Would you want the Firmament to be a feature for future expansions?

I enjoyed the Domain Enclave, but it's a bit too similar to
The restoration was like that but more fully conceived.
If they kept iterating on this sort of thing I'd welcome it.

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Originally Posted by Shougun

Personally I would like progression of areas to be mostly based around my own actions, but I think locking the maximum progress around the community would be neat (such that the community has to work together to improve the area, and those participating live would just be moving the area along as natural, but those coming in later could experience the area growing as is natural to their own story / journey). Like if the area progresses with the story it would feel better than if I first came into HW and Ishgard is in ruins but 'hah look at this spotless pretty area'.

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This is a really good idea, imo. That way, people who come in to the game later on still get to do it, but you also have community involvement at the time.

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But everyone can't craft everything all the the time though.
This is true free market, you choose your niche.

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I made many hundreds of millions of gil crafting several different markets.

On Crystal, about half of those are now less valuable the material cost, and the other half are so low profit, you'd be better served just running around killing snurbles of one variety or another. The only market without significant negative impact is the newer primal weapons, and those still generally cost less than the mats. Some of the highest activity markets (magitek repair mats, certain other consumables) are now sold in bulk at a major profit loss with craft time figured in.

You can get all your crafters and gatherers to 80 with almost no investment in less than a week, which means 99% of all relevant combines are available to make in bulk for the cost of vendor-buyable white gear.

We -MIGHT- see a small bump in housing items again when new wards hit, but other than ~30 housing items you can have the ability to make them by spending 5 minutes a day between now and then.

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Originally Posted by ZattanaWen

I think she's referring to the fact that there's now like 20-30 listings for something like the Aesthete gear where in the past you might have expected to see 5 tops. And their prices are laughably low because now you have a dozen people all undercutting each other because there aren't 20-30 people buying the gear on the MB. Impossible to profit from if you don't gather at least most of the materials yourself, which can be beyond tedious. A lot of the people crafting and selling that gear, if they aren't bots themselves, they absolutely employ gathering bots at the very least.

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That's exactly right. It's almost to the point that you can remove crafting entirely and just put the crafted gear for sale on an NPC and nothing will change.

I honestly think the firmament should be implemented for every new "housing" area in the future so it would give incentive on working to obtain your new housing area rather then just magically getting it. It would also mean that servers that do not complete their firmament for the new housing area would not get the new housing area until they completed it on their server as well, thus providing more reasons to do the firmament content outside of ranking season.

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Originally Posted by Amnmaat

I approve of making crafting more accessible, the HQ end game crafting is still not an easy feat. It just allows the "ok" crafters to make some money as well.

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It allows the bots to make money.

In stormblood, you could sell basic white HQ gathering/crafting gear for between 100-300k. Many housing items were 200k+. Even in 4.1 and 4.2. That was the sort of thing an "ok" crafter could 1 button macro. In Shadowbringers, the master recipe endgame gear barely sells for 50k apiece. It's much harder to make gil than in the past.

On many worlds, the main sellers of endgame gear are players with 6-9 person FC's consisting of them (a character with 1 lv80 DoW, maxed DoL/DoH and no mounts/minions except basic story) and an collection of bank alts. These 9 person FC's have the top activity ranks on their server.
The reasons for this? The crafting changes have been the perfect bot set-up. It's fast to level. Easy to get mats. Gear is cheap. Materia is cheap. You can sell cross-world to the entire data-centre. This is what the "ok crafter" has to compete with. He has no chance.