Craft Skill Limitations

[GlobalVariable]

The issue really is that crafting is irrelevant since the way people experience now makes buying the early gear irrelevant. Until SE finds a way to bring exping back outside of Abyssea for lower levels in a way that doesn't infuriate those that seek Abyssea parties to leech, I don't think you will see a more populated Auction House.

More specifically convince low level people actually play their jobs. You can enter at 30 but can't really do anything in an exp party except open boxes - the problem isn't WHERE they get their exp, its HOW. If those boxes for exp popped up in FoV zones and it were easier to build lower level parties people would.

[Okiro]

Also, I'd say you were right about the timing of the increase to craft skill limits being perfect with those other adjustments as every one of those things occurring at once might create a little economic boom in the crafting industry that would be beneficial for everyone, as I said before. This next comment of mine may not be popular here, but sadly a high percentage of posters on the official forums aren't the ones to be influenced by as they would have this game in "easymode" and make everything obtainable without much effort at all (Essentially, this is abyssea; everything is too easy to get except *maybe* cards). That's not to say I don't enjoy abyssea, but you've done the casual community a favor with it and still they complain that it's too hard to get seals and things even though it's really not; it just takes a little effort and the rewards are well worth that effort being put forth. These same people are the ones now who are complaining about letting a second craft go to 100; these people who now make their gil off of crafting consumables that have in most cases over doubled in price because no one crafts and they think that if you let a second craft go to 100, it might impinge upon their profits. Realistically, the most used consumables are craftable as is with subcrafts leveled to 60; sure you can't HQ them at the rates of higher levels, but there's still profit in NQing them with the occasional HQ currently and even before when the market was stable. The purpose of allowing a second craft to go to 100 would be reigniting the interest in crafting that there was years ago which will hopefully re stabilize the market and make things better for the entire economy.

[Cljader1]

This decision SE made delayed many intermediate crafter's dreams. What I mean by this is that some players may have been low on gil and as a result decided to take up a easier craft like cooking to get a good healthy stack of gil going for themselves. However after a couple years of building gil through cooking, these crafters finally have enough to invest in more prestigious crafts like goldsmithing, blacksmithing, leathercraft etc. By allowing a second 100 lvl skill cap would've freed many players from there starter crafts but SE decision for the time being denied them this. Thus pigeon-holing crafters to remain with there starter crafts and force the more buying and usage of mules.

[annewandering]

It would be lots of fun to have all crafts to 100 or even two. I just am not sure how much good it would do. If there are new recipes introduced that would be great for WW and Bonecrafting wonderful. Now if other recipes were introduced for WW and Smithing, Great! Except that now I can make any WW recipe and with those I would only be able to make some. Maybe it seems petty but truth is I leveled my WW to 100 with my subcrafts specifically so I could make any recipe in the WW list. It would anger me to not be able to continue to do that. We would be forced to chose WW+ one other craft. That means there are WW + 5 others I could not do.
Now from a consumer point of view consider this. If they cant find a crafter now, it would be 6 times harder to find the RIGHT WW in the future.

[Aquilla]

I apologize in advance if this has been said before in this thread... I don't have the time to read through all of it atm, so I'm just replying to Camate's post.

I am glad that improvements are being looked into in the gathering, and in crafting as a whole. In my opinion, the problem with crafting is two fold: base materials, and reward.

1. base materials for crafting: especially at higher levels, it becomes nigh impossible to gather with any sort of efficacy materials to level up. In every craft, it's easier to simply make the gil elsewhere, and then possibly blow it at the AH to get a few skill ups. Skill-ups are few and far between, but that wouldn't be an issue if I had a real chance to farm/gather ingredients. I used to be a prolific miner (i funded my blm's staffs that way back in the ye olde days), but if I went back to leveling goldsmithing seriously, I certainly wouldn't be trying to mine up gold/platinum ingots for skillups. This is not to say that it is impossible to get gold/platinum ingots through mining, but I will say this: If I went to, say, Sea-Serpent's Grotto as monk/thf and killed sahagin for nothing but gil drops, I would get more ingots by spending a few hours there and then buying them off AH, than I would mining any given area.
Crafting is a bit about the journey. It is cool to put the drops/gathered items to use by making something out of them. Buying stacks and stacks of stuff off the AH doesn't quite have that same allure... and simply isn't fun. If I'm looking at crafting as a simply monetary venue, and not anything that has any other value except for how much money I can make ...that brings me to point number 2.

