Factors Affecting Test Data From Abyssos Savage Delay

Dear Respected Forum Master / Webmaster,

If this is not the right forum to discuss high-end content, I must apologize, but I did not see a more suited forum when writing this post. Please move this thread if that is the case.

Would you please kindly forward this letter to Yoshi-P and the content cycle management team?

Thank you very much for your help.

Sincerely,
Aurelle

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Dear Yoshi-P and the FFXIV development team,

First, I must commend you for testing out the delay of Savage Raids from their Normal Raid counterparts with the release of Abyssos Savage. As you have said in a Live Letter, this is a highly requested change but also one that could have major impacts on core content. The care you are taking to test out this change before committing is much appreciated.

I must also commend you for seeking feedback on this test run, both in your announcement before the tier and in the Live Letter during the 14 Hour Broadcast. In the spirit of providing that feedback, I would like to draw your attention to various factors affecting the test data that you have been collecting and analyzing, so that you may better interpret the data. (For clarity's sake, some of these factors deserve lengthy description.)

1) Combat-focused players of all skill levels have entered Abyssos with lower purchasing power than other tiers, affecting their ability to afford raid consumables and crafted gear. This is because Asphodelos did not use Allagan Tomestone of Aphorism materials in its potions (or any other consumables), so players generating Aphorism beyond their own gearing needs had no way to generate value from it except selling crafted gear materials - which have very low demand outside patch launches, tanking the trade value of Aphorism to nearly nothing for most of the tier. I heartily welcome the return of uncapped Allagan Tomestone materials to potion recipes with Abyssos, and hope that future tiers remain this way to provide purchasing power to combat-focused players.

2) Due to changes in job balance, many of which you have acknowledged with numerical adjustments or statements in the latest Live Letter, raiders have felt unusually pressured to switch jobs in order to best help their party. Some players did so out of their own awareness of different jobs' performance, others were asked to switch by their statics, and still others found their intended jobs locked out of parties in Party Finder. (As Raid Finder is effectively not used outside JP Data Centers, being locked out of Party Finder parties on other Data Centers means not getting to raid, to players without statics.)

This resulted in players first getting gear - crafted, tome, Extreme, ... - for the job they had initially intended to play, and then having to re-gear on a different job. Some of these players also bought food and potions before swapping. While this situation sells more crafted gear and raid supplies in the short term, it is highly unpleasant for raiders and discourages them from playing in the long term. Even as a crafter, we want happy customers who are enjoying their purchases and likely to come back in future, not disappointed customers and purchases sitting unused. Likewise, players who choose to be self-sufficient want to make use of the items they so carefully gathered and crafted, not have them sitting unused after a job swap.

I am sure you are working very hard on job balance and do not want this situation to repeat in future tiers. Accordingly, much of the demand for crafted items created by job swapping would also not be present in future tiers.

3) Between job balance concerns, character KOs stemming from increased mitigation requirements, and worries about the DPS requirements of Abyssos: The Eighth Circle (Savage), Party Finder recruiters have demanded unusually high item levels to enter their parties. This has pressured raiders first to buy crafted gear and then to commit even more heavily to one job than usual.

As early as the first day of Abyssos Savage, many Fifth Circle (Savage) (P5S) learning parties on Aether were going up with a minimum item level of 610. This meant that raiders who would not normally buy crafted gear, intending to progress at a slower pace, had to either pay up or face a significantly smaller party selection just to enter the tier at all. The additional week of Normal Raid and Allagan Tomestone gear helped, but did not prevent raiders from having to buy crafted gear they would rather avoid and contend with difficult substats.

And beyond that, item level expectations have only continued to rise, even after the adjustments to Eighth Circle (Savage) (P8S). As soon as the fourth week hit, P8S learning parties on Aether began going up with a minimum item level of 620, which was literally unattainable at the time without winning Savage drops.

(A player who had not yet cleared P8S had access to a Storm's Crown (Extreme) weapon, at most 5 Lunar Envoy pieces from 5 weeks of Allagan Tomestones of Causality, and at most 4 books each from the prior floors. Generously assuming that they cleared Seventh Circle (Savage) (P7S) on the first week of the tier, this would allow them to buy an augment from P7S and a piece from each preceding floor. An item level 615 Extreme weapon, an item level 630 augmented Lunar Envoy piece, 4 item level 620 unaugmented Lunar Envoy pieces, 2 item level 630 Abyssos pieces, and the remaining slots filled with item level 610 Rinascita or Purgatory gear, makes... an item level 619 gearset.)

(And that's after forcing the player to give up the flexibility of books to complete their intended gearset. A player who was saving their books would be at item level 615.)

It is disheartening and frustrating to be locked out of parties purely due to luck, despite one's own diligence and commitment in gearing. This has surely affected the pace of player progression even aside from the purchase of crafted items.

4) The simultaneous release of Island Sanctuary with Abyssos Normal drew many players to spend their playtime on Island Sanctuary instead of other content. Island Sanctuary has been quite successful and enjoyable, and as new entirely noncombat content it particularly appeals to players who enjoy discovery, exploration, gathering, systems optimization... precisely the players who normally do the crafting and gathering to supply a new raid tier!

This means that fewer players have wanted to craft and/or gather for Abyssos Savage than previous tiers, making the crafted gear and raid consumables more expensive. As it would be a massive imposition on development resources to expect a release on the scale of Island Sanctuary with every new raid tier, we cannot realistically expect this situation to hold for future tiers either.

5) Unfortunately, many players who did want to craft and/or gather for Abyssos Savage have been deterred by the unexpected stat requirements and breakpoints throwing off players' materia meld plans, particularly with (but not limited to) Disciple of the Land stats. While it is understandable that some adjustments to the usage of DoL stats have occurred with the removal of HQ gathered items, players were nevertheless impacted.

Normally - outside of gathering for expansion launch raid tiers - a player aiming to craft and/or gather for a new raid tier has a choice for each of their crafting and gathering gearsets: they can either

• meld materia before the nodes and recipes are released, thus being ready immediately and taking advantage of cheaper materia prices, but having to predict what the stat requirements will be; or
• meld materia once the nodes and recipes are released, delaying their readiness to craft / gather and paying peak prices for materia, in exchange for using known requirements as the basis for the meld choices.

Many players, ranging from those with tight gil and time budgets to those who desire immediate readiness to provide the best customer service for raiders, normally choose the former option and meld in advance. This substantially blunts the peaks of materia demand, reducing prices for those who choose the latter option and meld at the start of the raid tier. Thus, all players who aim to craft and/or gather for the raid tier benefit.

But this only works out if the players' predictions match up with the stat requirements that are released into the game. With Abyssos Savage, that's not what happened. So all those players that melded in advance were faced with an unpleasant choice: they could either

• try to make things work with the melds they had, getting worse results for their time and possibly being unable to meet their production targets (for example, supplying their own static with raid food and potions despite limited playtime due to Earth considerations);
• redo their melds to match the stat requirements - facing materia prices even higher than the peak they had intended to avoid, as players choosing this option raised demand beyond that expected from players who planned to meld at the start of the tier; or
• give up on crafting and/or gathering for the tier, treating their gear investment as a loss.

Further, players who waited to meld (or to decide if they would invest in crafting and/or gathering for the tier) were also faced with these higher materia prices than normal, which also deterred them from melding heavily or at all.

(Why is farming the materia via scrip or spiritbonding not an option considered here? Because it takes too long for most players to be ready for their own raiding / while demand is still high - materia farming is largely a pre-patch activity.)

Every player who tried to make the melds they had work, who didn't meld as heavily, or gave up on crafting and/or gathering for the tier means decreased production capacity with which to supply raiders. (Even if the weaker gear can still complete the crafts or gather the items, doing so requires more time, either directly in longer rotations / lower gathering yields or indirectly in consumables and HQ items. And time is the ultimate limited resource for a player.) So what compensates for the loss of production capacity?

Some of the lost production capacity resulted in higher prices, leading raiders to go without the supplies they wanted. This leads to frustrated raiders, and is obviously undesirable. The rest of the lost production capacity was taken up by others crafting and gathering more to fill the gaps. But who does this?

The bulk of players who want to supply a raid tier by crafting and/or gathering are aiming for middling or light melds and have limited gil - they can't make up the production, they're the ones who lost capacity! Wealthier players who remelded (or did their initial melds after the recipes were released despite the higher prices) didn't lose production capacity, but they still only have so much time and that limits how much they can increase their production.

