I last logged off on Tuesday night at the moon base. When I logged back on, I came back to some sort of crisis happening on the moon. The sky had changed color ("Astromagnetic storm"), and everyone had left the central base which was on red alert to go repair at the disaster area. So I used the hoverboard tram (which was built within a few hours of the patch going live on Tuesday morning) to get over there and join in. You get access to a new type of leve (repeatable crafting quest) that you get to spam for even more exp while the timer is counting down. There is a bar to fill to complete the FATE. We filled up the bar and then there was 10 more minutes until the FATE expired so we kept doing the crafting for the extra exp. Note: you are still navigating menus and then clicking your macro to craft the item (or let your Artisan addon automate everything) and you get exp for it, just that you are getting more exp than normal.
Then it ended, the sky returned to normal, and we went back to the central encampment to spend our currency on the roulette trying to get the mech mount, which apparently can be sold on the auction house and is plummeting in price rapidly (currently 1.6 million gil).
I remember speculating during the leadup to Endwalker that there would be some sort of GW2 esque meta event for crafters or a raid where you would need crafters trying to fix the heart of the star while being defended by combat players, so it was interesting that FF14 wound up doing something like that but for side content with no stakes.
Shortly after the red alert, applications for the next mech ops began. Apparently you don't pilot the white mech (called a "vacuum suit") every time, as mech ops can have you be using different kinds of vehicles depending on the op about to begin. I decided to go on foot, and this time alien fungi began raining down from the sky (It's the Thread!) and we had to use flamethrowers and bulldozers to clear it out. It was pretty much just running around to the pink balls and pressing the flamethrower button for two minutes while there is dramatic music playing. My gathering classes had already been leveled up to the cap of 100, but I still wound up getting a buff out of it for my crafter classes, where for the next 20 crafter leves I get a bonus to exp earned.
Fortunately, I was online during the next stage of the construction of the moonbase, this time the habitat module. Once again, there is all this humdrum and excitement and fast paced music playing, but the actual gameplay is walking up to a construction rover, extracting its battery for 3 seconds, then running over to the charging station and charging the battery for 10 seconds, then running back to the rover and installing the battery for 3 seconds. Rinse repeat for 15 minutes. I don't know why these devs haven't learned from GW2's game design of sprucing up event gameplay on a moment to moment basis.
Start of habitat module construction event.
Event finished, we all look inside the rooms.
It was then followed up by construction of the cosmoport/landing pad 30 minutes later. Exact same gameplay of ferrying batteries back and forth for 15 minutes. It is weird that we built a landing pad but I don't think there any spaceships in the setting capable of landing on it. We have seen literally only one other spaceship in the whole of FF14, the Ragnarok, which is a huge frigate built by the Sharlayans and had to land in the water outside of a port.
Start of cosmoport construction.
Event finished, checking out the landing pad.
Despite the glamour and presentation, it is odd that this is still effectively solo content. At no point did I ever have to work with another player. I am a crafter, but the game just magically provides all of the materials I need whenever I accept a leve (crafter quest) so I didn't need to gather materials myself or buy them off of the AH like with the Ishgard Restoration. Everyone is effectively gathering and crafting alone while inhabiting the same space. Again, don't know why they didn't learn from the past decade of GW2 event design.
GW2 had a couple of events where the players have to coordinate to pass an item down the line. The bonfire event in Grothmar Valley where you had to throw a torch that other people could use to light a torch and throw it further down, repeat until you have a line of torches that reaches the bonfire. Or the Dragon's End event where people need to throw corrupted crystals into a pot, but you can't hold a crystal for more than a couple seconds so you can't just grab it and run with it back to the pot. You instead have to form a line where people are throwing crystals to each other down the line and it eventually passes to the pot.
EDIT: I got selected to pilot the vacuum suit for a mech ops. Pretty neat. The "click" sound effect when you hit a rock is satisfying.
I like the visual effects of FF14 walls.
Perspective of the ground support team.
ँ़── .✦.𖥔 ݁ ˖