2. reward.
No craft is worth much at 100 anymore.
Yeah, some HQs still sell very decently, and I am sure that people who are more committed than I can spend the time investing a lot of gil into a certain % of return based on HQ percentage. Okay. I am not hard core crafter, or player, of any sort. However.. It's a lot easier to make money in any number of ways.
Well, I'd venture to say that most people don't play for imaginary riches, so what other reward does crafting offer? What unique ability/aspect of game do I get as a lv 100 crafter?
None. Outside of a few furnishings, there is no reward for me hitting 100 in any craft. I've had friends who've put the time to level a craft, taking years to hit 100, only to see that there is very little they can do with it. Most good armor now is no longer crafted...and there is no real way to produce 'unique' armor in the game. I thought that the idea of coloring certain furnishings, or the evoliths idea, was gonna lead to a way for us to produce truly unique things, but that isn't going to happen.
Why not give us more control over the output of our crafting? Why not really let us decide what stats are going to go into it, what color it will be, what it will do? Why not give crafters -- especially those who hit 100 -- a bit of a boost or ability of some sort, something that's going to improve their gameplay overall -- a stat bonus, maybe? Would it really break the game at this point? What if cooks could make unique r/e aoe foods, that stacked with regular foods, that could buff their parties? What if goldsmiths had a gem-O-finder ability, a mining widescan of sorts?

If we choose to be crafters, why not let us be unique for that aspect? It's okay to have crafting be a difficult journey, but give us something to look forward to... something other than a furnishing and an apron, and a knowledge that 99% of the recipes of our given craft are useless, and the remaining 1% just don't add up to much more than a side-grade.

Having a ton of side-grades at 75 was much derided on the internets for a good reason, and it's not something I'd like to see at 99.... instead of giving us gear where we need to change pants every time we cast a different spell, why not allow us to combine some of that gear...but that's a separate rant, I suppose.

In short, crafting and gathering in XI have always been a less-fun part of the game, something that seemed tailormade for bots due to the high time-cost, and sheer un-funness of hitting 'craft' button millions of times to get to 100. Let's hope that changes!

[Avina]

First of all I want to say that even though I definitely disagree with the decision to postpone raising the crafting skill I do appreciate the effort being made on the community team and the devs to address this issue... but there are some points that I think really deserve to be addressed.

Here is how I see the current problem with crafting (aside from consumable crafts such as WW and Cooking, although those have taken a hit as well):

As said in my earlier post a huge problem with crafting jobs that specifically craft gear (armor, accessories, etc) now have enormous amounts of what basically amounts to as trash when you look at how the game is run. There use to be a time when being well geared at level 40 was actually important, people camped NMs for gear and bought high quality low level gear. Since so much of the player population has taken to trading keys to chests or even simply just idling in Abyssea, to the average player there really isn't a point to investing in lower level gear. If you can find one, tell me... and I don't Abyssea burn my jobs either and actually try to gear myself as best as I can at these lower levels but being honest to myself; I'm just making it hard for myself because I liked the old way. And it really fails to feel rewarding.

I know other crafters will turn to me and say that all the money from crafting came when you got to level 100 and were HQing... and its true, that's where the big money was at for sure. But crafters were still able to turn a profit or at least break even with staples such as the Eisen set for smithing or Seer's for clothcraft, etc, both which were low level synths that people used to buy. The point being there was still money to be made at these lower levels of crafting... but the way SE has set up the game now, very nearly all of the recipes for gear we can craft won't be bought and won't be used.

This is the biggest problem I see for crafters... its easy for SE to make new recipes for new gear that can be used at the 75+ level that have awesome stats... but now you can really make the case that the great majority of crafting recipes is garbage. Crafters might argue that this has always been the case (lots of statless gear that no one would buy) but it is much more pronounced when no one is playing a job at a level that they'd use the gear that you can make. Crafting and the Auction House will always have problems if this issue is never addressed by SE... merging the auction house won't fix it, raising the crafting caps won't fix it, nothing will unless SE makes some serious change that would give players a reason to really *want* to level their lower jobs outside of Abyssea. We need a new perk for doing so.

Taking this all in, there are some things that Camate said that I have questions and concerns about specifically:

In regards to our plans to raise the crafting skill limits during the next version update, ... However, as a result of discussions based on all of your feedback we have opted to postpone this.

Although I definitely believe that raising the crafting cap won't solve the problem we have, I don't see any reason to avoid doing so. It's a lot of work as it stands now, you really have to earn it, and it would revitalize it a bit. It would not bring lower level gear into the AH again... that's going to take a bigger fix that doesn't have anything to do with the crafting system. My biggest question is how is raising the crafting cap bad? What was the reason that they decided to postpone it specifically?