Instead, most of the production increase - and therefore market share - was taken up by bots, who aren't limited on time because they don't require player input. Not only is this losing out on player satisfaction of producing goods that others want to buy, it is also a loss of subscription revenue from frustrated players.

A dedicated gathering bot pays only one subscription to run continuously, far more often than any player can. A non-dedicated gathering bot, run by an existing player whenever they are AFK, pays no additional subscription fee to run almost continuously. A dedicated crafting bot pays two subscriptions to run continuously - one for the crafter character, and one for eight "mules" who share a Free Company (FC) with the crafter character and use the FC chest to pick up and sell the crafted items. A non-dedicated crafter bot, in the same manner as a non-dedicated gathering bot, only pays one additional subscription fee (for the "mules") to run almost continuously and still have continuous price updating.

Even considering a dedicated crafting bot paying for the maximum of additional retainers on both subscriptions, the bot pays less in subscription revenue than 5 normal players. And such a bot drives off far more than 5 normal players - each one has access to 90 retainers and checks 80 of them continuously, enough to lock up every major raid consumable market and gear piece market on the entire server. (Each raid tier only has 4 frequently used potions, 4-8 relevant foods, 19 weapons, 1 shield, 35 armor pieces, and 25 accessories. That means a maximum of 92 final product markets for the tier, and a crafting bot has 1600 retainer sale slots continuously checked.)

Likewise, gathering bots drive off far more than one player each. Not being constrained by time means that bot owners are willing to undercut prices to the point that rule-abiding players simply can't compete; the rule-abiding players give up and often stop playing instead. And as soon as the bots have driven off their competition in any given market, they raise prices immensely, so this is not a service to raiders either!

So the result here is that no one is happy - not crafters, gatherers, raiders, or the bottom line.

6) In regards to the Rinascita gear, players' production capacity has effectively been further lowered by the changes to gathering nodes and intermediate material recipes. The new nodes' tuning, considering breakpoints and node bonuses, results in a player getting roughly 25% less raw material for their time compared to previous tiers, even for a player that did take the gil hit and meld to the same standard for Abyssos as for previous tiers. Meanwhile, the intermediate crafts require 5 of the gathered material rather than 4, which is a 25% increase in requirements.

Combining these two changes, a player with limited time to gather produces 1 intermediate material for Rinascita in the same time that they would have produced 1.5625 intermediate materials for a previous tier. This is more than a 50% increase in the gathering time required to produce a fixed amount of gear, whether that's a single set for personal use or a large order for a static.

And again, those numbers assume a player who took the surprise gathering requirements in stride and spent more gil instead of accepting weaker melds. Everyone feels the material shortage... except the bots, who simply shift their time ratio and keep going with no player presence.

7) The vast majority of players who want to sell raid supplies or materials for those supplies rely on the rush of a new tier being released alongside the new recipes. It is very difficult to pay off melding one's crafting and gathering gear without being present for the higher prices produced by immediate demand - and taking a loss on a gearset drives players away from crafting and gathering, both by feeling bad and by making it harder to afford gearing up for future tiers. Even without bots this is difficult, and the bots only make it worse.

Further, highly skilled crafters rely on preorder crafting as the one place where their skill is valued, and preorders are only placed for items that are not available until the content to use them in is also available. (Expert crafts have tried to provide an alternate form of value for crafting skill, but even where they succeed in testing skill, they have not done so to the extent that the highest level of preorder crafting does. More on this later.) It would be wonderful if meaningful rewards for crafting and gathering skill were not limited to a single day of each raid tier, but that is simply not currently the case.

And aside from that, some players just plain find the rush fun. No other MMO can boast of commission crafting and gathering without being beholden to the corporation structure of EVE Online, commission work is its own sort of thrill, and the time-sensitive nature of a rush period is often part of that.

By releasing the new crafted recipes before Abyssos Savage, all of that was swept away. Players of all skill levels were disappointed by not getting the rush period they'd been looking forward to and planning for - including melding for - over the last several months. And I doubt you intended this, but the English-speaking playerbase found out via an interview, rather than via the official announcement that you were testing delaying Savage Raids from their Normal Raid counterparts. Many of us found out not even via the interview itself or a community translation, but buried deep in the Reddit comments on the interview. It made players who enjoy selling crafted and gathered items feel overlooked and unwanted, therefore less likely to play at all.

(What about the Water Otter Fountain crafts? They are a commendable attempt to provide value to crafting skill outside of the raiding system, and in particular to ensure that highly skilled crafters are paid for that skill. I applaud their creation, I personally enjoy doing the crafts, and I would like to see more exploration of such ideas so that skilled crafters are not relying on a once-a-raid-tier event. I've already made at least a dozen complete Water Otter Fountains, and I plan to make more. However, a working in-game macro for the Water Otter Fountain crafts went public less than a week into patch 6.2, well before most potential buyers reached Island Sanctuary rank 9 to use them, so they ultimately failed to be a market for skilled crafters. The release of the macro just before the release of Abyssos Savage was an unfortunate and disappointing timing, reminding skilled crafters that Savage was starting without anything for them.)

8) Finally, players of all skill levels consider both Normal Raid and crafted gear for glamour purposes. The unprecedented effects of the Abyssos/Purgatory gear have made them highly desirable as glamour to some players, but overly flashy to others - as you said, now you are getting requests to turn gear effects off! Meanwhile, yet other players greatly appreciate the detailing and /visor options on much of the Rinascita gear. Perhaps this has drawn more players to the Normal Raids, perhaps to buying crafted gear.

When it comes to letting players enjoy the Normal Raids and their story, delaying Abyssos Savage has clearly been a success. But when it comes to the economy behind raiding, these many and conflicting factors make it incredibly difficult to apply the test data to future tiers. Therefore, I am forced to recommend another test run for the patch 6.4 raid tier, with the crafted gear and consumables released simultaneously with Savage. (Patch 7.2 would be far too long to wait for a repeated test, and the patch 7.0 raid tier will naturally be delayed by waiting for players to complete a large block of MSQ.) Returning players would still be able to use the Normal Raid gear and the newly uncapped Allagan Tomestones to enter the new Extreme Trial. Further, all combat-focused players would have a week to farm Allagan Tomestones for purchasing power before the Savage launch, thus not being pressured to save up beforehand and forgo combat power in the preceding tier.

(What of planning around the substats of crafted gear in advance? Players do fine without this ability for every expansion launch's raid tier, but if it is desired, the crafted gear could simply be shown on the Lodestone's item database along with the release of the Normal Raids.)

The fewer nonstandard influences on the raid tier, the better a test will be and the easier it will be to interpret the data. If I may make a suggestion, one way to prevent factor 5) from recurring would be "declaring" the expected stats for the patch 6.4 raid tier, via cosmetic crafts and their materials released in patch 6.3 or patch 6.40. We have already had this happen in Eden's Promise for crafters, as in patch 5.31, the Grade 3 Artisanal crafts from the Ishgardian Restoration showed players the Craftsmanship and Control requirements for the Exarchic gear and raid supplies for Eden's Promise ahead of the tier's patch 5.40 release. This took the guesswork out of melding in advance for crafters, and the same could be done for gatherers.

Thank you for all your hard work as developers, and I hope you are all enjoying the game as players as well. I look forward to your reply, whether in writing or in future game updates.

Sincerely,
Aurelle

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I must humbly confess that I do not speak Japanese; for your convenience I have attempted to translate the above letter via Google Translate. Please pardon any mistakes so generated.

