Cosmic Exploration is CASUAL content with a pinch of midcore

[hydralus]

And you would be one of the "genuinely good ones" I mentioned, not that I really doubted it given your posts here and elsewhere on the matter. But I imagine most players don't know you from a hole in the ground and may not be willing to take a risk in asking, or maybe they did and ended up mocked or ignored by one of the bad ones.

Perhaps it's different on other worlds but when someone asks a question in shout chat on mine they tend to get genuine answers from multiple people. Things like "How do I deal with items that only have 35 durability", or "Is there any trick to landing the fish for that FSH/BSM mission". There's even people running around giving away free crafting/gathering food from time to time. It's nice when shout chat isn't just used for venue advertisements.

[Kaurhz]

And you would be one of the "genuinely good ones" I mentioned, not that I really doubted it given your posts here and elsewhere on the matter. But I imagine most players don't know you from a hole in the ground and may not be willing to take a risk in asking, or maybe they did and ended up mocked or ignored by one of the bad ones. Safer to just go quietly look up a guide and whoops, that's the problem right now for a lot of them.

You're counting on a community to be helpful and understanding when Dawntrail has shown most people really don't want to be or probably never did, and where "more stress and friction" was literally what the director wanted, and the content has succeeded in being hard "enough" to really bring out the abrasiveness and disregard in others for others with every major patch so far. We saw how people were about Chaotic when it came to casual versus hardcore discourse, did we really think Cosmic would be spared that just because it wasn't combat? It even has a literal body check that Dynamis and Materia have been failing for days now even if nobody was dying.

But more importantly, it's not your obligation to make the content approachable and understandable, and it's not your fault that it wasn't. That's completely on Square-Enix.

Most people generally won't care, honestly... The line is usually drawn with group content, where it is more difficult to 'teach' someone, versus guiding someone through doing gathering or crafting, generally the players between both pools are quite far apart.

Second paragraph is just see the above.

I will say most of the issue is on the players as much as it is Square Enix.... Crafting is one of those facets where there's a bit of nuance with everything, and what I mean by this is... If you were to ask several different crafters on crafting rotations etc., you would get several different answers, and for the most part they may not be wrong... and it's difficult for that to be communicated in a guide, especially from Square Enix... The best they could deliver is essentially a 'brass tacks' of the system, which players would infer if they cared anyway... Some of that nuance we don't need, but for the most part it's really a use-case basis, e.g., modern macros don't really use abilities like Prudent Touch, or use other abilities like Delicate Synthesi, bar specific use cases like reaching 5/70 Durability instead of 10/70, because being durability efficient is just not a concern... But with recipes like 20D, the need to be durability-efficient is a much bigger consideration, especially for abilities like Prudent Touch or Delicate Synthesis.


and it's just somewhat unfortunate because our method as a community is to disseminate information in a way that isn't concerned with actually learning but just reaching an objective, e.g., being melded to macro craft your master recipes, versus saying why, and to be honest the last time we had a level of nuance that taught people crafting was way way back when we had the beefy guides which were dissertations in their own right, and why is why it would be difficult for Square Enix to produce something meaningful, IMO.... So I would put it on the community as much as I would the developers... Especially when we as a community generally engage with resources that isn't really concerned with understanding versus just copy/paste/execute cycle which undermines any good done with trying to make it digestible, e.g., not unlocking everything at once.

I suppose the best way I could posit this... For people using other peoples' macros, when was the last time you asked yourself Why did they do it this way? -- and actually try to pick apart the rotation... For the most part you didn't because that wasn't the goal... The goal was just to make your own gear or some Gil.

[s32ialx]

Perhaps it's different on other worlds but when someone asks a question in shout chat on mine they tend to get genuine answers from multiple people. Things like "How do I deal with items that only have 35 durability", or "Is there any trick to landing the fish for that FSH/BSM mission". There's even people running around giving away free crafting/gathering food from time to time. It's nice when shout chat isn't just used for venue advertisements.

I can promise you on Behemoth you will be ignored asking a question 90% of the time, and the other 10% of the time 30min to an hour later someone might send you a tell and be like 'did you ever get an answer' and be genuinely helpful

[Gurgeh]

I am most definitely being genuine! >:{ don't call me a twat, I considered moving my main to Maduin already once before cause I had an alt there that I did lots of content and I have lots of maduin friends, I don't know this specific person but I could introduce them to some of the nicest people on all of XIV. The hardest part for me transfering my main is I really don't wanna throw away my 9 year old FC that I made on 01/01/2016, but the Maduin crew I know are very kinda and understanding of me with my disabilities and my mental health conditions.

I literally have two different pet macros D:


and I am all about emotes...

I suspect you haven't let me bother you, but regardless I apologise if you have had to suffer for my cynicism in anyway. Keep being cool. Sorry.

(That said, I doubt I'm going to stop going on the counter offensive when I 'think' I see someone being attacked, and the wind is also blowing in the wrong direction.)

