Suggestion for Devs on adjusting crafting skill up difficulty after craft level 50.
To whom it may concern.
I've been a long time player of FFXI and I've greatly enjoyed many of the improvements you have made over the course of it's life time. The more recent improvements have allowed me to accomplish more things in a few weeks that actually took me years to even "attempt" to complete.
My current concern is the rate of "skill-ups" during crafting after reaching level 50. With the exceptional introduction of crafting kits to make levelling a craft easier for beginners and intermediate+ players, as well as encouraging crafting to be used more often helped.
Before the crafting kits I was attempting to level up Blacksmithing and over a time period of 4+ years, I was only able to accomplish level 26. When the crafting kits were introduced I was able to get not just my main craft to level 50 but also many others. It is my understanding that there is a new level cap for all crafts that allows us to achieve 2 main crafts to level 100 and all other sub crafts to 70.
But now that I have finally reach my first goal of getting many crafts to 50, I am hitting a wall when it comes to receiving skill-ups afterwards. I have fulfilled the requirements for getting past the next level cap of 51-60 in my main craft. The problem was I was using Ionis, as well as advanced synthesis support, and some "crafting" food such as a Kitron macaron and more. I was only trying to get from level 50-51 in my chosen craft. But the program decided to bottleneck so harshly that all I recieved was one 0.1 skill-up out of well over 31+ attempts with all of these "support" advantages for helping players skill up a craft.
This has happened more than once and my dream of attempting to get any craft to even level 60 is so bleak I do not even want to think of the amount of time it is supposed to take with these standards to reach a maximum of level 100 in any single craft. I do not mind losing materials (which cost game money to replace if they are available, or taking time to manually "farm" materials if none are available...) as long as I receive crafting skill for just attempting it in the first place I would be satisfied that at least something was accomplished for my "work".
When a player is willing to invest time and "gil" to accomplish something as useful as crafting it would be helpful for them actually not be hampered so severely in their progress of accomplishing this goal.
With the number of multiple crafting levels raised, it would be proper to reduce the difficulty in accomplishing skill-ups in crafting during higher levels. Keeping a steady growth "through" growth rate for level 50-100 would be ideal, instead of drastically and continually reducing the growth rate (after 50 and later levels) as the player accomplishes getting to the next tier in crafting. As it stands I still have not been able to get my Blacksmith skill high enough to create a level 55 player item that I have been trying to achieve for over 7 years which requires level 70+ Blackmsmithing skill.
I don't believe that crafting kits should be made for anything after level 50-100 as it helps to encourage players to find various "recipes" and search for where to get particular materials.
As times have changed, it is much harder to sell and buy particular items in the Auction House unless they are absolutely necessary to higher level player advancement. While there are new players or some veteran players that are willing to buy lower level equipment or materials for levelling up a lower job class some items still do sell, but it is not very often as it used to be.
One other suggestion I would like to make is that mining, harvesting, and logging still need to be adjusted so that players can "choose" what item they are attempting to retrieve when doing said project. As a partial player of FFXIV where I saw many drastic improvements in crafting, it was not as important an achievement as it is in FFXI.
As FFXI relies on players going to particular regions to mine/harvest/etc. particular materials, I believe that making the items recieved from the attempt should no longer be completely random as it is and has been for such a long time. When a player finds a mining/etc point and uses a tool to attempt to retrieve an item, a mini-menu should pop up with the materials they will be able to retrieve and a percentage of what their success rate would be for their chosen material based on their crafting skill (and their "farming" equipment set).
Also the higher their crafting skill (i.e Goldsmithing for silver ore), should allow the player to get more than one item in a single attempt (since now many items that didn't used to stack up, now stack...). Any excess items (if the players items bag is full, should be sent to a treasury pool for the player to sort out later.
This would make it much more logical for those who craft(and those who don't) to want to make use of mining/etc to either make money, or save money and change the perception that it is better to buy all the base materials (if they're even available at all) instead of taking the time to get it oneself.
