Thank you, Square, for listening to the majority.

[Alucard135]

This is a bit hyperbolic. Those 9132 players on Mateus are not on and playing 24/7 and the majority of that population is unlikely to have more than a passing interest in the Firmament.

This is where I'll stop you. People do care because of the rewards. You have a mount, hairstyle, glamours and an emote. Why do you think people already stressed the servers using the world visit? Because they wanted to get these rewards ASAP. Else why do you think low population servers progressed this fast with world visit? Because people wanted the FATEs to pop up. And that is evident when you see how slowly these severs are progressing now. And the fact that you can be on any DoL/Doh regardless of level to get the reward, then a significant majority will have interest in the FATE. They don't care about contributing to the progress, hence why they will AFK when the FATE timer draws near.

And if you're going to say people don't care about these rewards, allow me to remind you about every Eureka thread regarding the items that you can only get there and and asked for them to be obtainable another way (even though they can be sold at the MB but for high prices).

So I really doubt that 10-15% only are interested given the history we have regarding players' desire for such rewards. Maybe 10-15% would actually put the effort to farm the scripts for the rewards, but the majority would jump on the FATEs with its high return in a span of 3min without any effort to craft.

[Jojoya]

This is where I'll stop you. People do care because of the rewards. You have a mount, hairstyle, glamours and an emote. Why do you think people already stressed the servers using the world visit? Because they wanted to get these rewards ASAP. Else why do you think low population servers progressed this fast with world visit? Because people wanted the FATEs to pop up. And that is evident when you see how slowly these severs are progressing now.

You need to stop insisting wanderers leeching off FATEs were the ones responsible for server progress. They weren't. 99% of them weren't contributing a darn thing to the worlds they were visiting except congestion.

The lower pop servers are taking longer to progress now because EVERYONE was taking longer to progress on Stage 3. The number of contributions required to fill the bar is significantly higher than the other stages. Balmung had stages 1 and 2 knocked out in a day but took 2 days to complete stage 3. Seems like it would make sense for the low pop servers to take twice as long to complete Stage 3 as well, right? And that's exactly what's happening. With the possible exception of Spriggan, every world will have its Stage 3 completed by Tuesday, only one week after the content was released. No one is falling behind anything because there's nothing else to do.

Is there no one else alarmed that content intended to require ongoing server cooperation has been completed in such a short period of time, so short that many players never got a chance to participate and watch the progress happen? Sure, they can continue to turn in items for scrip and rewards but they missed out on seeing things change. It's hard to get excited when you feel like you're only being allowed in after the party is over.

SE should know that a large portion of the player base has little self control when new content is introduced. They're going figure out the most rewarding, less effort portion of the content and latch onto that to get what they want. They're going to consume it as fast as possible then complain there's nothing left for them to do.

That type of player should never be left dictating how long content lasts because they've now cut the rest of the player base out of that content.

It would have been better for the first stage to be the longest stage to give all players a reasonable chance to get involved and see what was going on before the visual progress started getting made, or at the very least make all stages of the project phase last the same amount of time.

As for the FATEs, the Concerted Works needs to last far longer. Make them last a week with FATEs occurring every 2-4 hours to give all players a reasonable chance to participate. Kill the XP and scrip rewards to 10% of what they currently to bring the reward to effort ratio more in line with what we get for the contributions that actually count toward progress. There doesn't need to be visual progress after every FATE. Set it up to occur every 10 completed FATEs or something similar.

Honestly, none of this was well planned out when player habits were not taken into account for the stage design.