Lessons from red scrips for 3.3

Well, gathering has always been full of RNG, particularly since they added timed nodes for star gathering. Same for crafting, has been more and more about RNG too since they added star-crafts in realm reborn.
That's the easy answer, it's like going to a casino and making people addicted.

But it is also quite a japanese one in fact. They love RNG in Japan. When you want to buy a poster of your favourite manga in Japan, you get these RNG rolls. Go on, buy 8 and hope to get the one you wanted. You eventually will, after spending 20x the amount you'd have put into this beforehand. It's the same here, you'll eventually fetch your items, having spend 20x the time you initially planned.

But somehow I can't seem to be able to stop. Damn I'm addicted :(
It's the only way to get items you want so you just have to do it or stop altogether... but stopping would mean not being able to do what you want in the game so we can't stop....
You're right, it's not fun, but it's the only way now....

My current play style doesn't a lot for doing Script farming.

I would like to... but it's the not a high priority for me.

I have 1-3 hours to play per day. By the time I log in and find out if someone in my FC/LSes needs help. I may get to run my DR EXP and Trail. some Random Innovatory management and GS. I'm out of time.

I currently have enough red script items to get the Main Hand for 1 job. but can't bring myself to spend them because I know the gear is being replaced.

well I don't do that so clearly you don't like the game enough, I suggest you do something else if you have to entertain yourself while playing.

I farmed 2 Folklore Books out of boredom and it wasnt fun for 1 Minute. I just did other stuff while looking for my blue scrip node every 30 min.

Not sure what should be fun about it, but the old system is way superior. lol

I must be weird....I enjoy the red scrips. Not to say you don't have a point. I just enjoy doing them.

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Originally Posted by RyuSaarva

well I don't do that so clearly you don't like the game enough, I suggest you do something else if you have to entertain yourself while playing.

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I submit that you're doing solo content wrong, because my way is the only way that's right. Anyone that plays any different way should quit the game.

Red scripts were a away to make materials rare, incredibily rare, to a point, even now being dungeon dropped they still rare! rare enough to be, at least on my server, more expensive than ever before EVEN after being dropped in dungeons. Why? Cuz there isn`t really a demand for them, and most crafters in need of them, either get them by themselves or ask a friend who wants to earn some extra gil and has a few favors arround.

Sometimes idk what is SE thinking. This whole expansion for crafting has been a disaster from every point of view possible. The breach between rich and poor has only growth larger, exponentially larger, the abysmal level of grind and time required to get into crafting has become basically a discrimination rule against new players wanting to participate in increasingly smaller and controlled by a few markets. There is basically no room anymore, i would love to say the new raiding crafting gear is a good addition that revitalized crafting... And it would have been, if not only a few were able to actually craft the damned things.

Not to mention, materials are so unnecesarily rare/expensive, and the time requiered to craft 2 star crafting gear so long, that is honestly, unless you were on the top of the wave at the point of implementation with several hundred millions to back you up, a real economical suicide.

For me, crafting has become in near dead content, went from HC to MC crafting for time issues and the horrid script system, and the requirement of gathering... No, i just couldn`t do it anymore, even if i probably have resources enough.

If this is how things are gonna be for crafting, well, congratulations SE, you are officially the mayor supporter of RMT activity and wealth concentration of this game economy. Because thats the goal right...?

In ARR, this game had the best crafting system I had ever seen in an MMO—I enjoyed it so much that despite not having a main class (I always play rogue-types, and ARR didn't have Rogue/Ninja until 2.4), ALC was my first level 50 class, and I was happy that it was.

All through ARR, I loved crafting. I loved the way the progression worked at my own pace, separate from the weekly timers and caps for my combat classes—it was something I could do at my own pace. Sometimes that meant I didn't craft for a week, and other times, it meant I sat down for hours on end, because that's what was fun for me at the time. I did all of it, and participated in high-end crafting for every tier.

Red Scrips (and all of the crafting changes in HW in general) changed, and ruined, just about everything I loved about crafting. It's to the point now where I almost never craft, when I used to do so every day. While I've kept up with the minimums to craft high-end items, I've pretty much never done so (except for a brief period during 3.1) because the system has just stopped being fun.

I know the developers aren't likely to remove Scrips in 3.x, but I very much hope that they consider a new design direction that is more like the ARR one for future expansions.

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Originally Posted by Alahra

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Justifiably, devs tend to be afraid of content becoming stale or boring. Thus they end up trying different approaches to it. While scrips ultimately became seen as more of a burden, it didn't have to. They, as always, implemented it wrong. Too many restrictions and time based activities that pertains to not just crafting, but gathering too. So for many of us that do both, it's double the displeasure, meaning it just amplifies the dislike far more. To begin with, they treated it far too much like combat progression gates, which it NEVER should have been. Some restriction is fine, but they just added so many in small doses that it just ended up snowballing into what feels like an avalanche.

Truth be told, if you were to keep doing crafting in the same fashion as it was all throughout ARR, you'd probably be hitting the same feeling you did with scrips soon, if not already, even if they didn't introduce such a system. They really did need to do something to change it up a little, but more or less failed unfortunately. It's important to remember as well that it's not just crafting/gathering that affects why you lose interest in something. Ignoring variables outside of the game, it's the negativity of any form of content that chips away at the game. They tend to fail or make mistakes in so many ways that it reaches a point where you just throw up your hands and walk away (figuratively... maybe literally?).

One huge critique that I have about the team is that they always look towards the future of the game, rarely ever looking at what they can do for it now. Some would say that's the best way to do it or that that means they care, and to some extent I agree, but that's very shortsighted, ironically. Yeah, they take criticism about things towards future content, but they rarely bother to seriously fix what's currently there until far FAR into the future, if ever at all. So just like the crafting/gathering limitations that 3.0 introduced was piling up, so too does all the existing problems as they continue to add new content with its own problems to add on.

QoL problems, such as a need for player controlled chat filters for RMT, has long been an issue with zero... ZERO reason to hope for some sort of remedy in the future. Not exactly a big deal by itself, but tag on all the other issues we have with no fix in sight, and you have that exact snowball effect mentioned. Quite the coincidence that there's multiple ways we can deduce a repeat of history as time goes on.