Cosmic Exploration is CASUAL content with a pinch of midcore

[Valence]

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.

I don't disagree with your sightseeing log, although the platformer part of it was there in ARR with a couple of them already, and they were tied to annoying weather/time windows. They got rid of most of it in HW only to reintroduce and try out the kugane inn and tower in SB because they had that new idea of doing jump puzzles, so sightseeing seemed like the right place for it. Counterpoint though, it was merely 3-4 logs in SB, so is that a problem that some people could get a little challenge as well or should the entirety of the content have been dedicated exclusively to you there? Genuine question: do you need them ALL done for something? Is there a specific reward attached to this?

Anyway, that's beyond the point, where is the difficulty spike here exactly? It's baseline crafting recipes, and A-Ranks are either hard or expert recipes, which has been a requirement for every DoH relic since their introduction in ShB. Where is that wrench that came out of nowhere supposedly there? Or are you just unhappy that the relics require expert recipes? Because that argument, I can hear. It's valid. Doesn't mean that I agree or disagree with it, but it's valid (and has some have said above, you can bypass A ranks for your relics anyway apparently). But let's not pretend a second that it's something that came out of the blue?

The fundamental issue I take is that you try to conflate the whole game as "midcore" or "hardcore" as soon as a small part of it is above the baseline (yes big fishing is a small part of fishing, like A-ranks are a small part of cosmic). This sounds genuinely disingenuous to me. Aren't people allowed to have more challenging things to do as well? 90% of this new content is literally casual, yet you're trying to shoehorn it under a hardcore umbrella? All your examples, I feel like that you're taking offense that a part of the content is targeted at a higher difficulty than the majority of the baseline. Should we also delete extreme trials and whatnot because they suddenly render ALL pve "hardcore"?

But it also doesn't really counter what I said that the content in this game is harder than people want to admit just because it was a snap for them personally

You're trying to shift the subject on what the OP wasn't about. You're perfectly within your right to find the current content hard for you. You're perfectly within your right to find baseline crafting hard for you (because again, 90% of cosmic is baseline crafting).
But saying this is hardcore? Just no.

I fail to see how a AFK Clicker game is any content at all though

Truly riveting content right?
But the point is, can't do more casual than this...

[Supersnow845]

snip

These relics are arguably easier because you can complete them entirely without experts. There are A rank missions that give IV research data that aren’t experts

Better yet there are actually 2 other facets that allow you to “take advantage” of experts without actually interacting with them. Firstly a good chunk of the expert A1 ranks are basically just non expert recipe stat distributions but with expert conditions applied. This is actually better than normal because if you macro you never lose out to getting poor condition at the wrong time (as expert doesn’t have poor and excellent is useless) and if you manually craft normals then the expert conditions don’t matter anyway because none interfere with how you do a normal (because they all basically amount to different flavours of conditional CP saving depending on action priority). The second advantage is the stellar action can also turn non experts into pseudo experts conferring all the advantages above as well

For your average macro/casual crafter experts are superior in every way to normals. It’s only when you get experts that actually force you to engage with them (which is really only A3’s) that you actually have to consider knowing how to do an expert recipe

[Astronis]

Cosmic Exploration just sounds like more of the same, content I have no business touching even if I had access to it because I won't be good at it for one reason or another, and if its well and truly considered casual? Well, that just makes my personal inability that much worse.

It's up to you if you want to give it a try, but there's some of it that can be engaged with that has no curve at all--the mech ops and the Red Alerts can be done by anyone and you can get currency to play the roulette game to get orchestrions or mounts that way as well as buy glams and portrait frames and such. The crafting and gathering tools want a little more effort, but if you don't want to do any expert crafts you don't have to, it will just be slower relying solely on the Red Alerts for the tool XP that otherwise you'd only get from the harder quests.

