Workshops - getting 4 people in there to progress a tier is getting tedious

[Jeykama]

That's the path to bigotry, and it isn't a pleasant road to go down.

Don't get in a snit just because your FC is set up to fail. I run a small FC too with ~3-4 active players too, and I have had no problems filling a 4M workshop party. Not because I manage to get all my FC mates online but because I also have friends and social linkshells I can ask to fill in. It's not a big deal to find 3 other people, it's just a hassle. I just wish the other 3 had a legitimate reason to be there, like a multiplayer crafting minigame or something.

And if you don't have the crafters available to turn in the mats, might I suggest levelling the crafters yourself? As weak as the workshop crafting process is, it's still crafting per se and isn't a bad goal to have crafters levelled for when more advanced schematics are released. That moghouse exterior and tatanora parts aren't going anywhere after all.

[PotatoTree]

It's not that we can't get 4 people. Obviously, if 4 people are needed there will always be volunteers. But it's extremely tedious and necessary. To have to wait for 4 people to get out of their duties/not be afk/teleport back from idyleshire/etc every time we want an aetherial wheel is just plain tedious. It adds nothing to the workshops.

[Neira]

Don't get in a snit just because your FC is set up to fail.

Offensive.

I run a small FC too with ~3-4 active players too, and I have had no problems filling a 4M workshop party.

Same.

Not because I manage to get all my FC mates online but because I also have friends and social linkshells I can ask to fill in.

Same.

It's not a big deal to find 3 other people, it's just a hassle.

Annoying and unnecessary.

I just wish the other 3 had a legitimate reason to be there, like a multiplayer crafting minigame or something.

Same.

My post was in response to someone who seemed to be incapable of seeing past their own experiences. To disregard everyone who is having factual, negative situations because it isn't an occurrence which that individual has personally dealt with is close-minded. We seem to agree on almost every point you brought up though, and have had similar experiences. Maybe next time you should defend the people who are being told that

they don't deserve

content because they can't find four people at will? Even I have trouble when my work shift has me home and online at 3AM, because not many people play on NA servers at that time.

[Valleo]

As a member of a very small FC who has done 4 rounds of crafting 4-5 airship pieces at a time; it is incredibly tedious and adds absolutely nothing to the workshop experience. There are better ways to have everyone participate in workshop crafting, and forcing you to gather 3 other people to AFK while you press buttons is not one of them. It feels more like artificial gating because they couldn't (or didn't have time to) make actual content.

The most baffling part of this is the people that will come to defend it because they feel like you should do things with others in an MMO, so any kind gating is ok. Well, I agree with the idea that MMOs = socialization, but I don't ask 3 people to come and AFK while I do a dungeon.

Either give us something meaningful to do in a party of crafters, or get rid of the pointless restriction.

[AnnietheCat]

Don't get in a snit just because your FC is set up to fail.

They weren't being snit, the other person was being a dick, and now you're being rude. The facts are that this is tedious, unnecessary, and exclusionary. I run a small fc of 12 members, a few being alts and the rest being fairly active. Only two of my members craft, myself and my co-leader. That's it. No one else has fun with it, no one else wants to do it. So not only is getting a party of 4 crafters together like pulling teeth, they can't even participate because they literally do not enjoy crafting. And no one should be forced to craft. Asking my other members to stop running dungeons/raids/trials, put on their level 1 crafting class, and afk in the workshop is unfair to them, don't you think? Why should they have to stop doing what they enjoy in order to just stand around doing nothing?

There are better ways of getting this done. If they just let anyone in the fc make the turn ins, people would actually feel as though they were helping. As of now, it feels like I'm forcing them to put their fun on the back burner for my own. If it felt like it wasn't punishing us for being a small company with only 1 or 2 crafters or if it wasn't like pulling teeth getting a party together, no one would mind it. But as of now it's just really obnoxious.

[AnnietheCat]

Do you think if we called 3 gms every time we needed to advance in the workshop that they'd get the point?

[kog985]

I agree that this system is getting tedious.