私は日本語を話さないことを謙虚に告白しなければなりません。あなたの便宜のために、私はGoogle翻訳を介して上記の手紙を翻訳しようとしました。 そのように生成された間違いを許してください。

Yoshi-P様、FFXIV開発チームの皆様、

まず、Abyssos Savage のリリースにより、Savage Raid の遅延を通常の Raid からテストしたことを称賛しなければなりません。ライブ レターで述べたように、これは非常に要望の多い変更ですが、コア コンテンツに大きな影響を与える可能性がある変更でもあります。コミットする前にこの変更をテストするためにあなたが取っている注意に感謝します。

また、ティアの前のアナウンスと 14 時間ブロードキャスト中のライブ レターの両方で、このテスト ランに関するフィードバックを求めたことを称賛しなければなりません。そのフィードバックを提供する精神で、データをより適切に解釈できるように、収集および分析してきたテスト データに影響を与えるさまざまな要因に注意を向けたいと思います。 (明確にするために、これらの要因のいくつかは長い説明に値します。)

1) あらゆるスキル レベルの戦闘重視のプレイヤーは、他の層よりも低い購買力でアビソスに参入しており、レイドの消耗品やクラフトされた装備を購入する能力に影響を与えています。これは、アスフォデロスがポーション（またはその他の消耗品）にアフォリズムのアラガントームストーンの素材を使用しなかったためです。そのため、自分のギアのニーズを超えてアフォリズムを生成したプレイヤーは、クラフトされたギア素材を販売する以外に価値を生み出す方法がありませんでした。パッチのリリース以外では、格言の取引価値はほとんどの層でほぼゼロになります。アビソスのポーションレシピに、上限のないアラガントームストーンの材料が戻ってくることを心から歓迎します。また、将来のティアがこの方法で維持され、戦闘重視のプレイヤーに購買力を提供できることを願っています。

2) ジョブ バランスの変化により、その多くは最新のライブ レターの数値調整または声明で認められていますが、レイダーはパーティーを最大限に支援するためにジョブを切り替えるという異常なプレッシャーを感じています。一部のプレイヤーは、さまざまなジョブのパフォーマンスを自分自身で認識していたため、他のプレイヤーは統計によって切り替えるように求められ、さらに他のプレイヤーは、意図したジョブがパーティ ファインダーのパーティから締め出されていることに気付きました。 (Raid Finder は JP データ センター以外では実質的に使用されないため、他のデータ センターの Party Finder パーティから締め出されるということは、レイドに参加できないことを意味し、スタティックのないプレイヤーにとっては.)

これにより、プレイヤーは最初にプレイする予定だったジョブのためにクラフト、トメ、エクストリームなどのギアを最初に取得し、次に別のジョブでギアを再設定する必要がありました。これらのプレイヤーの中には、交換する前に食料やポーションを購入した人もいます。この状況は、短期的にはクラフトされたギアやレイドの供給品をより多く販売しますが、レイダーにとっては非常に不快であり、長期的にはプレイすることを思いとどまらせます.クラフターとしても、私たちは購入を楽しんで将来戻ってくる可能性が高い 幸せな 顧客を望んでいます。同様に、自給自足を選択したプレイヤーは、転職後に未使用のまま放置されるのではなく、慎重に収集して作成したアイテムを利用したいと考えています。

あなたは仕事のバランスをとるために非常に懸命に取り組んでおり、この状況が将来の層で繰り返されることを望んでいないと確信しています.したがって、ジョブスワップによって作成されたクラフトアイテムの需要の多くは、将来の層にも存在しません.

3) ジョブバランスの懸念、緩和要件の増加に起因するキャラクターの KO、および Abyssos: The Eighth Circle (Savage) の DPS 要件に関する懸念の間で、Party Finder の採用担当者は、パーティーに参加するために異常に高いアイテムレベルを要求しています。これにより、レイダーは最初に細工された装備を購入し、次に通常よりも 1 つの仕事にさらに熱心に取り組むよう圧力をかけられました。

Abyssos Savage の初日 という早い時期に、多くのフィフス サークル (サベージ) (P5S) 学習パーティがオードで最低アイテム レベル 610 で上昇していました。これは、通常は購入しないレイダーがより遅いペースで進行することを意図して作成されたギアは、まったくティアに入るために、お金を払うか、大幅に少ないパーティーの選択に直面する必要がありました.ノーマルレイドとアラガントームストーン装備の追加の週は助けになりましたが、レイダーが難しいサブステータスと戦うことを避けて戦うクラフト装備を購入する必要がなくなるわけではありませんでした.

さらに、エイス サークル (サベージ) (P8S) の調整後も、アイテム レベルの期待値は上昇し続けています。第 4 週が始まるとすぐに、Aether の P8S ラーニング パーティーは最小アイテム レベル 620 で上昇し始めました。これは、サベージ ドロップを獲得しなければ、当時 文字通り到達不可能 でした。

(P8S をまだクリアしていないプレイヤーは、ストームズ クラウン (エクストリーム) 武器、5 週間分のアラガン トームストーン オブ 因果関係から最大 5 個のルナー エンボイのピース、および前のフロアから最大 4 本の本にアクセスできました。ティアの最初の週にセブンス サークル (サベージ) (P7S) をクリアすると、P7S からオーグメントを購入し、前の各フロアからピースを購入できるようになります. アイテム レベル 615 エクストリーム ウェポン、アイテム レベル 630 オーグメント ルナ エンボイ ピース、アイテム レベル 620 の強化されていないルナ エンボイのピース 4 つ、アイテム レベル 630 のアビソスのピース 2 つ、残りのスロットにアイテム レベル 610 のリナシタまたはパーガトリー ギアを入れると、アイテム レベル 619 のギアセットになります。)

(そして、それは後で、意図したギアセットを完成させるために本の柔軟性を放棄することをプレイヤーに強いた.本を保存していたプレイヤーは、アイテムレベル615になる.)

自分自身の勤勉さとギアリングへのコミットメントにもかかわらず、純粋に運が原因でパーティーから締め出されるのは、がっかりし、イライラします。これは、作成されたアイテムの購入を除いても、プレイヤーの進歩のペースに確実に影響を与えています.

4) アイランド サンクチュアリとアビソス ノーマルの同時リリースにより、多くのプレイヤーが他のコンテンツではなくアイランド サンクチュアリに時間を費やすようになりました。 Island Sanctuary は非常に成功し、楽しいものでした。完全に非戦闘の新しいコンテンツとして、発見、探索、収集、システムの最適化を楽しむプレイヤーに特に魅力的です...まさに、新しいレイド ティアを提供するために通常はクラフトと収集を行うプレイヤーです!

これは、以前の層よりもアビソスサベージを作成したり収集したりするプレイヤーが少なくなり、作成されたギアとレイド消耗品がより高価になったことを意味します. 新しいレイドティアごとにアイランドサンクチュアリの規模でのリリースを期待することは、開発リソースに大きな負荷をかけることになるため、この状況が将来のティアでも維持されることを現実的に期待することはできません.

5) 残念ながら、Abyssos Savage の作成や収集をしたかった多くのプレイヤーは、予想外の統計要件とプレイヤーのマテリア メルド プランを破棄するブレークポイントによって思いとどまっていました。 ) 土地の統計の弟子。 HQ の収集アイテムの削除に伴い、DoL 統計の使用にいくつかの調整が加えられたことは理解できますが、それでもプレイヤーは影響を受けました。

通常、拡張ローンチ レイド ティアのための収集以外に、新しいレイド ティアのためにクラフトおよび/または収集を目指すプレイヤーは、クラフトおよび収集ギアセットごとに選択肢があります。

• ノードとレシピがリリースされる前にマテリアを融合させます。したがって、すぐに準備が整い、マテリアの価格が安くなりますが、統計要件がどうなるかを予測する必要があります。また
• マテリアを結合 一度 ノードとレシピがリリースされると、マテリアをクラフト/収集する準備が遅れ、マテリアのピーク価格を支払う代わりに、既知の要件をメルドの選択の基礎として使用します。

多くのプレイヤーは、ギルと時間の予算が限られているプレイヤーから、レイダーに最高のカスタマー サービスを提供する準備ができていることを望むプレイヤーまで、通常、前者のオプションを選択して事前に融合します。これにより、マテリア需要のピークが大幅に鈍化され、後者のオプションを選択してレイド層の開始時に融合する人の価格が下がります。したがって、レイド層の利益のためにクラフトおよび/または収集を目指すすべてのプレイヤー.

しかし、これは、プレーヤーの予測がゲームにリリースされた統計要件と一致する場合にのみ機能します。 Abyssos Savage では、それは起こりませんでした。したがって、事前に融合したすべてのプレイヤーは、不愉快な選択に直面しました。

• 彼らが持っていたメルドで物事を機能させようとすると、時間の割に悪い結果になり、おそらく生産目標を達成できない可能性があります（たとえば、地球の考慮事項のためにプレイ時間が制限されているにもかかわらず、レイドの食料とポーションで自分のスタティックを供給します） ;
• ステータス要件に合わせてメルドをやり直します。回避しようとしていたピークよりもさらに高いマテリア価格に直面しています。このオプションを選択したプレイヤーは、層の開始。また
• ティアの作成や収集をあきらめ、装備への投資を損失として扱います。

さらに、融合するのを待っていた (または、ティアの作成や収集に投資するかどうかを決定する) プレイヤーも、これらの通常よりも高いマテリア価格に直面し、大量に融合するか、まったく融合することを思いとどまらせました。

(なぜ、スクリプトや精神結合によるマテリアのファーミングがここで考慮されていないのですか?ほとんどのプレイヤーが自分のレイドの準備をするのに時間がかかりすぎるため/需要がまだ高い間-マテリアのファーミングは主にパッチ前の活動です.)