Our ultimate goal is to add numerous items so that you can select what you wear depending on the situation and slot.

Possible to create attractive, one of a kind items

System to add stats via augment synergy

I have some hesitation on these things based on how they are worded. But the basic gist is that people just don't like the randomness that has been thrown into so much of the newest gear that has been introduced into the game, as well as with the augment system. Fields of Valor gave us random stats that could possibly even result in the item becoming worse than it was before, and would always render it 100% unsellable with no way to remove augments (I still don't know why SE hasn't retroactively corrected this to allow FoV augments to be removed through synergy...). Synergy gave us reliable results with evoliths, but the evolith stats themselves were too specific to have many of them hold much merit. No one really wants to carry around on them a weapon that has WS Acc +5 against birds, especially since synergy favored augmenting weapons that were already statless. If we were augmenting pieces that were already good with WS Acc +5 against birds as an additional stat on top of that, it could've been much more worthwhile. But what the statless weapons needed were solid, reliable augments such as attack +5, accuracy bonuses, attributes, etc...

There are also some items that have been thrown in like those series of earrings that gives bonuses depending on if the part has a certain job present. We really need items and gear that don't require correct alignment of the planets in order to make use of them.

So yeah, I hope you are taking efforts to avoid that kind of 'situational' gear, since that sort of stuff was way too situational and has never really been used because of it, or the benefits from using it weren't good enough. I think if it isn't a piece that you don't think a player would want to keep in their inventory most of the time when they are playing, it probably isn't worth putting into the game. It's clear that you guys know what kinds of things we want... Abyssea is full of such treasures, let the crafters make some compareable stuff. Hopefully this is meant when you wrote "Possible to create attractive, one of a kind items" ... I'm just responding to the things we've seen in the past.

If we ever can breathe life back into lower level exp party like I described in the first half of this post, I think its possible to salvage some of the systems already in place... as any crafter knows who crafts armor we have lots of statless armor that are perfect blank slates for augmenting... but the current system has been too unforgiving. Potential fixes could include:

Fields of Valor Elite Training: Remove the negative stats. We are, after all, putting down our time in the form of tabs for this... it would make sense for the system to not butcher our piece and make it worse in the process. Make it so that weaker (but all positive) augments are more common with a small chance of a significant stat increase or a rare augment type (Haste, for example). Let us remove augments we don't like with synergy so that taking a chance at these doesn't ruin our chance to ever sell the item!

Synergy Evoliths: Improve the quality of the evoliths that fit on weapons that are naked and statless... no more of this "vs. beasts, only with dark magic" kind of boosts. Like I said, have evoliths drop varying levels of attributes like STR and straight stat mods (accuracy up).

I really am getting to the end, I'm sorry for the length lol

Possible to create base items through synthesis

I'm guessing that this is referring to stuff like the ebon ebur etc line of gear... I don't think the relationship between Synthesis and synergy really should follow the direction of Synthesis > Synergy. Synthesis crafters should be able to materials that can be used in synergy, base armor/weapon/accesories pieces to be augmented, but there should be an equal amount of gear that only those high level crafters can make on their own, which can rival even augmented gear (but with very difficult to obtain materials). Likewise, synergy should also be producing unique materials that could be used to help make those fancy gear items.

There should be an interplay between the two types but a crafter should be able to make solid, viable gear on their own. Especially since crafters run the added risk of losing their mats... you can fail synergy all day long if you have the fewell and you won't lose anything. But in Synthesis the crafter runs the risk of losing sometimes millions of gil not from lack of skill but because of the internal dice roll the game does for synthesis... such great risk needs a great reward.

[Atomic_Skull]

It's taken me 7 years to get level 94 fishing. I think if the goalpost was moved and I suddenly found myself 26 levels from cap instead of 8 my head would explode.

[Anapingofness]

I also apologize if any of this has been mentioned before, I do not have the time to read the 17 pages of posts. Therefore, I am mainly responding to Camate's post.

Here are my two cents~

It is kind of difficult not to draw parallels between FFXI and FFXIV not only because the games are made by the same company and one game in many ways mirrors the other but also because it feels as if they had attempted to do things that they didn’t complete in FFXI, so to speak.

This is best seen in the fact that FFXIV gives you the option to level a craft as a “main job”. While it certainly isn’t a bad idea, what SE failed to do was shift the game play to suit the players that opted to play a crafter rather than a typical mage/dd job.

