ARR often feels very contradictory in its design (long)

This is probably one of the more constructive posts I've read for some time so I have to tip my hat to you, OP. You made some very good points. I agree with some and disagree with others but I do believe that the XIV team is still trying to figure out what they want to do. The game took off with unexpectedly high popularity so they were caught very much off-guard from the get-go (see early access/launch week server and account issues.) With that being said, that meant they needed to appeal to a much larger player base and I really think they're still trying to strike a balance there for customer satisfaction and profit...and they're not stupid so I'm sure they will, they just need time. I myself am loving most aspects of the game right now and 2.1 only made me enjoy it even more than I did. There is still room for improvement of course but that will always hold true.

Leveling speed is not a problem. The problem is there isn't anything worthwhile that anyone can sell. Crafting doesn't make anything better than what you can get from drops and tokens. Consumables do not provide a large enough bonus to make them necessary raid boosts.

You should be able to get to the real meat of the game (endgame) quickly, which you can, and that's good, but crafters need to be able to actually make something people want. Right now they really don't, and supply far outstrips demand.

What needs to change:

- The materia system needs work. Stat caps need to be raised. All gear, including dungeon drops and raid drops, should have materia slots, but only crafted gear should allow over-melding. Materia should be crafted rather than obtained by burning gear. Let a crafting material be obtained from converting a piece ("protoaetheric matter," with a ~15% chance to obtain HQ protoaetheric matter) and use that precursor material be used, in conjunction with other materials, to make materia. Higher item level gear gives more protoaetheric matter when converted. Distribute the different types of materia among the existing crafting classes, ensuring that in order to craft all materia, one would need to have every crafting class leveled.
- We need more crafted gear. There should be a tier of item level 80 and item level 90 crafted gear. Why we're still stuck with ilvl70 as the highest is beyond me.
- Food and potions should provide a larger increase to a player's performance, making them much more necessary for endgame encounters.
- Crafted fluff items such as more dyes, fireworks, minions and mounts. Yes, mounts. There are loads of people who love nothing more than collecting mounts. Make them difficult to craft and you'll be giving people a good source of income.
- The highest-level crafted gear should require materials that only drop in raids and hardmode/endgame dungeons. This is so people who do not want to craft are not forced to craft, but instead can farm these materials and sell them to crafters. This would also make sure that the best gear in the game would require the cooperation of both battle-oriented players and crafting-oriented players.
- The repair interface should be fixed so that it's both possible for crafters to repair other players' gear and easier for crafters to quickly do their own repairs. Everyone still uses the NPCs to repair, unless they are crafters themselves. The "Request Meld" interface should allow for multiple melds in one shot.
- Implement a small (2%) listing fee on the market boards.
- (After 2.2) Give crafters the ability to create vanity weapon/armor skins in every existing armor model in the game with absolutely no class restrictions whatsoever (can be used by All Classes). This way, if someone wants to wear the sexy lab coat and short skirt ALC AF outfit and fight dragons, they can! But they have to buy an outfit from their friendly neighborhood crafter.

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Originally Posted by Starplayer

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SE is the only problem with the economy they refuse to use anything that creates one, NPC are you main focus for everything. RMT is still running wild & they even sell content clears.
you were pretty much forced to have crafters in 1.0 even FFXI in the pre abyssea days even with RMT the economy was moving items & gear around.
FFXIV you get all gear free from quest, NPC's, tomestones, drops no reason at all to buy anything crafted. just like other mmo's crafting is useless

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Originally Posted by synaesthetic

Leveling speed is not a problem. The problem is there isn't anything worthwhile that anyone can sell.

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I respectfully disagree. The reason why we have nothing to sell is because EVERYONE can gather and craft EVERYTHING too easily, which in turn leads to the market becoming flooded with every single item in the game, and it all becomes worthless. If there was some effort in leveling, we wouldn't have so many people crafting the higher end stuff which would make them more valuable.

