Cosmic Exploration on Dynamis needs an adjustment

[cidfox]

Help out smaller worlds. 40 min to fail a necessity over and over is so disheartening. And then by failing we don't get mech ops or red alerts until completed? Absolutely awful design. Think about Dynamis and small dcs before releasing content like this please

[hydralus]

An actual valid complaint.

[oreorion]

I was here on Maduin for this. A lot of people figured very early on that unless more people logged on, we weren't clearing this. We were making progress way too slow, it took us until a bit under halfway (if I remember correctly) to get 25%. We have a linkshell set up and everything, people were telling their friends to come help, and yet it just wasn't doable. We spent 40 minutes and got to 98%, and this was at around 6pm central. The next one will be at 2am, and there just aren't going to be as many people online.

(I couldn't check directly, but people in the chat were saying we had around 150 people in all the instances combined, who were getting around 75-90 contribution if they were playing the whole time.)

This has happened with the first attempt of every upgrade we've had to do - the first one failed with 40%, and the second one (where a lot more people participated) succeeded, at least in Instance 1 - and then failed anyway because of some server tick issue. It's extremely demoralizing. It makes the last 40 minutes of running around feel entirely wasted.

Especially with the 8-hour lockout - I could live with an 8-hour wait, it's not the end of the world for me, but the fact that it also locks us out of the mech ops and red alerts is just... horrible. I can't understand why this design choice was made.

Clearly, these CE fates weren't suppposed to feel like a Savage version of themselves, since other (populated) data centers are clearing these within 10-20 minutes, but it really does feel like every single player has to be there and be going at 100%, robot-like efficiency for us to even have a hope of clearing.

I really like Cosmic Exploration so far! It's just being dampened by the extreme difficulty that low-pop servers have for seemingly no reason. This cannot be the intended gameplay experience. It's like SE forgot that some of their servers were smaller.

[LunarArtemis]

Also from Maduin and I've been to every single fate. The first one, I understood failing. It was so early in the day, not many people were on. But that 40% failing taking 40 minutes was rough.

The second fail at basically 100% was awful. We really thought we had it. We hit 100% at the very last second. We didn't get the pop up saying the mission was abandoned and we got the rewards you get when successfully completing the mission/fate, but it never upgraded and we got the 7 hour timer.

This most recent one, failing at 98% at a good time of day, was so frustrating. The next one would be around midnight, meaning less people. If we fail that one as well, that'll be 16+ hours with no red alerts or mech ops. It feels like we are being punished for not having enough people on our worlds. We're already suffering taking up the entire 40 minutes to complete these fates that take other worlds 10-20 minutes to complete. There has to be some way to scale the progress. Aether already has worlds on 7 while Dynamis and Oceania has worlds still stuck on 3.

[Elyah]

Materia is having the same problem.

On the first day 4/5 Materia servers failed the stage 3 upgrade because the second upgrade fate popped at midnight when everyone was asleep. On Sophia we then went 16 hours without a single red alert or CE because of the failure cooldown....on the first day. Because the midnight failure, the next one came at 8am on a weekday. Then the third came at 5pm ish and finally we cleared that to get to the third. Now to get to stage 4 we've failed again because it came at 10am on a weekday.

Feels like we are just being punished for being on a low pop server at this point.

[Andanie]

It's just incredibly stupid. I'm sorry, but it is. There's no reason this can't scale with participants. WE already take so much longer to fill our bar- at the very least make the fate easy enough to succeed. Adding to that how boring they are it really does feel like a punishment.

Mind you, they're locking Dynamis members off of other data centers to get us to play on it- and when we do, we're unable to enjoy an expansion feature fully because they didn't account for the low population.

[Kitcorin]

Agree with this thread, it's hard not to feel left out and completely an afterthought as someone from Marilith. I've been feeling incredibly disheartened and tired from all the time spent toiling away at the upgrade fates in a nerve wrecking pace, only for them to fail - and the following one happening in a very unfortunate time for NA players means we are pretty much guaranteed to have fates failing in sequence (this has already happened to us).
We are calling friends, pinging everyone on linkshells and shouting in cities and it stills seems like it's not enough to advance. Feels like a punishment for all of our time and effort pushing for our upgrades.

I'm begging SE to take worlds with a small population of endgame players into consideration, since the cooldown after a failed upgrade fate means we're completely cut out from a big part of the new content inside cosmic exploration.

[cidfox]

at least I'm not alone. our next shot is here in 20 min and I'm already prepping myself for a potential fail due to the time but damn it i'll be there trying

[LunarArtemis]

12am post update for Maduin: second attempt, about 30 less people because of the time, and we were at 50% with 7 minutes remaining. Most of us gave up. Next attempt would be about 8am pst. Expecting to fail it too.

[plounce]

Also just came from the failed fate on Maduin - I overall like Cosmic Exploration (getting to develop and use skills & strategies for crafting & gathering! Awesome!) and I like living on a lower-population DC/world for a variety of reasons. But these advancement fates... the tedium of the gameplay (just clicking and running? Not even letting us use our classes like for red alerts?), the lack of scaling for server size/active players/etc, and lockout from mech ops/red alerts is pretty demoralizing. And I want to contribute to my homeworld, so it makes me hold off from doing stellar missions since I don't want to have that not contribute to the next stage of development advancement.

There's a bit of an urban legend going on with us now, that the third time's "the charm" and it'll just let us progress after a third failure. I really hope we succeed, but 8 AM PST on a Tuesday is not Dynamis peak hours.

I try to stay pretty positive and I don't like to be a doomer. I did not anticipate Dynamis progressing CE at the same rate as larger DCs, but I would prefer if people felt less demoralized/disinterested about Cosmic Exploration (as many in shout chat, linkshells, and Discord servers have been) due to failures after various tedious grinds.

I hope in the next stages of Cosmic Exploration that different server population sizes are taken into consideration. I hope that all of us who are putting in the hard work to help see Dynamis succeed will be allowed to have the fruits of our labor grow. I hope to see Sinus Ardorum completed on Maduin and other Dynamis worlds! I hope that people continue to show up, but I think that unless this is balanced for our circumstances (and SE knows we have a smaller population and has made use of it - remember the 7.0 travelling restrictions), each stage will be harder and harder to achieve for us.

It would be great if this could be balanced more appropriately for us smaller worlds.