持っていたメルドを機能させようとしたプレイヤー、メルドがそれほど重くなかったプレイヤー、またはティアの作成や収集をあきらめたプレイヤーは、レイダーに供給する生産能力が低下したことを意味します。 (弱いギアでもクラフトを完了したり、アイテムを収集したりできる場合でも、より長いローテーション/より低い収集収量で直接的に、または消耗品と HQ アイテムで間接的に、より多くの時間を必要とします。そして、時間はプレイヤーにとって究極の限られたリソースです. ）では、生産能力の損失を補うものは何ですか？

失われた生産能力の一部は価格の上昇につながり、襲撃者は必要な物資を手に入れることができなくなりました。これは侵入者の欲求不満につながり、明らかに望ましくありません。失われた生産能力の残りは、ギャップを埋めるために他の人が作成して収集することによって占められました.しかし、誰がこれをしますか？

クラフトや採集によってレイド層を供給したいプレイヤーの大部分は、中程度または軽いメルドを目指しており、ギルが限られています-生産を補うことができず、容量を失ったのは彼らです!再溶解した（または価格が高くてもレシピがリリースされた後に最初の溶解を行った）裕福なプレーヤーは、生産能力を失うことはありませんでしたが、それでも時間はあまりなく、生産をどれだけ増やすことができるかが制限されます.

代わりに、生産の増加 (したがって市場シェア) のほとんどは、プレーヤーの入力を必要としないため、時間に制限されていないボットによって占められました。これは、他のプレイヤーが購入したいと思う商品を生産するというプレイヤーの満足度を失うだけでなく、欲求不満のプレイヤーからのサブスクリプション収入の損失でもあります。

専用のギャザリング ボットは、継続的に実行するために 1 つのサブスクリプションのみを支払います。これは、どのプレイヤーよりもはるかに頻繁に実行できます。既存のプレイヤーが AFK になるたびに実行される非専用の収集ボットは、ほぼ継続的に実行するために追加のサブスクリプション料金を支払う必要はありません。専用のクラフト ボットは、継続的に実行するために 2 つのサブスクリプションを支払います。1 つはクラフター キャラクター用、もう 1 つはフリー カンパニー (FC) をクラフター キャラクターと共有し、FC チェストを使用してクラフトされたアイテムをピックアップして販売する 8 つの「ミュール」用です。非専用クラフター ボットは、非専用ギャザリング ボットと同じように、追加のサブスクリプション料金 (「ミュール」用) を 1 つ支払うだけで、ほぼ継続的に実行され、価格が継続的に更新されます。

両方のサブスクリプションで最大の追加リテイナーを支払う専用のクラフト ボットを考慮しても、ボットは 5 人の通常のプレーヤーよりも少ないサブスクリプション収益を支払います。そして、そのようなボットは 5 人をはるかに超える通常のプレイヤーを追い払います。各プレイヤーは 90 人のリテイナーにアクセスでき、そのうち 80 人を継続的にチェックします。これは、サーバー全体のすべての主要なレイド消耗品市場と装備品市場をロックするのに十分です。 （各レイドティアには、頻繁に使用される4つのポーション、4〜8個の関連食品、19個の武器、1個のシールド、35個のアーマーピース、および25個のアクセサリーしかありません。つまり、ティアの最終製品市場は最大92個で、クラフトボットには1600個のリテーナーの販売スロットは継続的にチェックされます。)

同様に、ボットを集めると、それぞれ 1 人以上のプレイヤーが追い出されます。時間に制約されないということは、ボットの所有者が、ルールを順守するプレーヤーが競争できないほどに価格を下げることを厭わないことを意味します。ルールを守るプレーヤーはあきらめ、代わりにプレーをやめることがよくあります。そして、ボットが特定の市場で競争相手を追い払うとすぐに、彼らは価格を大幅に引き上げます。

したがって、ここでの結果は誰も満足していないということです - クラフター、ギャザー、レイダー、または収益。

6) リナシタ装備に関しては、採集拠点と中間素材レシピの変更により、プレイヤーの生産能力がさらに低下しました。ブレークポイントとノード ボーナスを考慮した新しいノードの調整により、ギル ヒットを受けてアビソスと同じ基準に融合したプレイヤーであっても、プレイヤーは以前のティアと比較して、その時間で得られる原材料が約 25% 少なくなります。以前の層の場合。一方、中間工芸品は、収集した材料の 4 つではなく 5 つを必要とし、要件が 25% 増加します。

これらの 2 つの変更を組み合わせると、収集時間が限られているプレイヤーは、前の層で 1.5625 個の中間素材を生産するのと同じ時間で、Rinascita で 1 つの中間素材を生産します。これは、個人用の単一セットであろうと、静的な大量注文であろうと、一定量のギアを生産するのに必要な収集時間の 50% 以上の増加です。

繰り返しになりますが、これらの数値は、サプライズ ギャザリングの要件を大胆に受け入れ、弱いメルドを受け入れる代わりに、より多くのギルを消費したプレーヤーを想定しています。誰もが物資の不足を感じています...ボットを除いて、単に時間比率をシフトし、プレーヤーの存在なしで進み続けます.

7) レイド サプライまたはそれらのサプライの材料を販売したいプレイヤーの大多数は、新しいレシピと一緒にリリースされる新しい層のラッシュに依存しています。差し迫った需要によって生み出されたより高い価格に立ち会わずに、自分のクラフトとギャザリングギアを融合させることは非常に困難です - そしてギアセットで損失を被ると、プレイヤーは気分が悪くなり、ギアを集めるのが難しくなるため、クラフトとギャザリングから遠ざかります。将来の階層に備える余裕があります。ボットがなくてもこれは難しく、ボットは状況を悪化させるだけです。

さらに、高度なスキルを持つクラフターは、スキルが評価される 1 つの場所としてプレオーダー クラフティングに依存しており、プレオーダーは、それらを使用するコンテンツが利用可能になるまで利用できないアイテムに対してのみ行われます。 (専門家のクラフトは、クラフト スキルに別の形の価値を提供しようとしてきましたが、スキルのテストに成功したとしても、最高レベルの予約注文クラフトほどではありません。これについては後で詳しく説明します。)作成と収集のスキルに対する有意義な報酬が、各レイド ティアの 1 日だけに限定されない場合は素晴らしいことですが、現在はそうではありません。

それとは別に、何人かのプレイヤーは単にラッシュが楽しいと感じています. EVE Onlineの企業構造に縛られることなく、コミッションの作成と収集を自慢できるMMOは他にありません.コミッションの仕事はそれ自体が一種のスリルであり、ラッシュ期間の時間に敏感な性質はしばしば一部です.その。

Abyssos Savageの前に新しいクラフトレシピをリリースすることで、それらはすべて一掃されました.すべてのスキル レベルのプレイヤーは、過去数か月間、待ち望んでいたラッシュ期間 (融合を含む) を取得できなかったことでがっかりしました。そして、あなたがこれを意図したとは思えませんが、英語を話すプレイヤーベースは、あなたがノーマルレイドの対応物からサベージレイドを遅らせることをテストしていたという公式発表ではなく、インタビューを通じて知りました.私たちの多くは、インタビュー自体やコミュニティの翻訳を通じてさえ知りませんでしたが、インタビューに関するRedditのコメントの奥深くに埋もれていました.クラフトアイテムや収集アイテムの販売を楽しんでいるプレイヤーは、見過ごされていると感じたり、不要であると感じたりするため、プレイする可能性がまったく低くなります。

(Water Otter Fountain クラフトはどうですか? それらは、襲撃システムの外でクラフト スキルに価値を提供するための称賛に値する試みであり、特に高度なスキルを持つクラフターがそのスキルに対して確実に支払われるようにするためのものです。私は彼らの作成を称賛します。私は個人的に楽しんでいます熟練したクラフターが一度だけのレイドイベントに頼らないように、私はそのようなアイデアをもっと探求したいと思っています.しかし、ラッコ噴水クラフトのゲーム内マクロがパッチ 6.2 の 1 週間も経たないうちに公開されました。 Abyssos Savage のリリース直前にマクロがリリースされたことは、残念ながら残念なタイミングでした。

8) 最後に、すべてのスキル レベルのプレイヤーは、グラマー目的でノーマル レイドとクラフトされた装備の両方を検討します。 Abyssos/Purgatoryギアの前例のない効果により、一部のプレイヤーにとって魅力として非常に望ましいものになりましたが、他のプレイヤーにとっては過度に派手になりました.一方、他のプレーヤーは、多くの Rinascita ギアのディテールと /visor オプションを高く評価しています。おそらくこれにより、より多くのプレイヤーがノーマルレイドに引き寄せられ、おそらくクラフトされたギアを購入するようになった.

