Cosmic Exploration is Bad

[Kaurhz]

I doubt it's as inviting/approachable as you make it out to be given all this talk about needing to commit millions of gil and hours of time to see a tiny amount of progress on anything and the constant risk of failure with nothing to show for it. With that much gil and time requirements, the only thing separating it from other hardcore content is that there's no body checks ...oh wait, if there's not enough people doing it, certain events will literally fail and nobody makes prog. (I'm sure folks on Dynamis and Materia are loving that part, and this time they don't even get the mercy of data center hopping.)

Personally I can't even access Cosmic Exploration, but after everything I'd read about it, I don't feel like I'm missing out, and I can dump it in with the rest of the content that's beyond my ability to do.

Alternatively, it isn't as unapproachable and uninviting as people make it out to be. Look, there are some issues, e.g., scaling points on levelling, which is as much to do with Ishgard Restoration than it is to do with Cosmic itself since they're woefully unbalanced. Or something like missions not resetting cordials. leading to unnecessary waiting around between gatherer missions, or that the progression events are not scaled well for lower pop servers, which it looks like Dynamis and Oceanic have progressed stage 3 now, so that was probably as much to do with how early they triggered than anything else, so it isn't a massively insurmountable task. But it being hardcore or uninviting is not one of those issues, you can literally still go in there, comfortably get relics, level your DoH/L and progress your server.

A lot of the problem, at least from DoH stems simply from the fact people feel as though they have to do everything, e.g., A-3 missions and to a gold standard. Doing A-3 recipes, and even to a gold standard should present a modicum of challenge, just as they should with gatherers as well, it's good that some of the missions show you at least how crafting and gathering act as a cohesive system. and some facets of that content presenting a challenge does not make it hardcore or unapproachable content as a whole. In that regard A-3 is no more different from the presence of expert recipes in Ishgard Restoration, and people were not up in arms about that, so I don't see why people should be up in arms about this.

The problem we have with DoH is simply for the past 8 years or so players have been far too reliant on macros and using other third party tools, so they haven't bothered learning the fundamentals of crafting, and that the moment they are presented with non-conventional recipes, that don't have a macro on day-1 their entirely perception just crumbles. If people spent half as much time reading their crafting abilities, or looking at a guide, as to what they did by simply copying/pasting macros from a guide and calling it a day, then the reality is that most of these players would at least consistently get gold on A-1 and A-2 recipes, even without needing go through the whole ordeal of decking out their gear with melds. I'm sorry if this sounds insensitive but certain problems are player-based and are not content-based, and if people spent some time to ask "What am I doing wrong here" or "How do you approach these recipes" and some time to read those replies then they would be sat there cruising by, by now.. Rather than calling it insurmountable content.

and the bigger irony is some of these recipes are not much harder at all than the Ceremonial gear, and are expert recipes akin to what people had done for the Dragonsung and Crystalline tools.

It's almost sad that our bar for something being hardcore is something that expects we play the game and not just copy and paste a macro, or zergfest a legendary node with all of our GP, and instead need to manage it a little.