The problem was never the crafter, it was the fact the buyer could completely bypass raid tiers with Gil.
I remember threads like this when we were waiting impatiently for crafted 110 gear.
and getting banned for buying gil, scaring other potential buyersQuote:
If these gear are i190+, then you can imagine gil buyers wearing full sets of materia-melded gear in raids without the need of doing any kind of raiding activity.
The sad part is that if the devs were remotely creative, they'd have given us a system which allows us to upgrade existing gear instead of replacing it every update. Keeps older content relevant, and keeps crafters in the loop the whole time. This constant planned obsolescence is getting really old, really fast and I think people are finally starting to clue into this.
If every major update is just a new item level, with then same tome/raid grind as before, it quickly loses incentives to keep people playing. I'm not sure about you guys, but I've seen a nose-dive in activity over the past few months, and the last update did little to quell the lull.
The same-old isn't going to work forever, so its time their creative department got a bit more creative.
But that would require planning and balancing instead of just quietly sweep everything under the rug because it's become old content!
They could design fights around mechanics and teamwork instead of strict dps checks and ilvls so people could costumize their equipment according to their preference instead of whatever number is needed (hello ACC) and make any kind of gear feasible. But it's so much easier to just lock everything, make it so a certain amount of time must pass before it's even possible to pull certain numbers and hope people don't get bored while they simply wait.
At the moment FFXIV is following the exact same model as WoW in almost all aspects and crafting is one of them. In the end we will reach item level 800+ with thousands of obsolete crafts.
Yeah. They should instead go Archeage's route.
Where every tier is needed to advance to the next tier.
And the stats are randomized.
And the materials needed to create a single, finished, top tier item numbered in the thousands. While still being random. But hey, at least a crafter and gatherer always has something to aim for!
Sometimes I don't think you all understand what you're asking for or what you want. It's easy to say "Give us something new."
Literally no one asked for that.