ノーマルレイドとそのストーリーをプレイヤーに楽しんでもらうという点では、アビソス サベージの延期は明らかに成功しています。しかし、襲撃の背後にある経済に関して言えば、これらの多くの相反する要因により、テストデータを将来の層に適用することは非常に困難になります.そのため、パッチ 6.4 のレイド ティアの別のテスト ランをお勧めする必要があります。作成されたギアと消耗品はサベージと同時にリリースされます。 (パッチ 7.2 は再テストを待つには長すぎます。また、パッチ 7.0 のレイド ティアは、プレイヤーが MSQ の大きなブロックを完了するのを待つことで、当然遅れます。) 復帰したプレイヤーは、通常のレイド ギアを使用することができます。新たに上限が解放されたアラガントームストーンは、新しいエクストリーム トライアルに参加できます。さらに、すべての戦闘重視のプレイヤーは、サベージの発売前にパワーを購入するためにアラガン トームストーンを集めるための 1 週間の猶予が与えられるため、事前に貯蓄して前のティアでの戦闘パワーを放棄するよう圧力をかけられることはありません。

(クラフトされたギアのサブステータスについて事前に計画するのはどうですか?プレイヤーは、拡張ローンチのレイド層ごとにこの能力がなくても問題ありませんが、必要に応じて、クラフトされたギアは、Lodestone のアイテム データベースに、通常レイド）

レイド層への非標準的な影響が少なければ少ないほど、テストはより良くなり、データの解釈がより簡単になります。私が提案できるとすれば、要因 5) の再発を防ぐ 1 つの方法は、パッチ 6.3 またはパッチ 6.40 でリリースされた化粧品とその素材を使用して、パッチ 6.4 のレイド層の予想される統計を「宣言」することです。パッチ 5.31 のように、イシュガルド復興のグレード 3 の職人工芸品は、エデンの約束 ahead のエグザルシック装備とレイド用品の職人技と制御の要件をプレーヤーに示しました。 ] 層のパッチ 5.40 リリースの。これにより、クラフターが事前に融合する際の当て推量が不要になり、ギャザラーも同じことが可能になりました。

開発者としてのご尽力に感謝するとともに、プレイヤーとしてもゲームを楽しんでいただければ幸いです。書面または今後のゲームの更新でお返事をお待ちしております。

心から、
オーレル

uhm, is there a short version of this?

all i see is a bunch of whining and complaining when Yoshi-p reported about 90% of the feedback they got was positive for the one week delay for savage launch.

The main crux I see here is crafter sharks being madge that they can't sell gear for exorbitant prices after no-lifing the process to reach rush hour in time to get millions upon millions.

,For one, good riddance.

For another, I got told that sales were stable for more than a week, so I don't see the fuss here.

For last apart from nolife crafters and gil sharks, everyone else LIKED not having to rush story for savage.

As someone who is a dedicated crafter, at least during major patch drops when raid gear is worth a damn, I welcomed the delay because it meant I actually got to participate in week 1 crafting instead of having to choose between it and Savage. Prices were also the most stabilized they've ever been since crafting saw repeated nerfs which made everything get progressively easier.

The only adjustment I'd like them to consider going forward is delaying the capped tome because P5-7 did not account for it whatsoever and it showed. P8S in its current, post-nerf state, would also not have favored well with the extra gear we normally wouldn't have. Crafted gear being a week early was quite welcomed.

I'm sure they probably took into account how extra tome gear affected the raid difficulty. Wouldn't be surprised if they delay it as well next time. Or else balance it with the gear in mind (which would theoretically make it harder). Considering they want the fights to be clearable with min-ilvl, probably the former.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by DrWho2010

all i see is a bunch of whining and complaining when Yoshi-p reported about 90% of the feedback they got was positive for the one week delay for savage launch.

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How is it "whining and complaining" to praise Island Sanctuary and the return of tomestone materials for potions as part of discussing in-depth why this tier's data might not apply easily to future tiers?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Aurelle_Deresnels

How is it "whining and complaining" to praise Island Sanctuary and the return of tomestone materials for potions as part of discussing in-depth why this tier's data might not apply easily to future tiers?

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To be fair, if you didn't create a massive wall of text people might actually be able to properly digest the points you are trying to make.

It is best you use bold and/or underlined text and keep your points concise with some

X.) Headers to explain the next paragraph

otherwise things will get lost in the sheer amount you posted. I mean for crying outloud, you made a 30000+ character post, which is still at least 18000 characters if you remove all the Japanese.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Reinhardt_Azureheim

The main crux I see here is crafter sharks being madge that they can't sell gear for exorbitant prices after no-lifing the process to reach rush hour in time to get millions upon millions.

,For one, good riddance.

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I want both raiders and casual combat-focused players to have the purchasing power to buy what they want comfortably. I want players to use the gear they put in the effort to buy or make, rather than being forced to abandon it and buy more over job balance issues and PF requirements. I want raiders not to be locked out of learning parties simply because they didn't get lucky and win Savage loot. I want the players who want to craft and/or gather on a budget to be able to do so - rather than having their melds broken, their market share taken by bots, and being unable to pay off their gearset. (The rich crafters can afford to remeld, and the bots don't care. It's the people who want to supply their static on a time limit, or sell modestly, that get hurt.) And I want the highly skilled crafters and gatherers to be valued outside the raid tier, but SE has yet to find a way to make that happen, so one day every 8-9 months is better than zero.

All of that is already in my post, and none of it is "crafter sharks being madge".

Further, why would a highly skilled crafter no-life their melds? Anyone that dedicated knows their value of time and gets their materia in advance, even a full expansion in advance. (Yes, we can farm materia before it's released. Entirely within TOS, obviously. It's called Wondrous Tails.) Scrip farming, spiritbonding, simply buying materia in the lulls between patches... it's just not that hard for anyone serious to be ready ahead of the rush.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Reinhardt_Azureheim

For another, I got told that sales were stable for more than a week, so I don't see the fuss here.

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You "got told that sales were stable"? Do you have hard data? Do you have hard data from previous tiers to compare with?

Do you know how many people didn't buy gear or consumables because they didn't make much money during Asphodelos, and would have bought supplies if Aphorism retained value? Do you know how much gear went unused because players swapped jobs, meaning that the sale doesn't correspond to a happy customer? Do you know how much gear raiders didn't want to buy, but felt they had to in order to get into PF groups? Do you know how many players got discouraged from raiding because they kept seeing parties with minimum ilevels they couldn't reach, and so stopped buying consumables? Do you know how many people decided to focus Island Sanctuary instead of raid prep? (Do you seriously expect SE to come up with a new type of noncombat content every raid tier?) Do you know how many people crafted and/or gathered less, or not at all, because they didn't want to / couldn't afford to redo their melds? Do you know how many players have stopped crafting, gathering, or playing entirely due to bots? Do you know how many sales were made by bots, meaning that the sale doesn't correspond to a happy crafter or gatherer? Do you know how sales would change if the gathering node breakpoints were set up differently next tier, or if intermediate recipes went back to using 4 of the gathered item? Do you know how many players felt left out because of the way the non-delayed recipes were announced, and how many of them decided not to bother with the raid tier? Do you know how many of those remaining won't be able to pay off their gearsets? Do you know how many players pursued each of the new gear options for glamour, and how that compares to previous tiers?

Somehow, I doubt it. While SE probably doesn't have exact numbers for all of those either, they have more data than they release publicly, and they'll be better equipped to find those answers now that they know the questions are worth asking. Hence why I found it important to point out that those questions are worth asking.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Reinhardt_Azureheim

For last apart from nolife crafters and gil sharks, everyone else LIKED not having to rush story for savage.

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I specifically said that in letting people enjoy the story the delay is clearly successful. I suggested that the delay between Normal and Savage continue. But I want to make sure that the decisions are well-informed, and that will almost certainly require more testing. Hence, more testing of how exactly to implement that delay.

Clearly you didn't read my post.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ForteNightshade

As someone who is a dedicated crafter, at least during major patch drops when raid gear is worth a damn, I welcomed the delay because it meant I actually got to participate in week 1 crafting instead of having to choose between it and Savage.

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Thank you for sharing your experience. Do you have any suggestions for how to give crafting and gathering skill value outside of the raid tier?