That being said it is rather important to note that crafting as a whole is a very, grossly, outdated concept in FFXI. Simply put the time and effort spent crafting in FFXI does not equal to (even by a fraction) the reward. It simply takes too long to really get anywhere. Challenge is important in any game and one certainly wants the players to feel accomplished but often times that is not the case in FFXI. I, personally, have lost count of the many times I’ve said to myself “Christ, that too way too long to do.” but I digress (slightly).

In addition to what has been stated about giving crafting meaning and the like, it’s important to understand that it will take more than that to revive it. I’ve been level 87 Alchemy for quite some time now (well over a year, not to mention that it took me several years to get that point). I’ll be perfectly honest, as it is right now, I’ve no desire to touch it. The reason is really two fold. Firstly, there is nothing that I can make that is worthwhile- about the only thing I’d like to make is the Crystal Rose furnishing but even that doesn’t make up for the aggravation I’d face trying to get to that point. Not to mention since we can’t increase the size of our Mog House to be able to put more furnishings in there the furnishing that I’d eventually get around to making (if I’m bored enough) would only end up being inventory +1. Secondly, the journey to reach level 100 is such a bloody pain in the ass (if you’ll forgive the cursing) that just thinking about it is a huge turn off.

Speaking of crafting and the Mog House. Back in the day when the crafting signs ( i.e. Boneworker’s Signboard, Goldsmith’s Signboard... etc) came out many players thought that they would be able to use their Mog House as a shop of sorts. That would have been really cool- sadly that didn’t come to be, nor were we able to have our own stands/stores. It is something to consider and maybe even pass on to the FFXIV dev team if these changes are too much for FFXI.

A slight comment to the Mog House bit. The Mog House is a fairly original idea that I applaud SE for. I was very disappointed that they didn’t have it in FFXIV and I can only hope that they add it in rather quickly with adjustments to the Gardening (yet another idea that I applaud SE for) aspect so that it reflects more like a mini Farmerama/Farmville/LOTRO farming style. However it is my personal belief that they should allow for an actual Mog House expansion because furniture crafting is a rather large part of crafting. I know for a fact that I am not the only player who likes to buy furnishings for show and invite my friends over to chat it up and admire them. It is rather depressing that one cannot make the Mog House grow and show off more furnishings. Another thing I’d like to point out is an overall lack of interaction with the furnishings (but this is an overreaching problem with an overall lack of interaction with the world that is going to be saved for discussion on a rainy day).

Some players may discredit the idea of decorating the Mog House for frivolous reasons but one must consider- we picked the characters we picked because they appealed to us. They in many ways become an extension of ourselves. The Mog House, likewise becomes that extension as well. Being able to decorate it how we see fit is something that is small but that does bring joy to players- it gives us a sense of accomplishment and individuality. It is the same reason people want barber shops and casual clothing. It is as if a small piece of Vana ‘diel is “ours”.

All in all the things to keep in mind about crafting is number one- it should be fun and number two- that the time/effort put into the endeavor should directly effect the reward.

P.S. Feel free to pass this onto the FFXIV dev team as it can help, I’m sure.

Edit:
It would be very beneficial for craters to have "Craft Bags"- as in, bags/storage/etc that crafting/gathering items would go into. You will not believe just how much inventory the crafting/gathering materials take up- especially in the higher levels.

~ Thanks!

[Avina]

It's taken me 7 years to get level 94 fishing. I think if the goalpost was moved and I suddenly found myself 26 levels from cap instead of 8 my head would explode.

I don't think anyone is suggesting they raise the crafting cap in that sense. We're talking about more 100s, but I wasn't able to read all the posts so I'm not sure if it had been brought up... if so, yeah, I agree with you. I just want to be able to take more to 100.

[GlobalVariable]

I don't think anyone is suggesting they raise the crafting cap in that sense. We're talking about more 100s, but I wasn't able to read all the posts so I'm not sure if it had been brought up... if so, yeah, I agree with you. I just want to be able to take more to 100.

SE only mentioned multiple level 100 crafts but a few posters were suggesting beyond 100 for their main craft earlier in the thread.

I'd like to be able to take cooking up without worries that I'm losing out on recipes in my main craft that would need a higher sub or needing to spend those points on my main craft so I'm against going past 100 for now to and all for having as many 100's as we feel like grinding out. I feel other issues need taken care of before bother though or we'll just have a short burst of power level crafting and NPC'ing the results. Hardly anybody to buy the low level stuff, and no low level stuff for anybody to buy. Catch22. So I think the decision to postpone was a good one.