[Minali]

(snip bc. post length)

I hope it doesn't come off as rude, I am not you of course and you have to know what is or isn't fun for you, obviously. However, going by the examples you mention, like the sightseeing log, triple triad or crafting and gathering in this case, this feels like "perfect" is standing in the way of "good" a lot. It sounds like very binary decisions are being made here, leaving you with nothing to do due to not being able to do them 110%. There are hundreds of Sightseeing Log entries, and maybe a hand full after ARR involve jumping puzzles like the ones on the Kugane Tower or Bokairo Inn. And some of the ARR ones used to have jumping puzzles but are now nothingburgers due to the addition of flying in ARR regions. Considering the point of the Sightseeing Log is exploring maps and getting some nice extra lore about this world of FFXIV, and maybe unlocking paintings for housing or getting a minion or two, I can't help but wonder how not being able to do a hand full of them suddenly makes the experience of dozens of others really bad. It's not like you have to do them in order or have to have finished all HW entries to unlock the SB ones or so. (A part of the ARR logs seems to be hidden behind other ARR logs but as others already pointed out, the ARR ones are weird as hell and not representative for this whole feature anyway.)
And it's the same here: Plenty of people described in detail how there are many parts of Cosmic Exploration you can do with zero knowledge about gathering and crafting whatsoever, maybe 10-20% of knowledge for Stellar missions, should you decide to do some, it just takes more time. And yet just knowing there is an optional part somewhere in there that might not be your thing spoils the whole experience for you.

I am a person who has some completionist tendencies, and issues with being too perfectionist in some regards, so I fully understand of not wanting to do something maybe 70% instead of 100%. However, perfection is an illusion, not just in FFXIV but just in life in general. And I learned sometimes these 70% can also be a lot of fun one would otherwise miss out on entirely, limiting my life experience drastically.

Of course, as said, I am not you, but I know this kind of striving for experience that fulfill you 100% leads to a very lonely path with not a lot of options for enjoyment. If this is still enough and satisfying for you, sure, go for it, but maybe consider once in a while to look for fun in imperfect things as well...?

[Moomba33]

I was having trouble with a lot of the A rank missions on ltw because I was being stubborn and not using food on the first day. After I started using food and the cp tisane I found that most of them weren't bad, though there were still a couple that took a lot of attempts to gold. I like that the content gives you the materials for the crafts, it made it so I didn't feel bad experimenting with my rotation until I found something that worked. I honestly had fun trying different things, and even making use of specialist actions for the first time in awhile.
Silvers are still worth a lot of points towards the relic, so I encourage players who are struggling to keep trying and experimenting. There is a fairly wide gap in difficulty among the A rank missions so you may find some you can do even if not all of them.

Haven't tried much gathering yet so I can't comment on them.

Edit: I realize I kind of talked around the point, but overall I think it's ok for the content to have some harder recipes mixed in since all rewards can still be earned by players with easier missions, the red alerts, ect. Admittedly I don't know how much slower it is if you avoid A ranks altogether.

[AmiableApkallu]

Probably because the community and even the developers come off very demanding about "perfection" in nearly every piece of content otherwise you're getting kicked, reported, body checked or duty failed.

In the great Wikipedia tradition, "[citation needed]."

In the ~4 years of playing FFXIV on Crystal, what you've said has literally never happened to me -- even as I ran roulettes while challenging Gerolt to a drinking contest.

I've seen how people act about Frontlines, about Chaotic, about bloody damn everything where the slightest mistake means death or failure and you WILL get chewed out for it, in-game no less

Again, in the great Wikipedia tradition, "[citation needed]."

In the ~4 years of playing FFXIV on Crystal, I've lost to Gerolt multiple times, and no one gives a f.

Anyone who's getting "chewed out" in-game has to be so incompetently bad that other people would prefer get sanctioned by a GM rather than stay silent.

[Gwenkatsu]

/snip/

I am pretty much in the same boat as you, as I also ignore a lot of the content this game has to offer since it's just too hard for me.

But there's one difference between us regarding the mindset. My mindset is "try it out, and when it sucks, just stop doing it". Your mindset seems to be "Read about it, and when I get the feeling I can't do it to 100%, don't even start".

For example, I went into CE, did some crafting, all goes well. Then up comes a recipe where my workpiece suddenly takes on some states I've never seen before. In the forums I learned that this is nothing special, expert recipes do this for years. Ok. Obviously, I never did an expert recipe before, since I never saw this stuff before. "Screw this sh**, I'm not going to learn 20 new states to finish this ***". And I was gone in no time.

Couple of days later I decided to give it another try. This time I found out that my tool experience bar (or however it is called) can be filled, even if I get only bronze state on a mission. Guess what? I never used a Touch action again, just finish every piece ASAP, and level up my tool. I do a couple of quests per day, get my 1000 Lunar currency for the daily mech ride or gambling, and have fun.

I will never score gold on all the missions, I will never finish CE to 100%. And I don't care, it's just a nice little side activity to me. And this is all it should be IMO.