Cosmic Exploration Opinions

[Jeeqbit]

Critical missions are so overtuned that it makes the rest of the content obsolete aside from some tool xp drops. I got more tokens in 20 minutes of critical missions than 2 hours of fishing.

Agreed, no point wasting your time with anything else if you want to buy the rewards and farm currency for the not-kupo of fortune. The dailies are good too. They are a sort of daily challenge log.

[Exmo]

I partied up with a friend and spent a couple of hours in the zone last night. We were a crafter and gatherer. Despite this, there was no level of interaction between us throughout the entire game mode - we may as well have been playing solo. Stellar missions are solo events. The mech fates have a shared progression bar but in reality each player interacts with crystals etc that only they can see, so there's no true interaction happening there. There is no sense of it actually serving as group content.

I've been playing Death Stranding recently so it strikes me as obvious how SE could have implemented a simple enough "donation basket" system in CE. Imagine completing your stellar mission with a gold rating, meaning you crafted/gathered in excess of the min retirement. You could visit this bucket to donate your excess to other players. When someone claims something that was donated, the player who donated it is gifted 80% of the rewards they got in the original stellar mission by base control, thereby incentivising donating. You collect the rewards for claimed goods in bulk by revisiting the collection basket.

A player would want to claim donated goods because they give benefits to crafting/gathering - basically functioning as consumable buffs for stellar missions and other activities. Players would have a cap to the amount of donated goods they can claim, but this cap regenerates over time and through completing stellar missions.

And lastly, players should be able to trade these excess goods directly to one another, bypassing the donation basket but missing out on the repeated stellar mission reward when it's claimed. This allows friends to help each other out directly in an uncapped way.

This simple idea would bring the relationship between gatherers/crafters in CE closer in line with that in the overworld, where they're encouraged to interact within the economy.

[Kaurhz]

I'm a big fan of the recipes... Some of them have some pretty unique scaling to them, which means you're utilizing a lot of your toolkit and in creative ways... It seems like they've designed certain recipes to be done in specific ways, inc., the expert recipes.

The expert recipes are on the easier side of fence, but I think this is better, as there's a good balance between fun and challenging, without resorting to seeing how many rapid synth fails we can get on a recipe, which was something I had a high distaste for with the Island Sanctuary recipes... Beyond a certain point the game was just bash your fingers on the rapid synth button was far too much RNG being frontloaded rather than evenly spread.

General progress, I would have preferred if the rank progression was a little more substantive in the grand scheme of things.. It's exceptionally limited in this regard, so even though there's a progression system, it rings hollow and meaningless, which could have served as a good way to satiate those that miss the main server progression points.

Relic handling is really good... There's some really good entry recipes across all ranks which help to progress the relic.

More events need to spawn, and red alerts definitely need to be more common... Even the server progression events could've been made repeatable, albeit easier for subsequent ones, this would make it feel more alive, as it definitely does get repetitive and fast (Which is fine, but more could've been done to add some dynamic play to it). Would like to see more rewards, as the number of rewards is currently very underwhelming..

[Ardeth]

It kinda sucks. The progression system is simple and easy to understand. The gathering is worse. The crafting is easier.

I guess I expected more. This isn't even touching on the moronic idea of zone progression being global, so if you woke up too late or had to work, it was just done. I get the point of it feeling like a group effort, but it's just fomo for people with lives.

And at the end of the day, it's just meh.

[Mawlzy]

I think my disinterest may stem from the fact the name Cosmic Exploration sounds pretty cool, but what we're doing on the moon is not.

"Cosmic Construction" might have been better, although for greater verisimilitude, "Cosmic Pressing One Button" would really capture the spirit of the FATEs. They're the closest thing to group content, but only in the sense that everyone is required to be in the same physical location.

I greatly preferred Island Sanctuary, and would rather be building a house there than thwacking crystals on the moon.

[Voidmage]

Starting off I went in not expecting much but I was let down by the lack of mounts, and the artificial difficulty of the tasks.

There's so much running around that I'd rather just have a mount for.
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.
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Obviously some easy Solutions would be to enable mounts, adjust the timers, and fix the GP/CP issue of not fully refilling after a mission.

I have to post a contrary opinion here in the hope it will be heard.
The inability to use mounts imo is the best part.
Sprint is fast enough to get around easily and the transporters are fun to use.
I am seriously tired of everything outside cities just being a flying mount zooming nowadays and enjoy actually being able to see things for a change.

Gathering has the correct amount of difficulty.
If you are not lvl 100 then gold should be hard to get. Maxing gatherers should have some kind of “reward” in it.

I like the content so far.
The dyes are nice, the “gacha” is kinda fun (could use a pity system though) and its nice relaxed content that should be seen as a marathon and not something to rush through.

My criticism:
Progress is way too fast and that will definitely hurt longevity especially because the rewards are really only dyes and nothing really else to work towards and… even IS had better looking gear.
The spacesuit is honestly pretty ugly (and could have used some ff14 aesthetic touch) and I hope that we will see gear with more care on the future instead of everything good landing in the cash shop.
This would have been a great time to give us a Garlean team mission with gear from them.

The entire thing seems to be made for no life content creators to stream in my opinion like many other things in the game nowadays and goes completely against the philosophy of “take your time and still see everything”.
It is really disheartening to see how much progress has been made already.

