Increase Elemental Shards/Crystals gathering yields and droprates.
It's becomming a bit frustrating that a lot of later level synths require an immense amount of shards and crystals.
For example, even a little platter of tomato relish requires you to throw in 11 Fire shards and 10 Water shards on each synth.
The end result is that people can require up to a 1000 shards an hour if they get really into it.
While that used to not be a problem, it's no secret that the elemental shard/crystal/cluster market is overrun with RMT sellers.
Even the most basic shards are 130 gil a piece on my server, meaning 13,000 gil for 100 of them, or 130,000 gil for 1000.
And still RMT are making a killing on sales, because gathering them up yourself in a legit (non-botting/hacking) way takes an immense amount of time getting them one at a time (with a slight boost every 400 GP).
And there's barely any way to legally compete with them outside of that all other than artificially inflating the supply and thus lowering the prices.
So, to prevent people from having to resort to either buying gil or buying the RMT-tainted crystals on the markets, perhaps we could get a increase in the gathering yield for crystals and shards.
Or better yet, back to 1.0 roots, have all monsters and leves drop crystal shards as well for their element.
Positives:
+ More shards available thus lower in price since legitimate players can compete on the market.
+ The ability to legally obtain your own shards more easily, being less dependant on having to buy them off a RMT seller
+ Happier crafters
+ Less RMT income
+ A reason to kill trash monsters for shards
Negatives:
- None i can think of
You could even have some fun with it by making shards from a gathering node give a random number of crystals between 1 and X (5?) every strike, thus truly shattering what you hit and giving you the fragmented pieces of crystal shards. But really, something needs to be done about this already.