Because right now, SE hasn't figured out a way to do it. And every single person who relies on a public gearset or macro, including Teamcraft Community Rotations, relies on a tiny group of people skilled enough to make those gearsets and macros - and nothing short of preorder crafting has given that group any content.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ForteNightshade

Prices were also the most stabilized they've ever been since crafting saw repeated nerfs which made everything get progressively easier. ... Crafted gear being a week early was quite welcomed.

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Would it work the same way in a different tier? With all the things impacting the tier, it's unlikely, and hard to say exactly how it would work out... which is my point. We don't know, and any interpretation of the data that doesn't take into account all those influences will necessarily be flawed.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ForteNightshade

The only adjustment I'd like them to consider going forward is delaying the capped tome because P5-7 did not account for it whatsoever and it showed. P8S in its current, post-nerf state, would also not have favored well with the extra gear we normally wouldn't have.

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SE straight-up said when announcing the Savage delay that they weren't going to account for the extra week of gear in the DPS checks, and would see how it went in doing so. Thus, I didn't feel the need to point that out, as they're already quite aware.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Reinhardt_Azureheim

The main crux I see here is crafter sharks being madge that they can't sell gear for exorbitant prices after no-lifing the process to reach rush hour in time to get millions upon millions.

,For one, good riddance.

For another, I got told that sales were stable for more than a week, so I don't see the fuss here.

For last apart from nolife crafters and gil sharks, everyone else LIKED not having to rush story for savage.

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Agreed. The delay was much appreciated and I'm for one glad they're going to keep that up from now on.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Aurelle_Deresnels

I want both raiders and casual combat-focused players to have the purchasing power to buy what they want comfortably. I want players to use the gear they put in the effort to buy or make, rather than being forced to abandon it and buy more over job balance issues and PF requirements. I want raiders not to be locked out of learning parties simply because they didn't get lucky and win Savage loot. I want the players who want to craft and/or gather on a budget to be able to do so - rather than having their melds broken, their market share taken by bots, and being unable to pay off their gearset. (The rich crafters can afford to remeld, and the bots don't care. It's the people who want to supply their static on a time limit, or sell modestly, that get hurt.) And I want the highly skilled crafters and gatherers to be valued outside the raid tier, but SE has yet to find a way to make that happen, so one day every 8-9 months is better than zero.

All of that is already in my post, and none of it is "crafter sharks being madge".

Further, why would a highly skilled crafter no-life their melds? Anyone that dedicated knows their value of time and gets their materia in advance, even a full expansion in advance. (Yes, we can farm materia before it's released. Entirely within TOS, obviously. It's called Wondrous Tails.) Scrip farming, spiritbonding, simply buying materia in the lulls between patches... it's just not that hard for anyone serious to be ready ahead of the rush.

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Bolding mine. Casual combat focused player here. By that I mean I do normal raids every week, level all non-limited jobs (eventually hand/land as well) to cap each expansion, and typically perform in the top half to top quarter in the dungeons, raids, and trials that I participate in. Nothing special, but it seems to fit your description there.

I have purchasing power to get what I need just fine. This from simply doing retainer ventures, weekly custom deliveries, etc. I don't even use crafting to make money, unless you count selling Slithersand to burn my white scrips as I slowly level my crafters. I don't make squat compared to people who actually know how to properly craft and bother with the horribly stupid overmelding and often somewhat luck based crap on the top tier crafts. I buy crafted weapons and occasionally other crafted gear pieces, but use tomes and raids to gear out my alt jobs. All that said, I'm not sure where you're getting a lot of your assumptions. I have no problem getting gear I want outside of the tome/raid piece caps that exist, and that issue has nothing to do with crafting.

As such, I'm a little perplexed as to why you feel that some mystical subset of users is having so much trouble getting any gear. If someone needs to buy THAT much gear that they can't afford a set or two of crafted gear, they are active enough that they should be able to get enough income to mostly cover it, or play enough to fill in pieces with raid/tome pieces. If you're referring to overmelding and raid food, then you're talking about hardcore raiders, and the "casual" part no longer applies.

Either way, between that, your replies since, and my admitted skimming of the first post (because I just found the same basic points being made in more verbose framing than even I'd typically use, and I talk too much), I can't really disagree with other people's summary of it. While "madge because greedy" may be a bit far, the general sentiment seems pretty accurate. Your average player, even your average crafting enthusiast, isn't having the issues that you're describing. Not where I've been reading, seeing, and watching at least.

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Originally Posted by DrWho2010

all i see is a bunch of whining and complaining when Yoshi-p reported about 90% of the feedback they got was positive for the one week delay for savage launch.

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No I understand a lot of the OPs points pretty head on. The feedback for having the extra week to get crafted gear was positively received because it meant that the top teams didn't have to grind like mad to make all the gear day 1, or just buy it outright. There aren't that many people that are going to argue the other side to that because it wouldn't make sense.

The problem I've felt after raiding for multiple tiers in this game is that they greatly underestimate how much variance there is in the ability to learn mechanics in savage across the player base and how it impacts people's experiences. The development team is depending way too much on day one groups to literally tell people what mechanics are, how they function, and where to stand. You can see it in the PF when people start labeling strategies as Mr. Happy Strat, or Ilya, or some other catch phrase meant to ID a specific one. That is the bit that bothers me way more than job balance and everything else.

https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...acaff4567b4e40

When they talked about adjustments here they mention the top percentage of players are overwhelming better at the game then the play testers. The only reason someone states that is if they are then adjusting and balancing against the top percentage of players, whatever that is. Yet if content is going to get released into a game and made available to all players, and then has rewards that would naturally attract all sorts of different players, what are they expecting to happen here on a social level, especially if the job balancing is always on knifes edge and you got stuff like High Concept on P8S P2? Heck I still remember Light Rampant on e8s and that debacle.

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Originally Posted by Almandaragal

As such, I'm a little perplexed as to why you feel that some mystical subset of users is having so much trouble getting any gear. If someone needs to buy THAT much gear that they can't afford a set or two of crafted gear, they are active enough that they should be able to get enough income to mostly cover it, or play enough to fill in pieces with raid/tome pieces. If you're referring to overmelding and raid food, then you're talking about hardcore raiders, and the "casual" part no longer applies.

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"Casual" may be part of the issue here, as it has such a fuzzy definition.

Those who don't set foot into hardmodes at all until tiers or expansions later to harvest mounts and glam might not feel there's any issue at all.

Those who tend to catch the "yanno, maybe I should try EX/Savage" bug after a while tend to be horrifically affected all over the place.

Communities dominated by Discord servers that are O&O almost entirely by hardcore raiders and ruthlessly silence any other mindset with polemics like "enabling bads" and "not respecting people's time" while there is a deathly lack of discoverable casual-friendly alternatives, especially with the limited number of platforms that players are willing to give the time of day (even forums are often looked down on, especially by the Discord mainstream who even tend to regard Reddit negatively when disagreements come up).

PFs, even learning PFs with the insane requirements OP points out (this has been a thing to some degree or other for some expansions now, and not even just for Savage, e.g., you can hardly even get in on the first wave of learning parties for an odd patch EX without ilvls that demand fairly extensive Savage experience, and if you miss that first wave ... well ... that's been a community problem for years now that no one has really found an effective answer to).

It goes on. The community seems dead set on making sure that there's such a moat between casual and hardcore that the middle tier players (who represent most veteran gamers by this point) are ruthlessly pushed out (more casual players seeing them as elitist, the hardcore community seeing them as "bad and unwilling to improve" which is considered on a level with "kicks newborn coeurl pups") as what at this point seems an absolutely intentional sacrifice.

And inevitably in the end the community tends to say it's an adaptation forced on them by SE, but SE will insist that it's a community issue ...

I'm not sure why you bring up discord all the time on this. I never felt that discord was a major factor in the problem of the current savage system. But you are correct on the part with "I want to give savage a shot" and then effectively finding themselves in an endless war with trying to tackle the content. Most of the truly hardcore raiders get it done and don't bother with it afterwards, but generally aren't that bad to run with later as they tend to help other people out. The issues arise with the swaths of people diving into content that is balanced literally for those top tier people, even though the majority of those in the community are anything but when it comes to savage raiding.

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Originally Posted by Amarande

"Casual" may be part of the issue here, as it has such a fuzzy definition.

Those who don't set foot into hardmodes at all until tiers or expansions later to harvest mounts and glam might not feel there's any issue at all.

Those who tend to catch the "yanno, maybe I should try EX/Savage" bug after a while tend to be horrifically affected all over the place.