The problem in here lies from the first concept design. SE designed a content where they want the community to be more socialize, FC have something to do together and also from players requested. SE did success create and delivered the idea and the concept, but the way they made it work is wrong.

Not only the basic explanation of how Company Workshop works is no different than a delivery quest (take Ixali daily delivery quest as an example): you make the item, delivery them to the machine NPC. The only different is you are not doing this alone but you may ask other people inside the FC to help you fasten the progress. And it has became a bit far from what they created from the first idea.

And to unlock the next phase of the project, they forced users to have a party of at least 4 players in order to unlock the next phase. What for?

- For being social or communicate from this? No, it isn't. This is forcing the users that "you have to do that, no excuse". For this, SE has failed the "communicate" part with the players.
- SE may have think about this system for big FC and for small FC as well (my FC only have 6 active members, and 2-3 online per day), and they made outsider can join the party in order to help. But what for? Why you have to come a long way like that? Why not make at least 1 player to pushes the phase and as many person as the party can take to also pushes the phase? For communicate or social? If we want to we will ask around if anyone have some free time that want to join in and watch some "cool" cutscene and then they can leave and continue their personal things. Not including they have a long way to travel to the city-state, locate the Wards, and then locate the Plots, go inside the house, etc. too many actions for just one action that only cost few seconds while the whole process before that require more than few seconds.
- Do we really need 4 person in order to press one button on the machine command board for it to active? Is that button really that hard to press for one person?
- It's really bothering the person that we have to ask them to forbid their activities to come inside our house, our workshop to join the party so we can unlock the next phase. Bothering them from their plays and their activities.
- It doesn't create any social when asking for a party of 4, because when the lead party finish unlock the phase, the other will just farewell and leave the party. So where is the communicate in here? We don't see any chit chat "Oh! Wow! Isn't that cool?" or "What will it do?". I have seen some sentence like "Is that it?" or "What next?", and that gave them the anger and i cannot ask them for help the next time.

tl;dr: SE failed from the concept idea of Company Workshop.

[Seyb]

I fully agree. Getting 4 people together to advance a step is not the biggest problem. But it is completely unnecessary. It gives no advantage what so ever and has to go.
Please S-E, can you remove the restriction with the next patch?

Even we as a middle FC with about 20 active members don't use the workshop often. Just the thought of stealing other people's time makes me shudder. We would use the workshop A LOT more if we could advance steps on our own. The creation process itself can still be a group effort. This restriction does not help at all.

[AnimaAnimus]

They need to make it worthwhile for others to join in. I am sure they thought diadem would create excitement about airships and make it easier, but diadem was a giant missed opportunity and a fail so...

What they should do is spread the exp awards to everyone in the party. They are minimal as it is so it shouldn't be that big of a deal if the exp you got was proportional to your level. If they would do at least that it would be somewhat more enticing then nothing at all.

[CatfishCassie]

I don't get it, why it is tedious.
In our FC our Craft Master let out a shout in the FC-Chat and there are always enough replies, except there are not enough people online of couorse, happens sometime.
For smaller FCs use PF, but there is a minimum of 4 people to etablish a FC, so it's most a problem of coordination.
If you don't get enough people who help in your FC, they don't deserve level III guild buffs or airship content or everything, wihich is related to the workshop.
And if it's a too high requirement to have a level 1 crafter and just pause the daily grinding for 5 minutes to complete some prepaired crafts, then it's beyond help.

My FC has about 12 people online at any given time, usually 4-5 of which are mid to high level crafters. Except those people are *also* high level raiders, or working on another class, or hanging out with a friend, or afk reading something on the internet, etc. Getting 4 people in one place is only easy when you're in the rare FC where everyone is motivated to do company crafting. For the other 99% of us, getting 4 people in one place is difficult because company crafting is somewhere near the bottom of the list of things they want to do, usually just below "Log off and do anything else at all with my life".

If company crafting actually WAS a group activity, I could probably get more people excited about it. But right now, people don't want to be bothered to show up and stand around so someone else can push a button when there are a great many other things they could be doing with their time.