Redo the Crafting system.

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Originally Posted by Elamys

I just want to point out that I absolutely HATE Maker's Mark and hope it dies a fiery death (it probably won't). I refuse to use it.

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Haha, I can understand that. Maker's Mark have lengthened our crafting time by approximately 1/3! Crafting one item used to take about 1 to 1.5 min... now the process take 1.5 to 2.5 min. Yet, our food duration remains 30 min. I wish they had extended it to 45 min instead... Anyway, even if they extended our food to 45 min, it still doesn't make the crafting process any shorter! :P

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Originally Posted by Driavna

In a sandbox all items come from crafter but in a theme park you can't do that, so the only real option is limit yourself to consumables (not only food/potions but gear improvements like enchants, gems, sharp stones, repair kits, etc) and one time only items (cosmetics mainly).

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So, your issue as I understand it, is that because you cannot make your battle character OP with crafting the system is no good.
It was an intentional design by SE to limit crafting ability make raid quality gear. This was done to maintain the value of raid gear.

Using this as a bit of a guideline though, it would be nice to see a system added where by you can take that i250 gear piece and get an RNG role for stat change, maybe improvement, maybe loss, this system would have potential to getting raid equivalent gear without greatly impacting raid equipment value do to odds. Similar in the manner than Diadem used to work.


As for how you limit yourself, you are a vendor, you carve out a niche in the market and defeat your competition to make money. There is nothing different in that then how a RL business does things.
Why do you choose one electronics store versus another? Proximity / Price / Customer Service / Products available.
Proximity - city taxes GIL sink can determine which person you buy the item from on the MB
Price - undercutting
Customer Service - Put up a PF, shout in town or join a LS with crafters to get items at better rates than MB (trade clear services or material gathering, etc...)
Products available - Specialist recipe locks

Nope, you missed the mark. I just explained how a sandbox by nature give more options, and options don't equal op stuff, to the crafter while a theme park spin around dropped gear and at his best crafting options would involve enhanced said gear with some flux stuff here and there.

I really belive you are wrong about the market too, in RL life you don't only have a normal car and HQ car, you have multiple cars to suits multiples needs. SwG accomplished that because was a sandbox, FFXIV (or WoW or any theme park) can't afford to do something similar because of his theme park nature, the main idea behind this game is to keep players eternally grinding for gear via raids/dungeons/rep grinds/PoTD farming/Etc.

Here I can't make a superior product so no matter what much other guy undercut me, if you want the best weapon you buy mine (during a lot of time this was a thing in my sever for SwG, if you wanted the best you have to buy from that one guy with top materials and maxed experimentation). Also, I can't make more affordable products (you don't really want to buy a full iroworks NQ set here for example) for new players with little money (and since I can use a factory to mass product those I never had to ponder oportunity cost that much because was also a way to tease those same players with better products for future purchases, in FFXIV this happen to me all the time). Also, items don't get destroyed by use so a player never had to replace anything and this eventually will slow/kill a market.

As a said note you need to understand that you average joe will always use a MB (similar to how people just go to one market and buy all there instead of going searching the best offert for each individual item) if giving the option because QOL, the exactly reaseon with some players learn merchant skills in SwG, one of the perks was to show your products in a galactic bazar so people learned where to go in order to buy it.

A lot of people are offended by this and I don't know why, FFXIV is a dumbed down crafting/market system by his theme park nature, but they added gear to keep player grinding during a longer time like in PvE if you remove it all you have is WoW crafting. This is why I said is a system complex for the sake of being complex but in reality add nothing by itself.

BTW: that proximity example was "an insult" to my intelligence. Back in UO or SwG your shop accessibility was important, moving to another capital is a TP away, there can cost you even 30m of real time. So yeah, I can charge more if my shop was extremely easy to acces because the saved time was valuable, here with luck a player will notice taxes and buy the one from the city he his now.

About undercutting... you know the system is not that good when is your only option to compete with other players.

Specialist recipe sucks, is just an annoying patch to a bigger problem: allowing everyone to be everything. You either stick to one option or you don't, but a mixture it's not something I like. My fav DoH is CUL because I don't need anything from any other class to craft a final product, to me (while it's make sense) is the worst way to "force" interaction (lances and CRP -_-)

And no, I'm not hating FFXIV system or saying SwG was perfect. It's ok, keep me busy and I love when I manage to craft stuff for myself, but I still going to die a little everytime people overlook his limits and claim is "complex" (to me it's just a math problem gated behind gear), the same way I died a little when someone belive himself a master economist by "playing" the MB.

This sandbox you speak: does it given enough effort grant everyone the ability to make the same superior products you talked about? If so, how is that different what you are complaining about here? Once you have reached the top tier, the stuff you make is no better than the stuff from the next guy. A sandbox as you describe is will not be much of a gate because player will eventually just grind through it.

You are from a smaller server, so was I back in the beginning. While I was there, I was one of a very small number of crafters had the Master Book II recipes unlocked. Those book unlocks were pretty difficult and this led to a situation similar to what you are talking about SwG. Very little competition because a small oligopoly controlled the high end market. In larger scales economies this becomes irrelevant because your competition pool is larger. Also, in Heavensward the requirements for those master recipes became trivial and gating was done with Specialization.

