Cosmic Exploration is Not Scaled For Low-Population Servers!

Hello, I just wanted to comment on the state of Cosmic Exploration progression on the Materia Data Center. I play on Sephirot, and we recently had one of our development fates reach 98%, but the timer ran out before we could clear (after 40 straight minutes of progress). While I understand that this is meant to be big group content, this was during our peak gameplay hours, and we still failed to clear even with everyone working their hardest.

We are at an extremely unfair disadvantage because of our smaller player count, and I'm concerned that these repeated failures will learn to burnout and a lack of interest in finishing this content at all (this also applies to smaller data centers, like Dynamis). I hope that the development team addresses this issue as soon as possible, because the content is very enjoyable otherwise, but this is becoming a serious problem that is causing a lot of players to develop a toxic mindset surrounding it. Thank you!

In addition to the complaints above, we are locked out of completing mech ops and critical missions until we have cleared the FATEs, which are 8 hours apart after we fail them. The lack of access to core gameplay mechanics for the zone and being punished for our smaller player count is very disheartening, and many people are already losing interest because of this.

We're having the same issues on Dynamis, and this is really discouraging. If you live on a low pop DC, this gameplay just isn't any fun.

i came here to make my own complaint post about the FATEs on the Materia DC, then i saw yours that just perfectly explained my issue.

its so insanely unfair. i participated in three FATEs recently, one on Ravana (during peak hours) and two on Sephirot (one during peak hours and one around midnight in western australia timezone).

the one on Ravana succeeded, but only /just/ with 40 seconds to spare. both of the FATEs on Sephirot failed.

this is insane, we desperately need these FATEs to adjust with how many people are in the instance. its completely impossible to finish. once again we are dealing with another stupid problem for low populated servers that makes me regret moving from NA, despite the high ping on there while living in australia. its not fun being so limited on Materia. we also badly need Data Center travel, i’d love to continue playing the game i pay for when the entire DC decides to go to bed.

Scaling for lower population servers is definitely needed. I think it would also be nice to move the event starting times into the most active time periods for each server. If this time shifting could be done say, 50% of the time, it would give both players during peak and off peak times a fair shot at getting to participate in the FATE.

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Originally Posted by Junipermoon

Hello, I just wanted to comment on the state of Cosmic Exploration progression on the Materia Data Center. I play on Sephirot, and we recently had one of our development fates reach 98%, but the timer ran out before we could clear (after 40 straight minutes of progress). While I understand that this is meant to be big group content, this was during our peak gameplay hours, and we still failed to clear even with everyone working their hardest.

We are at an extremely unfair disadvantage because of our smaller player count, and I'm concerned that these repeated failures will learn to burnout and a lack of interest in finishing this content at all (this also applies to smaller data centers, like Dynamis). I hope that the development team addresses this issue as soon as possible, because the content is very enjoyable otherwise, but this is becoming a serious problem that is causing a lot of players to develop a toxic mindset surrounding it. Thank you!

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Idk about other servers as I haven't played my characters on NA for a while now but i'm assuming most have the 5 instances, maybe more, its honestly just lazy at this point and being ignored by devs, simple enough coding to scale by the amount of players in the instances when the fate starts, yet they choose the route of laziness/ignorance.
Quick way to make decent content dead content.

After a few cycles it seems that the FATEs do become substantially easier after a few failures, but the timing of this is frustrating – each time it is ready to progress, we will have mass-effort groups at night that can't get there even with sustained effort, but then it gets completed in off-peak hours early the next day.

They are horribly out scaled that there is no need to even try to do them. SE have dropped the ball massively on this one.

From an large server:

Its not scaled for large servers either, neither progress nor fates... while we make it every time, i keep missing em and the two times i was there it was still so fast....

I appreciate you mentioning that the higher pop servers have issues with the lack of scaling too. The world progression content doesn't take active server populations at all and it's driving us insane on smaller servers right now.

I'm on a medium population server, and we just failed a fate with 200 people. You need 300 people which is sort of crazy numbers. This was on a Saturday on a weekend as well.

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Originally Posted by Kuroka

Its not scaled for large servers either, neither progress nor fates...

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Even for large servers its often close to failure. And thats 300+ people doing that fate. And yes 300 people doing the fate for 30+mins.

Also, you arent missing out on much from these fates, i think the only reason they tied mech ops/red alert is just to make sure people will do these fates, as the rewards from the fates are horrible (stellar missions are often more efficient for rewards).

I still do miss out, being there is a one time only, im already salty i never saw the mor dhona buid up...

And yesterday we missed the next fate again at night, then in the morning... we managed the 3rd one, but barely missed the 2nd fate again.
Its second try is at 8:00 which most likely will fail and then in the afternoon again...

We just failed our second attempt on Hyperion this morning with 149 people across the 5 instances shortly before starting. We got about halfway finished in 40 minutes, you really do need 300+ players to clear this. By this time interest is waning with most probably already getting the rewards they wanted by grinding or on the market board. And Occult Crescent coming on Tuesday is gonna really kill it.

Like i get it, ok, we should not clear this with like 10 ppl, but if all instances have about 100-150 ppl, please scale for that...

Last night, Hyperion was able to clear the Energization Station construction on the 3rd and final attempt! I couldn't be there myself due to a dinner date (yay!), but a friend told me that they came back with a vengeance and crushed it! And that got me to thinking. If they did scale this, we would game the heck outta it and figure out the absolute minimum work to clear it. It wouldn't be the same experience and maybe there wouldn't be any stakes high enough for a server to rally around the cause. I don't like failing, but I know how we are. So the only thing I think I'd like to see is the times shifted to when players on that server are active. Only light scaling for low pop servers, but not the rest of us who have a chance to rally enough people. IDK, I'm just so proud of Hyperion because I thought people might just give up and let it auto-complete.