Cosmic Exploration is CASUAL content with a pinch of midcore

[Minali]

Thank you very much for this thread!

I have the feeling there is also this lack of the sentiment of saying "this content is not for me". Now, does it suck when there is not a lot long term content for your taste? Of course! We had a full year since release where hardcore raiders dined well while the rest didn't really have anything with long time engagement. (I very much enjoy the normal raids and the alliance raid, but I wouldn't consider weekly farming for an hour max "long time engagement", nor doing ten minutes society quests for a few weeks. And I dislike progging hardcore stuff as a concept, it's just not fun for me.)
However, does this mean the content itself is bad? No. That's like saying milkshakes are a horrible invention and have many core design flaws because you're lactoseintolerant and cannot digest them. The solution for this isn't changing milkshakes but offering some without animal milk. And that's the same with this game's content, ask for content that suits your taste, not say the once we got is bad just because it's not your thing. Many people clearly enjoy it or enough parts of it, otherwise all worlds would still be stuck at phase 1 or 2 because not enough people are there for the upgrade missions. (Even the ones on less populated worlds who are playing a much harder version right now while the others breeze through it.)

Having said that, I am a person who is never getting tired of pointing out how "easy" and "hard" in itself are very subjective and just because one thing is easy for one, it doesn't mean it's hard for others. But we're talking about going into content with FATEs where you just stand in front of a crystal or a squishy pink bubble and aim a drill or flamethrower in its general direction. You don't even have to target anything, you don't have to be an omnicrafter with pentamelded lvl 100 gear for more currency. You just have to be in this instance during a mech op and point your character in the general direction and press one button. And at some point you have to walk three steps to the containers where you hand them in, which works by just standing in the circle centered on these tanks.
You even get a currency reward boost for the following missions by being part of the ground support team. It is not getting any easier than that.

(One could argue you still have to be level 10 at a DoH/DoL, but you can just unlock fisher, do the first quest by buying the required fish at the fishmonger in Limsa, then unlock Ocean Fishing by targeting a guy and do one or two ocean fishing trips while having a food buff, for reaching level 10. Where you again just point your character in the general direction of the water with a versatile lure and press "1" and "2" frequently. If you want to play half decent, you can get the three ocean fishing baits and ask in chat if anyone could pls mention them, if nobody is doing it already, but Ocean Fishing is so damn broken, it is really low effort.)

Now, are there missions who require you to put in more work, knowing what the buttons on your hotbar actually do instead of pressing a macro? Yeah sure, but that's on the highest tier of missions and if you compare rewards, it's not like they are massively better than Class B missions. I often mix them up because I want points for my DoH/DoL relics and sometimes the B ones I can see offer more of these than the A ones. And the C and B ones are not really any different than crafting on the higher regular game recipe levels, which you have to be on anyway to do Class B+ missions, and I'm sure there are macros for this out there, for the people who really don't care for crafting and gathering above the level of "having anything to do while watching Netflix" or "printing gil with stuff I sell on the marketboard".

Yes, some missions are going to be hard, but that's a good thing, considering what a faceroll average crafting usually is. Even the regular expert recipes for resplendent tools or dragonsong/splendorous tools if you wait long enough you can just outgear any difficulty (which I may have done in the past... ) I am crafting and gathering because I enjoy it most of the time. I don't even really care for the lottery, Kupo o' Fortune in Ishgard taught me well to expect nothing and rather be happy when you actually get something nice. I started skipping mech ops when I'm on the other side of the map for stellar gathering missions because I find them more enjoyable. If this all sounds wild and absurd to you.. that's perfectly fine. It's not your cup of tea. Same as raiding is not my cup of tea. Not everybody needs to like everything. But please just accept it's not a cup of tea instead of asking devs to dumb this down to the faceroll level it usually is. Just do Class B missions who tend to give similar rewards, and Mech Ops with or without mech, and enjoy your loot from the vendor and the lottery. Let us crafters and gatherers who are in there for the fun "gather" some sense of pride and accomplishment for tackeling an expert craft or gathering just fast enough for reach gold tier in a Class A mission, please.

[Gwenkatsu]

Having said that, I am a person who is never getting tired of pointing out how "easy" and "hard" in itself are very subjective and just because one thing is easy for one, it doesn't mean it's hard for others.

Thanks for that sentence, I already thought me to be the only person on this forum to understand this very obvious truth.

Personally I cannot help but laugh about all this threads. It's hardcore! No, it's midcore! It's softcore, shmonzcore, whatevercore. So what? When a content is too hard for a person, then it's too hard for that person - which does not mean that the content is bad. "I do not like it because <solid reason>" is a good point to make. "It's bad since it's hardcore" is a very stupid take.

[Valence]

Thanks for that sentence, I already thought me to be the only person on this forum to understand this very obvious truth.

