The Cosmic Explorations are the long-awaited new endgame for craftsman and gatherer classes in Final Fantasy XIV. However, just a day after the release, many servers are nearly finished and the players are heated.
What are the Cosmic Explorations? Update 7.21 for Final Fantasy XIV brought the Cosmic Explorations. This is the new endgame for players of the gatherer and craftsman classes. Together, players build a base and a spaceship on the in-game moon, presumably to explore space in later patches.
At the time of this news, the endgame is about 24 hours old. However, according to the official community website, the Lodestone, most servers are already in the third and presumably final phase of the new content. The next round is expected to start only with patch 7.3.
This seems to fascinate some players. But especially participants on small servers and veterans of the first endgame of this kind, the restoration of Ishgard, are reacting somewhat annoyed – because Square Enix should have anticipated this from their perspective.
Many servers are nearly finished – Blame the player count and time zones
Why are many servers already nearly finished? All players who have at least one craftsman or gatherer class at level 10 and have completed the main scenario of Endwalker can participate in the Cosmic Explorations. According to FFXIVcensus.com, over 1.4 million players worldwide meet the latter requirement.
Unfortunately, the endgame players are not evenly distributed: Large servers like Balmung in North America or Japan’s Pandemonium have many more people who can participate in the Cosmic Explorations than small servers like Carbuncle (Japan), Louisoix (EU), or Zurvan (Oceania) (via Fanbyte.com)
Accordingly, large servers complete challenges like these rapidly, where the goal is simply to have the largest number of participants. At the time of this news, the North American server Faerie with a total population of about 514,493 players is leading in the Cosmic Explorations.
Additionally, players can theoretically all start simultaneously, but this does not happen due to the various time zones worldwide: At the patch release between 10 and 11 am in Europe, most players there are at work or school. In Germany, it is currently Easter break, so students theoretically have time for the MMORPG.
In the USA and Canada, on the other hand, where most of the population lives on North American servers, it is the middle of the night. Only Japan and Oceania start in the evening.
Known issues are repeating
How are players dealing with this? Under a post on Reddit, players share their frustration about the rapid progress of some servers. The mood seems primarily annoyed to frustrated.
Players from small servers, such as commentator ScarletteVera, complain about the slow progress on their end. On Dynamis, the related Fates are partially uncompletable (via Reddit) because there are not enough players to collaborate. Reddit user kirinmay claims they made only 25% total progress on a Fate after 40 minutes.
Other gamers, like AceSoldia (via Reddit), are disappointed because their server was already in the third phase of the content when they were able to participate.
Adventure_Drake (via Reddit) points out that there were similar problems when Square Enix introduced the previous endgame: Back then, the developers intentionally kept the first phases shorter to gauge how long they would need to make future ones.
Other players raise the question of whether Square Enix learned nothing from the restoration of Ishgard. As things currently stand, not everyone will have the chance to participate in the Cosmic Explorations.
The Cosmic Explorations seem to suffer from a similar problem as the restoration of Ishgard: Casual players on large servers have little chance of participating, while small servers with too few players struggle to complete the individual phases.
Currently, only the first of several phases of the Cosmic Explorations is live. As one commentator on Reddit mentioned, it could very well be that the developers want to first get an overview of the interest in the content and will adjust future phases accordingly. In fact, Square Enix seems to be getting many things right otherwise: After 8 hard months, Final Fantasy XIV is finally recovering on Steam, but it is still too early to celebrate
