A Place for Everyone - An Open Letter on the Future of Crafting and Gathering

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Originally Posted by Airget

I would say that given where in the 6.X series of the game, one thing that crafters are severely missing out on is application through other side content. ...

At first I thought I stopped doing crafting because I didn't want to deal with the melding, but in all honesty it wasn't the melding that caused me to stop crafting during one of the patch cycles, it was how barren the options were for Master Recipes and what crafters could exactly do. ...

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Thank you for sharing your experience and ideas for improvement! I'm glad to hear from more people and perspectives, especially since I hadn't heard about the Potion of Harmony before.

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Originally Posted by Illmaeran

People think they have to because that's what most content creators make videos for and the general social media going player base talks about. My main's max DoH/DoL and makes decent, but not huge money. Right now on my data center the most profitable thing is selling raw materials, not crafted items.

I also get a good chunk of gil each day from doing roulettes and the challenge log. My alt doesn't have any gathering or crafting jobs and earns enough money just by doing quests, roulettes, and the challenge log (passively) to buy whatever random glamour, mount, or pet I might want when I feel like it. Will she have tens of millions of gil at her disposal? Probably not, but she's always had more than enough to cover all expenses.

Having to play the Marketboard to earn gil is primarily based on social media pushing EARN ALL TEH GILZ NAO and trying to make as much as one possibly can and the perception in the community that you're doing something wrong if you have less than 100 million gil. This isn't real life where we have to plan for retirement or emergencies; as long as you've got enough to pay your expenses and buy that random thing when the desire hits, you're doing fine.

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Yet that's not what I'm hearing and what I discussed. I frequently hear from people who can't afford things they need to play the content they're interested in, such as raid prog gear and consumables, or duelling / Delubrum Reginae Savage consumables, or so on. The time and energy they have to do roulettes and Challenge Log isn't sustaining their expenses.

And wanting to repair one's own gear isn't replaceable by not crafting, not as a raider. Just last week I had a P4S (Pandemonium 4 Savage) group that had to leave the instance early - giving up a very valuable checkpoint for prog - because the BLM's gear had been completely smashed to 0 durability and they couldn't repair it in the instance. (It's not that they forgot to repair, it's that dying a lot is a normal and practically necessary part of prog.) Even in non-checkpoint fights, it saves a great deal of time and frustration not to have to leave the instance to repair; I once heard from an Ultimate raider who told me that even though Ultimates don't checkpoint at all, they still wanted to make their entire static level crafters just for the sake of in-instance repairs.

I skimed through the important segments that I thought through about it during my experiences. Personally, my responses might be more bias towards the DoH/DoL because i do like the crafting aspect. So that's the first thing.

In my FC, there are several raiders who managed to get thru without "getting their hands dirty" since there are omnicrafters that are kind enough to provide gears for them, sometimes even for free. This fact did make me wonder on why should crafters work so hard to gather mats, sit through hours to craft the materials, and finally, to craft the final piece of gear.

I made my own set, and I can say it's rather time consuming. When i checked the MB, for the (classical set) latest craftable set in EW, i was rather shocked. It was only 1 week since the recipes are out, yet the prices had went so low. It's just not rewarding considering the time, and effort taken to gather mats, and the pentamelding part was hell.

I do think that, it is not totally the game's fault. I do think it is due to the delay of EW release though. During the two weeks of delay, many players (at least in my friendlist) are all taking up odd jobs like crafting and gathering to spend time. That has probably contributed to a lot of new crafters well equipped to tackle the new recipes.

This is quite supported (i think) on the influx of players buying crafting materia to quickly get their melds on point. The materia prices often shoot up to high prices, far higher than those classicial gear that are crafted through the help of those materia.

However, as time goes by, many of those new crafters decided to stop crafting because "it is waste of time when i can just buy my stuff from the MB"

P.S
As a complaint, I do not like the challenge content for DoL/DoH.
Seems like plenty of those are basically a luck-based game.
Like failing a hasty touch on a Centered proc
Waiting for your Primed/Pliant by paying CP and hope it comes next, but you realise you have burnt almost 100CP without hitting any.
And the rotations (Basic Touch --> Standard Touch -->... ) so on, are rather useless in the expert crafts. They cost way too much CP.