Personally I cannot help but laugh about all this threads. It's hardcore! No, it's midcore! It's softcore, shmonzcore, whatevercore. So what? When a content is too hard for a person, then it's too hard for that person - which does not mean that the content is bad. "I do not like it because <solid reason>" is a good point to make. "It's bad since it's hardcore" is a very stupid take.

When the answer to some people's troubles was "just pentameld bro, lol" in nearly every topic about the difficulty, you can't really blame some people for having the perception that Cosmic Exploration was another false bridge like Chaotic Raid was. And it's not just crafting either, people seem to take umbrage with how gathering works in the mode too because of node distance and GP replenishment. Was that also player error and not a content one?

If you and others find the content so easy than you're a hair away from calling it "brain dead" like with every other piece of content you stomp through, good on you, keep on barely lifting a finger and all that. But I don't really trust it when other players who breeze through content because of their personal skill level being just that good try to blow smoke up my ass that I can totally do it too, whether its this content or any other kind.

Being told over and over again that things are easy doesn't really inspire confidence, but rather it makes the failures that much more embarrassing.

The fact that I find it easy or not is irrelevant. I am saying that at least on the side of crafting up to B-ranks and some lower A-ranks, this is baseline crafting recipes like we've had since the dawn of time.
I am perfectly happy to accept that everybody has different appreciations of difficulty, as evidenced by my post history in the dungeon subforums notably. But this ain't it. People complained about the content being "hardcore", which makes zero sense for the aforementioned reason. This is an overreaction, unless people are literally saying that they find baseline crafting "hardcore", which is a little wild to read, but I'm ready to hear it. Some people find baseline pve hard and I understand why. I can totally see that people can find baseline crafting hard as well. It's the "hardcore" part I have a little more issues with.

[Supersnow845]

Something can be hardcore for no other reason than suddenly throwing a massive difficulty spike at you because somebody on the dev team thought it would be funny.

Hilarious example just tonight; I assumed Sightseeing Logs to be casual content until some buffoon decided I needed to do jumping puzzles for some of the Stormblood ones, thus rendering 100% completion impossible unless I'm good enough. Of which I am not, so I guess I'm done with this piece of content (because why even bother collecting them from Shadowbringers and beyond if it'll never be completely done?)

I've likewise given up progressing the Blue Mage story because if I can't clear 29, so I have zero hope of clearing 30 and so on. I've also got a permanent quest marker out in the Ruby Sea because I can't even clear floor 20 of Palace of the Dead, much less 50.

Hell, I'd go so far as to say the majority of FF14 is in fact midcore content with hardcore offerings with casual content being almost non-existent because even something as benign as fishing has Big Fish and the like, or how Triple Triad literally sends you up against cheaters. There is a shockingly large amount of content that can't ACTUALLY be sleepwalked contrary to popular belief, and it's harder than some people want to admit just because it was a breeze for them personally. I doubt I could even do proper crafting that didn't involve Trained Eye, so yeah, expert recipes might as well be mid/hardcore too for all the difference it would make in my ability to do them.

Again, it would be so so much easier if people here would just admit they're actually just super good at the game instead of saying everything is easy because the false hope of what casuals can actually accomplish in this game gets tiresome after awhile because this game keeps getting harder but I'm not getting any better.

In the nicest way possible have you considered the fact that you are just way below average in general, especially if you will barely even attempt normal crafting without trained eye or give up on blue mage for one spell you can ask for help for

[Kaurhz]

Something can be hardcore for no other reason than suddenly throwing a massive difficulty spike at you because somebody on the dev team thought it would be funny.

Hilarious example just tonight; I assumed Sightseeing Logs to be casual content until some buffoon decided I needed to do jumping puzzles for some of the Stormblood ones, thus rendering 100% completion impossible unless I'm good enough. Of which I am not, so I guess I'm done with this piece of content (because why even bother collecting them from Shadowbringers and beyond if it'll never be completely done?)

I've likewise given up progressing the Blue Mage story because if I can't clear 29, so I have zero hope of clearing 30 and so on. I've also got a permanent quest marker out in the Ruby Sea because I can't even clear floor 20 of Palace of the Dead, much less 50.

Hell, I'd go so far as to say the majority of FF14 is in fact midcore content with hardcore offerings with casual content being almost non-existent because even something as benign as fishing has Big Fish and the like, or how Triple Triad literally sends you up against cheaters. There is a shockingly large amount of content that can't ACTUALLY be sleepwalked contrary to popular belief, and it's harder than some people want to admit just because it was a breeze for them personally. I doubt I could even do proper crafting that didn't involve Trained Eye, so yeah, expert recipes might as well be mid/hardcore too for all the difference it would make in my ability to do them.

Again, it would be so so much easier if people here would just admit they're actually just super good at the game instead of saying everything is easy because the false hope of what casuals can actually accomplish in this game gets tiresome after awhile because this game keeps getting harder but I'm not getting any better.