[Valence]

I will 100% agree with the more casual minded players here that crafting has a very high inbuilt floor of what you need to make it even functional. By and large scrip gear just doesn’t cut it like it used to, as far as I’m aware current orange scrip gear with food can’t even see 7.2’s raid gear meaning ONLY everseekers can see it. Pentamelding can either be very expensive or require a lot of time investing in different things that aren’t immediately obvious. IS provides materia, so does custom deliveries and beast tribes, but constantly doing them every day to build up a stock of materia can be hard to understand what activities are worth doing and how often to do them. On the gatherers side spiritbonding is generally your go to but nobody tells you that the lower ilvl gear in the same bracket spiritbonds faster (so thunderyards will always spiritbond faster than everseekers) and the rate of spiritbonding while reliant on how overmelded you are is agnostic to what is actually melded (so having BIS melds gives the same spiritbonding rate as having 5 tenacity materia)

Expert crafts as well are in my eyes a fantastic system built on a flawed base. Every single condition on experts besides normal is functionally a different version of exactly the same thing; a conditional CP gain based on action priority. HOWEVER the flaw comes in the fact that base crafting doesn’t actually teach you why any of the actions work the way they do and why. I can think of a few actions absolutely core to expert crafts that normal crafts don’t care about at all

1) prudent touch- it’s your main method of inner quiet stack generation in experts but is basically completely unused in normal due to prevalence of waste not
2) rapid synthesis/hasty touch- to someone who’s never done experts why would they ever think actions that can straight up fail are remotely useful?
3) observe- observe as a combo action into advanced is unused in normal and good omen only existing in experts is another highly useful action that doesn’t get used in normal

It’s hard to expect people to learn experts when normals don’t teach you why crafting skills work the way they do

Personally what I do find to be the biggest failure in terms of results within the community is the introduction of custom deliveries and society quests, or even GC dailies. They tried to bring doh/dol to the most casual players that weren't interested or into the system for starters, allowed them to level them by literally not actually engaging with the gameplay inside, and left them on the side in the ditch once they reached max level with 3-4 hotbars full of actions often with many of them doing the same thing but in a slightly different way.

It's not that different from pve where pretty much the same happens too.

[Astronis]

So I did end up making a crafting tool after starting it because I needed something to do while waiting for my GP and cordials to refresh. I never used any food, no overmelds, no macros, scrip gear except for my jewelry, whatever materia I had on hand shoved willy-nilly into it all.



That one gold mission there can be easily done bronze as long as you have a 100 miner. Gold just meant I gathered 81 rocks and made 9 normal, bargain-basement crafts. That wasn't hard. I have no idea about the other A quest, I think I tried it once and barely scraped by. Looked at a couple other A quests and laughed while abandoning them.

Otherwise, I got silver and gold sometimes on the B quests and got better at crafting.

[GlowClam]

I just wanted to relax and enjoy myself in Cosmic Exploration. I have no desire to memorize meaningless command names. Crafting skills should clearly state what they actually do. The best way to help crafters would be to rename these abilities so their function is obvious.

Here are some examples of crafter abilities and how they could be renamed for clarity:
Current NameSuggested Name Explanation
Great Strides Quality Boost Prep Prepares for a large quality increase
Byregot's Blessing Big Quality Finisher Massive quality boost at the end
Veneration Progress Power-Up Increases progress for a few turns
Groundwork Strong Progress Makes a big step toward completion
Basic Synthesis Simple Progress Advances progress a little
Basic Touch Simple Quality Increases quality a little

I hope, I got the translations right. I only knew the Germans one.

Conclusion:
I really don't want raiders to ruin gathering and crafting content in Cosmic Exploration as well.

[Kaurhz]

I just wanted to relax and enjoy myself in Cosmic Exploration. I have no desire to memorize meaningless command names. Crafting skills should clearly state what they actually do. The best way to help crafters would be to rename these abilities so their function is obvious.

Here are some examples of crafter abilities and how they could be renamed for clarity:
Current NameSuggested Name Explanation
Great Strides Quality Boost Prep Prepares for a large quality increase
Byregot's Blessing Big Quality Finisher Massive quality boost at the end
Veneration Progress Power-Up Increases progress for a few turns
Groundwork Strong Progress Makes a big step toward completion
Basic Synthesis Simple Progress Advances progress a little
Basic Touch Simple Quality Increases quality a little

I hope, I got the translations right. I only knew the Germans one.

Conclusion:
I really don't want raiders to ruin gathering and crafting content in Cosmic Exploration as well.

So my only concern with this to be honest, is that all we're doing here is essentially substituting the name of the ability for the pure function it serves, effectively replacing the tool top with it... Which any person interested in actually learning crafting will infer the what the ability does from the tooltip itself, which is effectively core at what you should be doing with any ability system regardless. and to be honest, beyond a certain point you won't even read the ability names, but just correlate it on the ability icon, and honestly with how crafting abilities are unlocked you should be naturally learning it anyway,

Besides, if I am honest (and your issue is your issue, which I think is fine), but a lot of newer crafters don't necessarily have issue with the ability names as such, but building all of those abilities into a rotation, and, for example remembering or knowing CP costs of finishers, for instance.

I'm not sure why raiders are even mentioned here..? They are two entirely separate activities. I don't see why everything should be watered down to appease low denominators.. There should be something for everyone, and hardcore crafters absolutely do exist, that aren't necessarily raiders in any capacity, e.g., I was a hardcore crafter and didn't raid at all.. Was being the key word, because many of the changes they've made to this crafting system have actively pushed some people away that actually enjoyed it, in favor of people that want a watered down system, because they want to do everything, without necessarily enjoying it or the process of it.., e.g., give me my macros so I can make my gear (or make Gil) and then be done with it. Which to be honest, seems to be a core of the complaints people have when it comes to crafting in Cosmic exploration.. Pretty much evident by the fact that people have literally never complained about this before (despite these recipes being on-par with standard relic experts from Crystalline and Skysteel), and the only differing factor is these resources haven't been available same day... Actually it's bold of me to assume never, as some probably have.. But certainly not to this degree.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

But there's a built-in 'calculator' window showing you how much progress/quality you'll get for using XYZ. They even let you use the skill by clicking there...

[BigCheez]

Artisan Exploration being midcore content is a take.