Communities dominated by Discord servers that are O&O almost entirely by hardcore raiders and ruthlessly silence any other mindset with polemics like "enabling bads" and "not respecting people's time" while there is a deathly lack of discoverable casual-friendly alternatives, especially with the limited number of platforms that players are willing to give the time of day (even forums are often looked down on, especially by the Discord mainstream who even tend to regard Reddit negatively when disagreements come up).

PFs, even learning PFs with the insane requirements OP points out (this has been a thing to some degree or other for some expansions now, and not even just for Savage, e.g., you can hardly even get in on the first wave of learning parties for an odd patch EX without ilvls that demand fairly extensive Savage experience, and if you miss that first wave ... well ... that's been a community problem for years now that no one has really found an effective answer to).

It goes on. The community seems dead set on making sure that there's such a moat between casual and hardcore that the middle tier players (who represent most veteran gamers by this point) are ruthlessly pushed out (more casual players seeing them as elitist, the hardcore community seeing them as "bad and unwilling to improve" which is considered on a level with "kicks newborn coeurl pups") as what at this point seems an absolutely intentional sacrifice.

And inevitably in the end the community tends to say it's an adaptation forced on them by SE, but SE will insist that it's a community issue ...

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If the definition of casual is "the" issue, then the OP needs to define it in some capacity. I get said itch to try EX content, but the fact is that I don't have the time or set schedule to do any kind of prog and still actually get my other goals done. Sure, gearing up multiple characters to BiS is definitely a slog and should be improved upon, but that's not a crafting issue; that's a tome cost/rate of acquirement issue. The OP seems focused on the impacts on and from crafting. I mentioned that I have no issues, and that I likely fall into the "casual" bracket. If I don't, then they can define what is and isn't casual, and what this as of now mythical group of people who can't seem to get any gear is.

What does discord have to do with this at all? I can't craft gear for FFXIV in discord. I can't acquire gear (within FFXIV's ToS) via discord. This has nothing to do with off-site communications.

As for the party finder, sure there are stupidly high bars set for entry. I've seen truly high end raiders mention that they couldn't get into party finder parties with alt jobs because the job was "only" in EX gear, and the requirements were set to a point that someone would already need to have cleared some savage to even get in. However, that's not a gearing issue; that's a "people are stupid" issue. Can't fill your party? Well, if you require savage ilvl instead of EX ilvl, that's on you. But again, that doesn't mean that gearing is difficult; it means that people aren't thinking about the ilvl they're setting properly.

Sure, there is a divide, and it does often seem like there are people on "both sides" that really want that hyper casual and hyper hardcore divide. However, this again has nothing to do with the gearing issue that my post was addressing, or the overall crafting issue that the OP seemed to want to suggest exists. It seems that your reply drifted off into some drama related tangent by the end there.

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Originally Posted by Almandaragal

What does discord have to do with this at all? I can't craft gear for FFXIV in discord. I can't acquire gear (within FFXIV's ToS) via discord. This has nothing to do with off-site communications.

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Perhaps I overemphasize or overthink it, perhaps not.

The main reason I so heavily opine against Discord is that it seems that a very large contributor to community problems in FFXIV in particular is that certain groups of players (especially what one might call the "smarter than the average bear casual") tend to be especially poorly served by the currently available communities.

The normal antidote for that would be, of course, to found one's own community; in fact, that's what usually happened with hobby communities especially in the days when independent forums were the dominant form of organization. If a forum was sufficiently disliked, other ones would naturally spring up and the activity would shift. Especially difficult or toxic forum leads would frequently find themselves presiding over tumbleweeds. Everyone was happy (except them, I suppose).

Unfortunately, Discord (due, primarily, to having gone over from becoming just a chat service like IRC or teamspeak to being full-blown social media in the mainstream eye in these times) places a much heavier onus on the owners of (especially) openly discoverable communities than forum hosts ever did (including the possibility of getting removed from the entire platform including other communities for running, or even sometimes for being a member of, an insufficiently moderated server), strongly discouraging people from going that route. Private Discords do abound, but most of them tend to as a result be so small and have so few actively playing members at any given moment as to be of little help when it comes to actual in-game activity desires.

And it's painfully clear that the FFXIV community is not, in this day and age, particularly interested in communities that are not conveniently accessible via a Discord invite. Even SE's expansion of cross-world communications in-game has not particularly helped, e.g., most CWLS (except hunt CWLS) are dead silent even when several members are active.

This, I feel, has contributed heavily to the environment of there being an insufficient variety of communities for everyone to find a comfortable home. Were everyone to be able to readily find an active community compatible with their pace and playstyle, as is the case in other MMOs (even WoW!), I feel like many of the factors under discussion would be of far less import in the first place (with the exception of the ultra-short window in which to make gil off of crafted gear, perhaps). But this is clearly not the case.

i think it's better that things like Discord exist because if a discord like environment was included within in the game, then there would have to be policing of said function within the game. And discord has way more functionality. said functionality doesn't really have a place within the game environment (other than voice chat). there wouldn't be enough resources also to do that much policing.

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Originally Posted by Reinhardt_Azureheim

It is best you use bold and/or underlined text

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I would have liked to use more formatting, but I don't know how well bold and underlined text localize into Japanese (not only direct translation, but also tonal and cultural implications). With a better understanding of Japanese localization I would have used more formatting, but I had to do the best I could with mostly using things like paragraph breaks, numbered sections, and lists.

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Originally Posted by Reinhardt_Azureheim

keep your points concise with some

X.) Headers to explain the next paragraph

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Unfortunately, I've seen that I have to include seeming-digressions such as the math showing that bots are a net loss of money for SE, or that the item levels being demanded by PF are in fact impossible without winning drops. Because if I don't, people will come by defending botting or the like, and will refuse to take the discussion seriously for my not having pre-empted them. Further, SE cannot simply call me back to converse when there's a language barrier and a corporate barrier in the way, so I have to go in-depth the first time. Concision is valuable within the constraints of necessary detail, in a situation like this.

Section headers are nice, yes, but for this purpose they're vulnerable to both mistranslations and jumping to conclusions. If I had put in, say, "Simultaneous Release of Island Sanctuary" as a header, people would have absolutely assumed that I was hating on Island Sanctuary, rather than praising it but pointing out that it draws crafter and gatherer players away from supplying raiders. Sometimes a point that needs to be made is, unfortunately, such that headers do more harm than good. Thus I avoided headers, but tried to have a good introductory sentence for each section.

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Originally Posted by Reinhardt_Azureheim

To be fair, if you didn't create a massive wall of text people might actually be able to properly digest the points you are trying to make.

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otherwise things will get lost in the sheer amount you posted. I mean for crying outloud, you made a 30000+ character post, which is still at least 18000 characters if you remove all the Japanese.

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Formatting constraints aside, 18,000 characters with plenty of sectioning and paragraph breaks is hardly a wall of text, especially when all formatting gets included in the character count the way that this forum does.

A second-year university (US college) essay will routinely exceed that length without counting title pages, formatting, references, or appendices. And this holds in fields ranging from literature to neuroscience, even if the essay is covering a single narrow topic, and while the writer is being concise. Remaining shorter than a college essay while including:

• a foreword to the webmaster,
• various cultural politeness gestures throughout,
• multiple "here's why this is so" sections that a college essay can either omit or defer to appendices, and
• all the aforementioned formatting characters,

seems entirely reasonable and concise for this purpose - a technically oriented letter to SE that has to cover eight different factors. The readers there should be able to go in-depth on the game to a post-secondary level. It's their job.

If you yourself don't want to read that much, simply don't assume you know what the document says!

If you want to see a long essay that needs all those words, try Lockhart's Lament, which is aimed at laypeople. Or for a more technical example that also demonstrates how un-header-able points can be, try Meditations on Moloch. Each of those stands well over 80,000 characters, with good reason.

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Originally Posted by Almandaragal

Casual combat focused player here. By that I mean I do normal raids every week, level all non-limited jobs (eventually hand/land as well) to cap each expansion, and typically perform in the top half to top quarter in the dungeons, raids, and trials that I participate in. Nothing special, but it seems to fit your description there.

I have purchasing power to get what I need just fine.

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Your average player, even your average crafting enthusiast, isn't having the issues that you're describing. Not where I've been reading, seeing, and watching at least.

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I'm glad you're having no trouble with your own purchasing power. Meanwhile, every raid tier I open my commissions to people paying in tomestones, and every tier I get customers who can't afford their crafted gear any other way.

