing to tolerate that being on a smaller server means slower progress in things like Cosmic Exploration. We just don't have the people! But locking out mech ops and red alerts for 8 hours per failure feels extremely bad, like we're being punished by having our toys taken away for not being able to assemble a 300-strong force at 3 in the morning or in the middle of the workday. It makes it very disheartening to show up and try our best at these 40-minute fates (which are, honestly, not nearly interesting enough to merit running for that long) and then be told that our best is not good enough so no bulldozers for you.

They should rethink the whole construction FATE thing. Instead of having a single FATE that unlocks a moon base stage when completed (or after 3 attempts), perhaps it could have a construction phase that lasts a hard fixed 24 hours. During that time, there would be a construction FATE every hour, starting exactly on the hour. The FATEs would be scaled for the number of participating players. Each player would be granted the full reward for participating in one, while participating in additional FATEs during the same construction phase would grant diminishing returns. The time to the next FATE and the time to the final FATE would both be prominently displayed, both in-game and on the Cosmic Exploration status page on the Lodestone.

This would allow players to participate at times that are convenient for them, and ensure that people don't miss out because the FATE happened at an inconvenient time. The diminishing returns would ensure that players don't feel pressured to do an excessive number of FATEs, while still giving people a reason to stay and do a couple more FATEs.

I noticed this event seems like pretty much a reskin of Ishgard Restoration... IN SPACE! Perhaps this could be applied to the rest of the Cosmic Exploration series, and to future similar events. If there is ever an "FFXIV Classic", it could also be applied to Ishgard Restoration.

So all this time and they still haven't fixed these issues? GOOD GRIEF.

It simply isn't fair when high-pop worlds/DCs have a huge advantage over low-pop ones like this. It's even WORSE that failing the build "Fate" means you're locked out of Red Alerts and Mech Ops for EIGHT HOURS, either because someone on the dev team didn't realize LEAVING the Build Fate banner up would block those other two from manifesting, or something thought it *should* be a "punishment." I'm guessing it was probably the former, but couldn't they hotfix to move the "Fate" bar to another location on screen, and leave the top of screen for the other two?

Also, IMO, small pop-worlds and "Fates" that pop in the middle of the night on a weekday ought to be scaled up, maybe with progress going twice as fast or something?

I'm on a higher population world. So far we've not had a build "Fate" fail, thankfully, but I look at what's happening to folks on Dynamis, on Chaos, and some other DC's, and I'm like what the heck? I mean, why do we even HAVE "server and world standings" on lodestone in the first place, when this is so UNEVEN, and UNFAIR to the smaller-pop worlds/DCs?

BTW side note, it also kills me that the dang rabbit who gives individual "stellar standings" for 24 hrs for single players, is programmed to vague-book us ON our standings. Like, right after he "activates" for his next 24 hour period, he'll tell me "You're in the top 10%." Then ten minutes later he says something like, "Well we have your name recorded, so keep trying." WHAT? Why on earth won't he give us actual NUMBERS of where we stand? Because it makes a big difference if you're "Now in the top 15%," or "Now in the 50 percentile." And there's NOWHERE ELSE that I've found that gives ANYTHING on WHERE we stand---can't find anything on Lodestone or anywhere else. It's incredibly DEmotivating and discouraging to me, and to others I've spoken with about it.

And yet I see all the time on Lodestone character page people's ratings for Crystalline Conflict.... :( WHY do we not get that for THIS particular "contest"?

Honestly, the "contest" aspects of this whole Cosmic Exploration thing, are NOT well-planned. At ALL. It's so frustrating.

But of the two, I'd take getting the "Fate" issue (especially RAs and Tech Ops) fixed, over the individual standings things, because the former is affecting entire worlds... and as many have said here, worlds SE was BEGGING people to MOVE to in the first place. I just can't even. WHY? Folks on those worlds DESERVE a fair chance at meeting these arbitrary goals, dang it.

My heart goes out to all of you getting hit with these build "Fate Fails" and especially the lock-out for RAs and Tech Ops. It's like they're punishing you for not crossing the finish line in the race, when they started you 200 yards back from the others running it. It's just not fair.

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Originally Posted by Nana_Bear

But of the two, I'd take getting the "Fate" issue (especially RAs and Tech Ops) fixed, over the individual standings things, because the former is affecting entire worlds... and as many have said here, worlds SE was BEGGING people to MOVE to in the first place.

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This is part of why I'm so confused they've done nothing to acknowledge this problem at all in the time CE has been out. I remember someone saying in shout chat during one of the fates that for some of their friends, CE being so unbalanced for low pop servers was what got them to transfer off of Dynamis. If they really do want people to move to Dynamis so badly, then why didn't they at least check to make sure their new content worked properly with Dynamis amounts of players?? Did they think they could manifest 400-player instances by just making it exactly the same and believing hard enough? I get the DC is named Dynamis, but I don't think it works that way.