In principle I agree with this, but at what point do we determine something to be a massive difficulty spike? The moment it asks you to play the game? I do ask this with sincerity, because if people were paying attention to their abilities as a crafter or gatherer whilst they were levelling up (In the manner that the game intended), instead of just plucking stats and macros from a guide, then I think the number of people struggling with this content would be few and far between, and there is no remedy for people that just refuse to interact with the game in the way the game intended. Beyond just rendering the entire game into macro mode.

(In this regard actually the guides are as much of a problem as anything else, since a few of them are just verbatim what the game tells you, with a macro thrown at you without saying why.. But in the same vein, a lot of this you can grasp by just asking the question yourself.)

I do agree that people do need to admit when they are super good at a facet of the game instead of declaring something easier, but this also applies at the opposite side of the spectrum as well in that some people just need to admit that they aren't bothering to interact with the content or read up on their own skills instead of trying to paint a specific piece of content as hardcore.

Because in this regard, the game suffers as a result of both ends of the spectrum, and in my opinion the perspective towards Cosmic Exploration is shifting more into the category of people that just aren't interacting or reading their abilities, than the category of people that are super good, because the reality is, unless you're aiming for a very specific achievement then the game doesn't actually demand that you are good.. Relics for Cosmic demand no less or no more of a player than what your standard master recipe macros do.

[s32ialx]

Something can be hardcore for no other reason than suddenly throwing a massive difficulty spike at you because somebody on the dev team thought it would be funny.

Hilarious example just tonight; I assumed Sightseeing Logs to be casual content until some buffoon decided I needed to do jumping puzzles for some of the Stormblood ones, thus rendering 100% completion impossible unless I'm good enough. Of which I am not, so I guess I'm done with this piece of content (because why even bother collecting them from Shadowbringers and beyond if it'll never be completely done?)

I've likewise given up progressing the Blue Mage story because if I can't clear 29, so I have zero hope of clearing 30 and so on. I've also got a permanent quest marker out in the Ruby Sea because I can't even clear floor 20 of Palace of the Dead, much less 50.

Hell, I'd go so far as to say the majority of FF14 is in fact midcore content with hardcore offerings with casual content being almost non-existent because even something as benign as fishing has Big Fish and the like, or how Triple Triad literally sends you up against cheaters. There is a shockingly large amount of content that can't ACTUALLY be sleepwalked contrary to popular belief, and it's harder than some people want to admit just because it was a breeze for them personally. I doubt I could even do proper crafting that didn't involve Trained Eye, so yeah, expert recipes might as well be mid/hardcore too for all the difference it would make in my ability to do them.

Again, it would be so so much easier if people here would just admit they're actually just super good at the game instead of saying everything is easy because the false hope of what casuals can actually accomplish in this game gets tiresome after awhile because this game keeps getting harder but I'm not getting any better.

PREACH IT SISTER

[Kuroka]

Again, it would be so so much easier if people here would just admit they're actually just super good at the game instead of saying everything is easy because the false hope of what casuals can actually accomplish in this game gets tiresome after awhile because this game keeps getting harder but I'm not getting any better.

Im not super good no... but yes, sometimes its a matter of skill. Today i did raid roulette and got Arcadium 6... 18 minutes in progress. Eighteen minutes lol

I was healer and replaced the other one that gave up. my co was new and so was one dps, but that doesnt really matter. After two more wipes he gave up and DC'd... I solo healed and ressed the part as we had neither smn nor rdm and we cleared just fine...


Same for crafting, some see the 25-12000-700 and take 5 seconds to know what skills to use, while i mostly either fu## around and find out or use an crafting solver if i totally cant manage lol

yet it never feels this bad, like yes some crafts just suck, but at least some you can just clear with base level.



While in most areas the game got too easy, the balance and difficulty curve is just trash...

[Gurgeh]

Something can be hardcore for no other reason than suddenly throwing a massive difficulty spike at you because somebody on the dev team thought it would be funny.

Hilarious example just tonight; I assumed Sightseeing Logs to be casual content until some buffoon decided I needed to do jumping puzzles for some of the Stormblood ones, thus rendering 100% completion impossible unless I'm good enough. Of which I am not, so I guess I'm done with this piece of content (because why even bother collecting them from Shadowbringers and beyond if it'll never be completely done?)
...

Holy, sh!
I hadn't realised! Lol.
Yes that's when I lost interest in sightseeing too! At the time I wasn't as disgruntled as I am now so never examined/noticed how/when/why it happened.
I just used to go back and complete a bit of sight seeing in a whim. But suddenly I stopped doing that.
And when it comes to jumping puzzles I assumed that was a me thing and thought nothing of it. I'm just really bad at them.
But yes! I stopped even bothering to clear sightseeing orbs that even just ran past.
Never going to 'complete' SB. Sure a hell don't want to try.
Guess we're done.
Ah meh. Not bothered. Just not bothered.