Thank you, Square, for listening to the majority.

[Ultimatecalibur]

You mean to tell me that players in an MMO should not do a piece of content that gives them massive rewards so that others can have a shot at it? Good luck telling 5K players to do that and that's the smallest number of active players in a world, let alone the remaining 500K. Even now with world visiting restricted, a significant number can't do the FATE (simple math). The speed of which the content progressed is not correlated to the ability of a player participating in a content or not. Whether your world progressed slowly or quickly, it all depends solely on if you are available in the 10hrs span after the progress finishes. The dev team knew this was gonna happen. People AFK in Eureka and other worlds for boss FATEs for the rewards. What would prevent them from doing this in a zone that doesn't have an AFK timer and with a known time for the FATE to pop?

The rewards are not really massive. 500 skyscripts and a crafter/gatherer level isn't something so massive that everyone in a datacenter must get in on it when you can compare it to what a level 70 or 80 crafter+gatherer can make in an hour. What was massive was that due to world visiting a limited number could semi-monopolize the FATEs to potentially get up to 8k skyscripts and 16 crafter/gatherer levels every time the phases advanced in the datacenter.

This was a Tragedy of the Commons caused by a greedy few who wanted the new mount and other rewards as soon as possible with the least amount of work.

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.

Stop. The low pop servers are not progressing much slower than before wanderers were sealed off. Stage 3 has a much larger supply requirement than the previous 2 phases. If you compare their relative speeds servers are maintaining the same relative pace. The wanderers were more than likely taking up space more than they were actively helping. It is looking like every Server will have completed all 3 stages of phase 1 before reset on Tuesday.

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).

No, I am not saying that people do not care about the rewards. There is a fair portion of players that are not rushing to get all the rewards day 1/week 1. Most of those currently with the new mount are those who abused the world visit system and locked locals out of the FATEs in their own greed.

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.

You do realize that that the forums are only visited by less than 10% of the player base and that a smaller fraction of that 10% post?

Those 9.3k (active) players on Mateus contain a vast majority that do not interact with anything but the MSQ and/or daily dungeons and regularly let their subs lapse. If the amount of active players on a Mateus were spread evenly over the day and all were trying to participate very few would be able to access the Firmament as there would be over 380 players trying to cram themselves into the instance at any time. Outside the most populated servers no one currently is having trouble accessing the Firmament.

[Alucard135]

Jowy, I can guarantee you that the world visit issue, while it may not be the main problem for you personally, was a massive problem here on Mateus. For all but the last round of concerted works, people on this server couldn't even get into the Firmament for hours at a time because trolls from Balmung would roll in to spam "THIS IS NOW BALMUNG FIRMAMENT". The idea of having world-visit work for the Firmament was to encourage friends and fellowships to perhaps help each other out so that servers could all progress, but this was thoroughly ruined by trolls who would either leech rewards from the server or would lock players out of their own server's instance.

We may disagree that world visit in Firmament wasn't the main issue, but it was a big enough issue that SE and Yoshida himself had to address it. Them's the facts.

I wouldn't call it a massive problem either simply because even without world visiting, you have 9132 active players on Mateus and only 300 can participate (3.3%). So with world visiting, that number would be between 0% to 3.3% of the actual world's inhabitants. So the remaining 96.7% in that world who aren't able to participate due to the way they implemented this FATE are a significant number, which makes the implementation itself the massive problem.

[Ultimatecalibur]

I wouldn't call it a massive problem either simply because even without world visiting, you have 9132 active players on Mateus and only 300 can participate (3.3%). So with world visiting, that number would be between 0% to 3.3% of the actual world's inhabitants. So the remaining 96.7% in that world who aren't able to participate due to the way they implemented this FATE are a significant number, which makes the implementation itself the massive problem.

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. If we say about 10% to 15% of active players have an interest in Ishgard Restoration we are looking at ~900 to ~1350 players on the server being interested and participating. Now not all players with interest will be on at all times, so it is likely a good idea to divide the number of interested players into Morning players, Daytime players, Primetime/Evening players and Nighttime players. Let us say 5/8 the players are on for Primetime, 3/8 for Daytime, 1/4 for Morning and 1/8 for Nighttime. During Primetime, a bit over 1/2 of the players currently on would be able to participate in the FATE on the low end and a bit over a 1/3 of the players would be able to participate on the high end. During Daytime nearly everyone to 3/5 of the interested population would be able to participate.

With world visiting it went from 900 to 1350 players per server to 8000 to 10k players in the datacenter trying to cram themselves into whichever of 8 Firmaments was about to have a FATE. During Primetime this meant that something like 20 times the instances' max population was fighting to get into each active instance.

[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.

[Ryaz]

Really hoping they do something to change how Concerted Works pop. I missed every single one on my server because they popped while I was working or sleeping. Donating 1000 items and not getting to participate in the group stuff sucks.

[reivaxe]

Some takes here are just silly.

I'm someone who took their crafts from being 21 at the lowest to 60-61 at the lowest with this event so far so yeah, I've been turning in a ton of stuff, right?

Did I ever "help" another server? Yeah ... that one time I had my inventory full of turn ins and couldn't get in my server's zone because GD Balm players were camping tf outta it cause we were 1-2 hours away from the fate popping (A fate I helped make happen cause I've been using this to grind levels all day). I HAD to go to another server to dump this stuff and get my levels cause of these campers.
And yes, they are campers. Standing around the board AFK not doing anything but shouting out which server is next to rush to or mocking natives of the server, disgusting. "We'Re hElPIng", yeah right, you know damn well my server doesn't need your help.

Hell, I was shopping around for mats and trying to get to small server to check their board landed me in a 5min que cause they were "next" on the fate train Balg was pushing.

After the change? I was able to come and go freely and not worry about having to camp a spot for the fate. Took part in the 2 fates and did my turn ins freely.

It wasn't a bad idea, it just assumed players are much more altruistic than they are AND that there would be far less interest in this content I guess (Cause lol, we're months away from any update and every server is basically done. Either this needed many times more turn ins or it's not really important how fast it gets done ... so allowing other worlds to help is a fix to a problem that wasn't there). I'm sure in a perfect world Balg players would help the SMALL servers with what should be an insurmountable amount of turn ins for them and once they get the fate count down going they say "Great, lets go help this other server and leave em to it!". But that aint how it played out so good on them for rethinking that.

Feel like this wouldn't have been a problem if the fate only gave like 100/ 75 scripts. Much harder to justify being afk in a zone for TWO HOURS just for 75 scripts when you can actually do something worth your time.