Final Fantasy 14 players can't help themselves: MMO diehards dogpiled the "casual" Cosmic Exploration content so hard it's caused community debate on FOMO and time-gating

The Final Fantasy 14 community is once again in shambles, but this time it's not over a poor event reward or Dawntrail reviews – it's related to patch 7.21 and its introduction of Cosmic Exploration, a new instanced form of collaborative casual content.

At least that's what it's supposed to be – but fans are saying it's anything but "casual" now, as more invested players bulldoze progress through Cosmic Exploration and leave others with nothing to do. A recent meme shared on Reddit highlights the issue, with the caption reading "Cosmic Exploration on populated servers be like" and the attached image saying "Cosmic Exploration just arrived... aaaaand it's finished."

Comments see players agreeing with the meme, with one saying they were "off today for it and still missed the first two phases," admitting it's "crazy how fast it goes." Another post on the platform shows fans criticizing Square Enix for the debacle, titled "Cosmic Exploration infrastructure expansion already finished the morning of Day 1?" The OP questions how the developers didn't "think to add some sort of basic time gate."

Not everyone feels the same, however. "FFXIV players are the type to finish a small segment of time-gated content and start dooming that they finished all the content and there's no time gating," reads a thread elsewhere on the site, seemingly poking fun at those complaining that Cosmic Exploration isn't properly time gated. Another post expresses a similar sentiment: "I feel people are overexaggerating how much they missed on Cosmic Exploration."

It's all almost too reminiscent of Island Sanctuary's own release in Final Fantasy 14 back with patch 6.2, and how quickly players were optimizing it rather than enjoying it as the relaxing, casual content it was meant to be. You can always count on MMO stans to min-max, though, I suppose – especially if it's multiplayer-based content that requires collaboration rather than a single-player focused instance like the Island Sanctuary.

After 8 months, Final Fantasy 14 expansion Dawntrail finally goes back to "Mixed" Steam reviews as MMO fans praise patch 7.2: "A massive improvement in all regards"