Increasing Rarity of Crafting Ingredients and incorporating Expert Crafting

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Originally Posted by Liam_Harper

I love that people still bring this up. The easier crafting changes have effectively made the top crafters ten times richer than new and casual crafters. They were sitting on a billion or more gil. That sort of money is ten times harder to earn than in StB or HW with everything being cheap and easily obtained now, thus their wealth is at an untouchable level that the casual player can never obtain.
If crafting was harder at endgame, it opens up the opportunity for even casual players to earn decent gil with some effort. Right now, they can only ever earn peanuts and the rich players are quite happy sitting on their gil mountain. We really don't care about gil that much. We just liked crafting a lot.

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At the same time though the changes drastically decreased the utility of owning that much gil. A billion gil doesn't get you any better gear than 10 million. A full set of HQ neo-ishgardian is what, a million or so gil? Endgame combat materia practically rains from the sky so there's no need to buy any. Houses are more limited by supply, and since there's no reliable way to sell houses, price-jacking can't really happen. Glamours crafted from treasure dungeon materials can be kinda expensive when they're new, but fall to affordable levels as players farm the dungeons. I guess if you're a diehard collector and absolutely must have every rare pet and mount in the game, you could drop some serious gil on buying them. But I don't know if I'd call that sort of player a casual.

Casual players are still in a decent spot to earn $ atm - it's just not in "endgame" gear.
This patch, moreso than any due to the accessibility changes, rly emphasizes collectable grind, DoL empowerment, and selling mid-tier crafts/subcrafts to other crafters rather than trying to sell the completed items. Particularly as there's no immediate need for the gear (unlike raid patches driving demand).

I don't like that they've been so eager to casualize crafting, but obviously there's data driving their reasons for doing so, and Ishgard's been widely adopted / popular so it can't all be bad. But in that spirit, I don't see them adding harder crafts to the master books or main-line crafting system, as expert crafts were specifically to counterbalance that casualization for the crafter mains. It'd be a complete 180 from their current philosophy. But it'd be neat to see grindier long-term achievements and crafts outside of Ishgard too, maybe even some sort of gil sink tied in via npc-sold mats.

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Originally Posted by ForteNightshade

Case in point, I made my first 10M way back in Heavensward selling almost nothing but baby leveling gear and Chocobo Aprons. It helped get my foot in the door to eventually make the Ironworks set. I actually spent a fair bit of time figuring out exactly how to get the stats to make it while spending the least amount of money. All of that is gone nowadays as they all but throw gear at you and crafting has become absurdly easy to the point it'll barely take any effort at all to catch up.

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I was in the same boat as you back in Heavensward, but I was NEVER into crafting in ARR. I spent the majority of ARR and Heavensward broke and never really ever getting more the 150k gil at any one time. I didn't make my first 1 million gil until mid heavensward.

I had such a difficult time selling high level crafted gear, and opted to sell mid tier (45-55) gear and sub-required mats to make said gear. I made a killing on just farming sand and making nuggets and mythril ingots. I made my first 1mil gil in the span of 2 hours just selling mats instead of focusing on high level crafted gear that could take days if not weeks to sell while playing the undercut game.

Now there is so much ease in crafting it's almost impossible to fall below 10 mil for me. Well I take the back, I did drop like 6 million when 5.3 dropped. I had to buy my gathering i490 jewelry. (I don't have carpenter maxed). But to gain that back only took about a week of casual gathering and crafting.

I suppose you really have to watch the markets. Supply and Demand is very ebb and flow on my server. And I never craft something unless the supply on the market is dire. Example: Crab Cakes i490 gathering food was 15k/unit. I made 198 no more, and for my own reasons are this.

Diminishing returns.

Don't go crazy and plow through crafting and make like 500 Crab Cakes or Chili Crab food. Your going to be adjusting prices like crazy until you get fed up and your patience runs out. You will spend ALL your time trying to sell those items. I keep it simple and make 99 of something, go to a different item make 99. Now i'm not focusing on 1 item in particular but 10 different items. Don't kill your own market with to much of your OWN supply. Make your 50k and move on.

I really made a killing on chili crab on my server as it was going for 15k/unit and I sold 198 the first 2 days of the 5.3. Nobody was making chili crab and I made around 3mil, and I broke my own rule and made another 198. Another 3mil! I thought I had the market cornered and made another 198....then the market supply exploded. Went from zero to 600 units in the matter of hours. And that made the price implode as people were asking 20k, 30k, 50k/unit. The price spiked and then plummeted to 2k/unit. I held onto mine and decided to wait. Currently it's back up to 8k/unit and I sell 6 at a time every day and it's solid income everyday.

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Originally Posted by tdb

At the same time though the changes drastically decreased the utility of owning that much gil. A billion gil doesn't get you any better gear than 10 million.

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True indeed, though it's always been that way. In the past a billion gil still wouldn't get you more than 100m would. Having silly amounts of money has never really served purpose other than just having it, which is why it's strange some players get so jealous by it and constantly bring it up as some sort of evil.

In that sense, the casual player being able to earn far less is probably not really an issue as long as they can earn enough. What some players actually miss is the challenge, the satisfaction of finally completing that melded endgame set after weeks of theory-craft and grind and having actual difficult and rare items to strive for. That doesn't exist in crafting now, so you're simply done with it a week into the patch.

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Originally Posted by Liam_Harper

In that sense, the casual player being able to earn far less is probably not really an issue as long as they can earn enough. What some players actually miss is the challenge, the satisfaction of finally completing that melded endgame set after weeks of theory-craft and grind and having actual difficult and rare items to strive for. That doesn't exist in crafting now, so you're simply done with it a week into the patch.

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I too missed the challenge of sitting in Urth's font for hours on end to break materia to get that melded end-game set.

This was touched on a thread Camie made months and months ago. A suggestion for changes that would offer challenging recipes that would not be required to succeed but there for the challenge and the bonus of having the items they would provide. Its a shame the thread has long since been burried and forgotten.