Lessons from red scrips for 3.3

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Originally Posted by Sento-Frost

I think Mindy meant it's kinda unfair / painful to need red scripts gathering items, in order to be able to exchange our own red scripts for i170 crafting outfits mats.

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Correct. 3.2 was a step in the right direction (crafting mats easily available for anybody who could attempt 3-stars, or for those who just wanted to sell items for quick gil). I'm hoping that continues in some fashion in 3.3 in regards to red scrips. One of the easiest ways to ease the red scrip system for crafters is to remove the need for DoL tokens to spend your red scrips to attempt crafts for progress.

Well a very small step... they don't drop that often in level 60 missions :(

I hate ALL the system. It's boring. I farmed 250+ red scrip token and 200+ gathering tokens, but used half for gearing to make hq 220 accessories and the faust striking dummy. I only have one floklore book that took me an entire day of blue scrip farming, and then i said NEVER AGAIN. Also, for crafter red scrip, every week i have to gather for one hour for materials and every two week have to do aetherial reduction for crystals. Nothing ever fun. Never tried a favor too, nor diadem, also because to craft a BSM tool i need a carpenter item and i don't want to spend money in food for carpenter, even if i more then doubled mi gils with relic items / eikon accessories.

Now we have a lot of MORE weekly dailies, that are no more optional but "mandatory" like lore caps: tribes, CT/ST/WOD for relic, VA for Materia V, Alexander Midas for 220 gear on alts these days, I do savage too.. And i work 10 hrs 5/7. Geez...

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Originally Posted by StouterTaru

Get the folklore books, I spent about 90 minutes last night capping off my weekly red scrips while watching TV.

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This always raises an interesting point for me. Your entertaining yourself with something else WHILE playing a video game that should be entertaining you in the first place. If i have to do something else while playing a game then there is something wrong with the game in question.

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Originally Posted by Katchoo

This always raises an interesting point for me. Your entertaining yourself with something else WHILE playing a video game that should be entertaining you in the first place. If i have to do something else while playing a game then there is something wrong with the game in question.

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This is easy enough to say, but think about it. If we're going to have a crafting/gathering system in the first place, then items will need to be gathered. Gathering is pretty much inherently a repetative process. Anything repetative - ANYTHING - will become routine and boring if done for long enough. So, really, the only way to "fix" the system would be to remove gathering entirely. And this also includes DoM/DoW gathering (killing monsters for meat, skins, bones, and such), as that can also be repetative.

Maybe that does appeal to you, but keep in mind that while this kind of thing can be considered "work", there's a considerable portion of the playerbase who would not be happy to see it go. Why? Because they're producing something. They may not enjoy the actual work, but they get satisfaction from producing something as a result of that work. Much like real life, really. And just as in real life, when performing the work, players will come up with ways to pass the time more enjoyably. While working in real life, a worker might listen to music, for example.

On another topic touched on in this thread, Crafter/Gatherers in this game aren't fond of the Favor gathering system. For these people Ooids and such aren't a product; they're just a frustrating step in a long, convoluted crafting process. Straight gatherers, on the other hand, after a few hours work gathering these things now have an inventory full of saleable goods to unload for sweet, sweet profit.

The Favor gathering system was put into place in a large part for much the same reason that the specialist system was: too many people were doing everything themselves. It was far from uncommon for a crafter to have every craft leveled, and every gatherer leveled as well. These crafter/gatherers would gather all their own ingredients, and craft all their own items. Folks weren't buying each others' goods, and this hit gatherers particularly hard; while it was possible for gatherers to make a modest profit pre-Heavensward, honestly there were a lot of better ways to make money. With the Favor system in play, however, trying to do it all yourself became a LOT more time-intensive. I think that SE was hoping that the Crafter/Gatherers would choose one or the other to focus on. (The specialist system was even less successful due to the almost non-existent benefits of specialization; SE pretty much had to brute-force the issue by introducing specialist-only recipes.)

So, for all you folks complaining about how SE needs to make the process easier, cuz it just takes too long to do anything, well, that's just was SE wanted to happen! For straight gatherers, favor items are among the most profitable things they can dig up. Asking SE to remove the Favor requirement of the crafting process is pretty much straight-up asking SE to make gathering unprofitable again. For folks that insist on being top-notch both as gatherers and as crafters, you're just going to have to deal with the added time-sink.

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Originally Posted by LineageRazor

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Your certainly not wrong, but at the same time a portion of the playerbase would not be happy to see it go only if it was not replaced with something better. Certainly MMOs are maybe the only kind of game where people are happy to "work' while playing a game. I would still argue that the system could be greatly improved upon.

You hit the nail on the head with your second point, it certainly did make gathering profitable again. As an omni-crafter/gatherer i can attest that most of my monies came from selling off spare Ooids / crafting mats. I guess the real question is could it have been done better?

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Originally Posted by LineageRazor

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Yeah, making gatherers profitable again was a great idea. However gating it behind a capped weekly currency was not. It means that you either gear your gatherer or make money/gear a crafter. And the prices for favor items, while great for gatherers, make getting into crafting prohibitively expensive for newbies. Hell, I was a BiS crafter before the expansion dropped but now I just don't want to do it anymore because I don't want to make what was a fun system into a weekly chore.

The simple cure is to remove red scrips entirely and make everything done via blue scrips, leaving the weekly cap out. Or unlock red scrips, whatever works easiest. The appeal of crafting and gathering before HW was that you could take it at your own pace, and if you were behind you could grind to catch up. Now you either need to have stockpiled millions upon millions of gil or turn your playtime into a chore to get anywhere. That's not fun.

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Originally Posted by Katchoo

You hit the nail on the head with your second point, it certainly did make gathering profitable again.

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At what cost, though?

Whenever something is profitable on a player driven MMO market, it's rare, either because of RNG or because of few people doing the associated content. In order to make something "profitable" without heavy RNG, you need to push people out of that content - making it less enjoyable, accessible etc. In general, you need to make that content "worse" for other people somehow so they don't participate and increase the supply.

In all honesty, SE should be more concerned with things being profitable than things being not profitable.

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Originally Posted by Zojha

At what cost, though?

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Funnily enough this was what i was initially going to write. I agree, at what cost indeed.

I tried redscrips for a while... then i realized i could just be making gil instead of going for scrips and buy/create the i170 gear instead which was a ton more efficient. Red scrips are too annoying to deal with. Atleast the blue scrips aided in leveling your craft.