It also detracts from one of the most important aspects of an mmo, the sense of uniqueness. I can't tell you how many other crafters in AF I see running around town, and a lot of them have every class leveled to max

I completely agree with the op. i played since day 1 of version 1.0 and yeah it had a lot of flaws, but i can tell you that the game had a lot more depth than now, armory system was abused by the players, if they had made more restrictions in the design the system would have worked really good, you could make pseudo jobs just by mixing the correct skills, like marauder becoming a pseudo Drk (mrd and thm), gladiator becoming a pseudo Rdm (gld, thm and conj) other thing that i liked was having a separated character from class level, you had more hp at the start of a class from lvl 1 and you could customize your stats.

Right now all the jobs are locked in a single role, you don't see a character playing very differently from another with the same class/job, its only about rotations and if you don't make the same rotations as the best dps you will do less damage. The open world is now all instanced, they over crowded the maps with teleports, why not add 1 or 2 teport points to an area and the rest run to the part you want? NM's are now Fates, no more open world dungeons with NM's in it, the weather now is not important in 1.0 served to spawn certain NM's at certain hours...

Crafting is not important and materia is not even what it could be, now the best gear is droped in dungeons or bought for tokens, why make a system so rich in gathering and crafting if you're not going to give it a good use, just as quick fix, why not make dungeons drop rare crafting materials once in a while? so you can make a very good piece of gear, materia should give more bonuses, Open world NM's dropped crafting mats and was awesome getting a good drop after fighting with another party for the claim, etc....

I like the battle system but it should give more options for play styles, almost every MMO now gives you that option or make more job branches, i don't know they really need to tweak this game , im still playing it and enjoying some stuff, but i really feel they can do a lot better than this.

Just to answer a player above me, if they restricted crafting level a bit more like just having the option to level up 2 craft classes above level 50, then you would have less crafters in the same discipline as you, that's how it should work, same for gatherers, maybe restrict only being able to level above 50, 1 of the 3 classes, other MMO's makes that, but they lock you since level one, i think that XI had the same option, so you would see just a few professional crafters.

I was thinking about this also .

Crafting in V1 . All gear was crafted and you did get some dungeon gear not all the gear came from dungeons like it is now . Also you could sell all the gear you got unless it was broken .

Crafting in 2.2 you make things sure but there is no point in anyone buying any gear because gear and weapons are given to us like candy on Halloween. Why should i buy level 37 gear when i can run a level 35 dungeon 10 times and get a full set of gear that is better ? You cant sell gear if 100% bonded ( witch is dumb imo ) you could take all crafted gear out of the MB and people would not notice .

It is to easy to level . I know no one wants a grind fest months and months to level to max but 3 days and boom your 50 . Really a hard core gamer can get max level in 3 days . Grinding FATEs all day its not hard at all , one of my 50s i did in 5 days . Witch also makes gear not worth the time to buy off MB . why spend 50k on a piece of gear when you will replace it in 45 mins . On that note the relic weapons . I have 3 i have finished all 3 in about 7 hours . Its like boom Ifrit weapon ohhh cool , next Garuda ohhh cool got weapon witch is better then Ifrit , Next titan cool got Titan weapon wont ever use it because i now have relic .

SE has no answer for RMTs but is quick on the spot to send you a e-mail if you told someone in a group your in you forgot to repair your gear but you can still finish the dungeon and the person wants you to leave but your like no why should i . ( had this happen and i got a e-mail for being harnessing wtf! ) So easy to slap the hands of paying customers but has no interest on cleaning the games RMT and Bot problems . They say that there pro-active but lets be honest there not

And now Housing prices . Because there is so much RMT gil in the game we have to pay 100 of millions of gil . And most of the houses bought now are from RMT gil ( not all ) A problem SE created . And it is us who get the shaft because of it .

The game is fun most times but most times you just sit back and say don't get it its a contradiction ?? Example Limit breaks we were all like why don't we have job specific LBs ? Yoshi said because he did not want one class to be better then or favored more then other ones , Yet if i want a magic unicorn i need to level WHM ???
And how about waiting all day for tanks and healers ??? Why even have job and class names then ?