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About undercutting... you know the system is not that good when is your only option to compete with other players.

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So you are saying that RL stores put products on sale for a different reason? There only four reasons I know of:
1. To be a lost leader to generate foot traffic for other products. [this has almost no applicability in this game because we do not have our own stores in this game; which would be a neat idea but it would suffer the same problems Ul'dah's market does. Wrong location, very limited traffic, and many players upset]
2. To undercut the competition
3. To clear inventory before it becomes a loss (e.g. produce going bad) [consumables from a couple patches ago would apply here; I used to make a Cockatrice Meatballs, now you can barely give them away]
4. To clear inventory space before new products arrive [our overloaded retainers]

For a time in early HW, some items like Dravanian Mistletoe were only available from gathering, this lead very high prices for base items. SE then made these items available for purchase from a vendor. After that, the price on MB has pretty much always been lower than the vendor price. All the non-player competition did was lower the price. All other factors and behaviours remained the same. If you are not competing against other players, who should you compete against?

No, the sandbox I speak also produced basic materials with random stats, so the same type of ore (to say something) can be perfect for one week and a piece of crap during the rest of the year each week, so even those "perfect" weapons will stop being produce at some point and become more rare and expensive. Another scenario is a total crash of a market during a time till said material become rare again, so yeah, you can even hoard rare mats and sold those for millions of credits months laters, here you can't do that, after a patch (if even), everything just loses value.

Anyway, I don't know why you are arguing this, a crafting system with decay (yeah, items breaking by use will open the market for everyday gear to save top tier just for very specific content, is so obvious that blow my main away how people skip this detail) that doesn't produce the exact same item is more complex and interesting, period. In this last post you are talking like I'm against competition when all I'm saying is that FFXIV doesn't have any option outside undercutting because crafters produce the same items with no options and said items, outside food and potions, don't need to be replaced ever again.

Lastly, I invite you to think for a second how limited NQ/HQ system, in special when for HQ you don't even need HQ materials. I know is a game, but the very concept is stupid, if you craft a sword with bad materials is going to be bad no matter what compared to another crafted sword with superior materials.

Ok, the recommendation is to return the crafting system to same RNG system that has been done to death in other games. Gather the materials, stick'em in the box and press button and pray. Alright, I get where you are coming from. This crafting system is simple little math mini-game with fixed predefined outcomes. So, the best of both worlds would be to keep the math mini-game but change the stats on finished products. Change them from fixed values to an RNG range.

Adversarial discussion, often mistaken as an argument, is an effect methodology to elicit productive ideas and clarify points of view. No one is right or wrong, just offering points of view.

Many players like the math mini game. Many player like the reliability of quality of the finished products.
In keeping with the NQ / HQ, it would affect the ranges of the RNG. The more completion you achieve, the higher the base stats could be thus improving the reliability of quality. And still maintain the ability for ultra-rare superior quality items.

e.g.
Weapon damage ranges: 50 - 60 at 0%, 52-60 at 25%, 54-61 at 50%, 55-61 at 75%, 56-62 at 90%, 57 - 63 at 100% : Or, some kind of improving sliding scale.
Then apply this same type of logic to all applicable stats.

The goal would always be to get 100% quality but that will no guarantee an optimal outcome. And, due to RNG, a lower quality out come could still produce a weapon of the same quality as the 100% quality craft.

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Originally Posted by ChameleonMS

... the best of both worlds would be to keep the math mini-game but change the stats on finished products. Change them from fixed values to an RNG range.
The goal would always be to get 100% quality but that will no guarantee an optimal outcome. And, due to RNG, a lower quality out come could still produce a weapon of the same quality as the 100% quality craft.

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So, crafted items might be like pink Diadem drops: a fixed iLvl (that ought to be higher for HQ, frankly) and some randomness in the stats (perhaps only in the secondary stats).

Sounds fun, and I suspect most of the mechanisms are already coded.

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Originally Posted by ChameleonMS

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No you don't, SwG did not have any RNG outside how resource generates, how much you can tweak the stats of any given item was determined by your experimentation (gear, food and city bonus) and the quality of your materials.

I never made any suggestion because you can't implement anything of what I said to FFXIV, is a theme park not a sandbox. I just give examples about why crafting and economy are so limited and why the crafting process offers a "fake" complexity (is the only difference vs WoW/GW2/EQ2 and similars), but there is nothing SE can really do about it.

And I will say again, I'm not hating on FFXIV crafting but it is what it is.

dont get me wrong i dont fail these synths but just a bit ago before i got hasty touch i was trying to crafting something simple (i dont remember what it was) and i had 10 fails in a row... not including things like Ticks of the Trade or Satisfaction... it was bordering rage inducing

This is far from a bad system. A bad system is EverQuest's system where you gathered what you hoped were the right materials, put them into the slots in whatever your class used and hit the combine button. You either made the item or you failed and lost everything. It was completely RNG. You had no control at all on the outcome. There was no recipe book or anything that told you where to find materials. This was all done by fan websites like Allakhazam or EQ Traders where the community pooled their knowledge on these things.

I much prefer the minor mini-game that games like FFXIV and EQII have.