[Valence]

What I like (surprisingly):

- The progression system for individual characters (lvl10 -> lvl50 -> etc)
- The achievements which give good rewards and goals to go for.
- This is something that Firmament direly lacked and they nailed something there to drive people forward besides the world race and big contributors.

What I don't (unsurprisingly):

- The only shared thing is a glorified scoring progress bar for everything that's done in common, but in reality we play alone in our corner while other players are just a silent background noise to keep the illusion that we're not alone there. Everything in this game once more, is done to minimize player interaction to zero so players do not have to think and just have to follow a list of procedures and work like busy bees in a sweatshop. Everything feels fake and it doesn't feel I'm contributing to anything, feels like I'm just crafting and gathering in the void.
- MechOps and big rocks and whatnot respawning haphazardly everywhere and nobody actually sharing the same area to clear feels terrible and ridiculous. Totally immersion breaking. And the gameplay loop about spamm clicking the same things is impressively dull and shows a blatant lack of creativity.
- Chain crafting and gathering is incredibly boring and tedious, and even expert recipe perks, which are always nice, quickly devolve into the same boring mass production grind. But I guess this type of content is fundamentally not my thing so if grinding brainlessly, then this is the content for you.
- The UI is bad or weird. There is obnoxious gating notably when first entering the area: it took me running over and talking to every NPC and then more than 15min even when asking people what I was doing wrong to understand that I had to complete at least one leve quest for me to unlock half of the menu (mechops, successes, infrastructure).
( - Relics are exclusively tied to this system. You have to engage with the system to progress them, but I guess it's not gonna be much different from what we had anyway, it's crafting and gathering all the same, it's just included in the area instead of outside, so tomato tomato. )

[DynnDiablos]

With all my crafters/gatherers 100 and pentamelded, and the rewards being absolute crap, I have decided it is a big NO THANKS for me. And I loved Ishgard Restoration (plenty of mounts and hairstyles and cool stuff). This? It is all junk and the progress happens so fast, if you're an adult who works you miss all the fates and stuff anyway.

[ShadowNyx3]

Initial impressions from almost exclusively Fishing for about 8 hours:

- The variety in Stellar Missions for Fishing is phenomenal. Gold Medals require actual thought and execution, with a palatable dose of RNG on top. The downside to failing to Gold Star missions is a wait for GP regeneration, which we could probably do something about. I don't know if a full restore on mission completion is the best decision, but I'm definitely feeling like we needed a buff to regen or the addition of a new cordial.

- Tool research is an interesting system. While a grind like previous tool relics, mission selection can be targeted to get the most out of the desired level of research instead of just spamming x number of catches or crafts.

- Mech Ops feels well balanced. Getting a buff for 20 missions allows me not to feel pressured to have to do all Mech Ops that appear. I can simply apply as a pilot and only join as ground support if I need to refresh my buff.

- The cosmetic and gameplay rewards don't feel great, however the inclusion of title achievement for attaining Gold Star rank on all missions is easily the best goal-oriented achievement that has ever been added to this game. We need more achievements like this in our content instead of the mindless "Gather 30,000 resources on Island Sanctuary" slop.

Overall, really enjoyed my time with it. However, I'm fully aware that was because I was fishing which is my favorite thing to do in the game. The prospect of completing missions for 8 crafters is daunting and makes me wish we had consolidated crafters long ago. I'm definitely going to have varying opinions on the content as I do it for multiple crafters and the less-engaging gatherers.

Edit: Forgot to mention that no flying is a wonderful decision. The area itself is not as interesting as it could be, but flying would make it irrelevant as it does to the standard 6 expansion zones. Mounts locked to the ground would be okay though and look a bit better than sprinting like a madman/woman everywhere. Though it's pretty clear that the cosmoliner is going to expand so when that happens the really far fishing holes should be fast to get to.

[Gortys]

This zone feels very underwhelming for me. I did not participate in the Ishgardian Restoration when it was current, but I enjoyed leveling 5 of my jobs in the firmament/diadem. There is a lot of XP for leveling in the Ishgardian area so when they announced this new zone I quit leveling my other DoH jobs. I assumed I would level here just as quickly, but this just feels very slow and boring by comparison for leveling. The crafting is super easy (I'm only lvl 62 though) and even when it tells me my gear isn't good enough to finish the "quest" (due to iLvL) I still have no issues finishing and getting HQ items (even for "gold") with no food or pots. Will you take extra steps to get HQ with lower iLVL? Yes, but not enough that it matters to me. Maybe the difficulty increases the closer I get to 100, but right now it is very easy and boring. The events are boring as well. You just go and hit one button regardless of job. You don't even need to know how to gather rarer items to do this stuff. I hope this isn't what the new "bozja" is going to be like. But if you just started a job and don't know how to do a gathering/crafting rotation? Well you won't be compelled to learn here either, but you can still participate.

I also liked that Diadem items could be sold on the MB for extra gil once you surpassed a certain level. I understand they may be doing this in a way to reduce bag space used or so people don't have to use a retainer. To me this just removes another avenue for players to use the MB which is a bit disappointing for me.

And yes, on my server it was up to level 3 and all of the top players had similar names. I'm not saying anyone is botting or using multiple accounts necessarily. It is possible they all coordinated to rename their characters and top the boards?