There trying to please everyone and at the same time there losing focus on what makes things great and unique . Like people we are unique so should the class and jobs a BRD should not have a healing LB and a DRG , PUG should not have the same LB there not the same class / job

I have to agree with the crafting, it's severely disappointing how underused it is now. In 1.0 I really didn't care that much about the crafting system, but when 2.0 rolled around and I really began making things I truly enjoyed myself. Crafting was now fun, and I really wanted to focus more on it. However there's next to no demand for it. I wanted to be the "go-to" person for a couple crafts that my Free Company might need, instead there's little demand. Partially since it's so easy to cap a craft but also because dungeon-dropped gear and accessories are so much easier to obtain and better. I'm in the process of making myself a full set of Gryphonskin gear for my Bard because I love being able to make my own gear yet I know shortly soon enough it will be entirely obsolete and I'll just be replacing it with dungeon drops or some kind of token system. All my efforts now wasted.

One of the other issues I believe is not only a dungeon oriented system but the fact that gear is quickly replaced with something else and only that one thing if you wish to be "the best" at your job. Grind a class to 30 using whatever gear that's given to you from quests, unlock your job quest. Grind some more as your job and get your AF gear. Hit 50 and start grinding dungeons for drops your class can use. Grind dungeons still and get tomes for Darklight gear. Eventually grind and get your AF relic weapon. Grind more and get Allagan gear. Someplace between there you might buy a couple accessories, a belt, or piece of gear but you won't really pimp yourself out on materia-infused crafted equipment because it'll just be replaced right after with dungeon drops or something from a token system.

Materia is still selling on my server, not sure for what use other than probably for PvP gear. But how long before that dries up? Eventually people will have the best PvP gear available and will stop buying materia. Even the PvP-crafted gear is nowhere as good as gear earned via the token system and thus has taken a large nose-dive in price. Isn't even good as materia fodder because it cannot be converted.

EDIT: These post restrictions are so pointless, 1,000 character limit that's easily bypassed by editing the post.

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Originally Posted by Skyhound

The game hasn't fully fleshed out, we barely have half of the total jobs meant for the game. Give it some time, sheesh.

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3 years isn't enough?

Joking aside, I really do hope they can balance out these mechanics and give more purpose to things that aren't just dungeon runs and boss fights.

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Originally Posted by Skyhound

The game hasn't fully fleshed out, we barely have half of the total jobs meant for the game. Give it some time, sheesh.

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I wish i had a dollar, literally, a dollar for each time ive heard this "phrase" mindlessly spouted on a mmo forums before the mmo itself became a sinking ship. *eyerolls* I would be one hell of a rich guy.

What i'm REALLY getting sick of around here is the white knighting to SE's rescue. Let me ask you "knights" a question.. what does it hurt if our complaining actually nets something good? You know.. something positive and nice that would be benefit to all? What if the OP's message is heard due to the number of upvotes and the devs stop and think and say, you know, hes right, we really need some consistency. And wham, more open world content.. or wham, changes to make crafters more viable in what they are supposed to be doing, crafting whatever they are SUPPOSED to be crafting... not just furniture that no one can use becuase no one can actually BUY the house...

I would think you would want to rally beside us, that would make the most logical sense. Of course what am i thinking.. people around here being logical. :p Lolz

"herp de derp! wait till they flesh out the game fully you guyz!" really? Looking at the games current state, i would love to see what this game "fleshes out" to be. :p Because i'm not quite sure myself.

/rant

Sorry, Thank you OP. Your post is on mark. Will say the game is fun in places, but lets all be honest, its still a cluster when you look at it lol.

you need to put this in a Japanese forums so the DEVs are forced to see it . The Japanese will read English just state in title poor Japanese but want to have a Japanese opinion . Remember this is a Japanese game