Some of your assumptions about other player experiences break down hard, so let me try to relieve your confusion.

I said:

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Originally Posted by Aurelle_Deresnels

I want both raiders and casual combat-focused players to have the purchasing power to buy what they want comfortably.

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It's not about defining "casual", it's about making sure that purchasing power is working out across the whole spectrum from casual to hardcore. So let's dispense with the endless argument on the boundaries of "casual" and look at different points on the spectrum, both in purchasing power and in expenses.

Purchasing power first.

At the root, the primary constraint on a player is not gil. The primary constraints are time and fun. If a player is out of time, they can't make more - they have to drop some content they're doing, which might lower their income. If a player isn't having fun doing certain content, eventually they won't do that content, no matter how much gil it makes. Gil is merely a medium for the exchange of value, including the value of time.

Let's first look at the time aspect. Every player only has so much time they can spend on the game per week before running into Earth limitations. Whether that amount is 2 hours or 60 hours, there's a limit. That limit can also vary over longer timeframes; for example, some people can take a long weekend off work to binge MSQ, and other people can't.

Second, let's look at the fun aspect. Every player has their own profile of content they find fun. And for some players, that profile doesn't include the timegated goodies like retainer ventures and Custom Deliveries. (Personally, I'm quite happy to work with the timegated goodies as a part of my income. But when half a dozen people who don't know each other tell me about the chore aversion / mental burden that such things induce for them, I have to believe them that it's a real phenomenon.) Further, many players will only do so much of a content type before it stops being fun and starts being boring. If they get bored, eventually they quit.

Thus, a player's earning potential - the upper limit of their accumulating purchasing power - is determined by their time and fun profiles, and how the economy gives trade value to those profiles via barter and gil.

Now for expenses.

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Originally Posted by Almandaragal

I get said itch to try EX content, but the fact is that I don't have the time or set schedule to do any kind of prog and still actually get my other goals done. Sure, gearing up multiple characters to BiS is definitely a slog and should be improved upon, but that's not a crafting issue; that's a tome cost/rate of acquirement issue. The OP seems focused on the impacts on and from crafting. I mentioned that I have no issues, and that I likely fall into the "casual" bracket. If I don't, then they can define what is and isn't casual, and what this as of now mythical group of people who can't seem to get any gear is.

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You've said yourself that you don't do any content harder than Normal Raids, and perhaps similar things like Alliance Raids. Which is all well and good, and also means that your required expenses are effectively zero, both in gil and in time. It doesn't matter to your ability to access content if you get crafted gear later or not at all - the Normal Raid and Alliance Raid gear, along with the tomes you get just for doing those, will keep you above minimum item level for that content. And that means you don't have the time expense of capping tomes either. It doesn't matter to your ability to access content if you meld materia to your gear, because the content you do is designed not to need it. After the minimal repair fees and teleports, which the game showers you in enough gil to cover, you're free to spend your income on whatever you please without affecting your access to content. In personal finance terms, all your in-game income is disposable.

Why do I put so much emphasis on "without affecting your access to content"? Because plenty of expenses do affect one's access to raiding content.

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Originally Posted by Almandaragal

If you're referring to overmelding and raid food, then you're talking about hardcore raiders, and the "casual" part no longer applies.

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Those are both examples of expenses, but they kick in at vastly different levels of seriousness.

Let's say that a player decided to take their first step into high-end content with Storm's Crown EX (6.2) at launch. Storm's Crown EX has an official minimum item level of 600, and players take that seriously because the heal checks are designed around it. Going in with less gear than that is putting undue burden on your healers, and PFs will rightly lock it out en masse. At launch, a player who hadn't done high-end content before 6.2 had a maximum item level of... 599, brought down by the one unaugmented ring. So our dabbler has to spend either gil or time getting a current-tier piece to reach minimum item level. But you can do that in Normal Raids or with the new tomes, so that's not so hard, is it?

Being minimum item level or just above, now they're expected to fill the materia slots on all their gear for the first time - with current materia X. Suddenly, their damage output matters. Assuming they got a Normal Raid or crafted ring, with a single materia slot, they have 21 slots to fill: 10 two-slot pieces from the previous tier, and the one one-slot piece they just got. (Other scenarios are worse for their total expenses, requiring more investment in gear or melds.) Using the Aether markets since I see that's where you are, materia X in the desirable substats was often running over 25k each. That means over 500k in materia just to set foot in the fight - or any high-end content while it's current - and it's not even the expansion launch rush on materia! Not for overmelding, but for slot melding.

The fact that they're expected to use raid food for the first time pales in comparison. They can use last tier's (cheaper) food, and EX fights only take a few hours to learn and a few more to get a weapon from, with no weekly commitment. 20k or so of old food will do.

The next week, our dabbler takes their shiny new EX weapon into P5S. (Along with at least one tome piece, possibly two, and more Normal Raid gear, which means 75k or more in materia to refill slots as they upgrade despite taking the materia out of the old pieces.) Assuming they find a party accepting item level 600 instead of going "but everyone had time to get crafted" and demanding 610 or even 612, now they need current raid food. Going in without it is asking to die to raidwides. If they take 3 hours to learn the fight, riding the first wave when PF is good, they've spent 30k in food... and maybe hit enrage instead of getting the clear.

The more serious and experienced raiders, who have more polished rotations and have learned to learn faster, were mostly in the 605 / 610 / 612 parties or in statics. Our dabbler's group, determined to clear despite potentially taking a few deaths or Damage Downs near minimum item level, faces an expectation of Savage but not EX: raid potions.

Raid food is used on a per-unit-time basis. Raid potions are used on a per-pull basis when trying to clear. And P5S is a three-potion fight. (So are P6S and P7S. P8S is four-potion, counting both halves together.) Pushing for that clear on the first day of Savage, while their potions could still be 10k each, they could easily drink down 60 potions trying for that first kill. 600k in potions is no joke, an expense almost as high as everything else they needed to get this far!

And for their trouble, they got... access to [Duty Complete] P5S parties next week, a book, a less than 3/8 chance at getting an accessory (one person can win multiple of the 3 drops), and access to P6S once they hit item level 605. Because Savage, unlike EX, isn't farmable. They can enter P6S without buying crafted gear - their second week of tomestone and Normal Raid gear can get them to 605 alongside that EX weapon - but if they want to guarantee getting gear from P5S, they have to come back week after week. Which means two things:

• They have to use food and potions every week. Even after they're well past minimum item level, they'll be expected to use food for heal planning and incentivized to use potions to maybe salvage close pulls. (If they care about logs to show a prospective static, that makes potions mandatory.) A few weeks later, at the peak of PF competence for the early fights of a tier, the prices for food and potions will have settled to about 2.5k each, and they'll have plenty of 100+ potion weeks reclearing P5S and P6S before they can hop into P7S prog for the week.
• Capping tomes is no longer optional for them. Every week they have to make sure to do it, at least for the first ~8 weeks to get their BiS pieces, or they'll fall behind the rising tide of PF item level requirements. And they can't do it in Savage, because each of their reclears only grants 30 tomes.

They don't wind up touching crafted gear, because their tomes and Normal Raids have taken care of the item level 610 requirement for P7S by the time they unlock it. But between raiding itself and capping tomes, they're now spending 9-12 hours and ~300k gil (food, potions, melding gear as they upgrade) every week that they weren't before. That pushes out other content from their time budget, and they can't check retainers often when raiding - when a party enters and leaves instances won't line up well with venture times. The only way (within ToS) that they can make active money in this time is the uncapped tomes they generate alongside capped tomes, and potentially materia / desynth fodder from however they cap tomes.

Do you want to gear up your alts, therefore going back after your main job is done with P5S gear? 300k a week is over 1.2m a month is over 8m a tier even without farming during unlock, and if they clear P7S or P8S they add to that weekly figure. And that's before factoring in the fact that they probably make less gil than they used to, since basically every other combat activity is gil-positive with some diligence and they had to push something out. Suddenly the fact that they can sell tomes to offset their potion costs is a big deal - and so is the fact that they couldn't last tier.

That player didn't use any crafted gear. Now let's consider a raider who did.

This raider had their experience of getting their feet wet last tier in Asphodelos, or possibly beforehand. Their prior experience has polished their rotations and learning to learn, so static or PF, they expect to set foot in P7S in week 1. Their Normal Raid and tomestone gear will not get them to item level 610 in week 1, and they need to reach that item level before going in or they'll die to raidwides. (Seriously, even now healers need to know if someone's in 610 gear, because that character will need extra heals that the rest of the party at 615+ won't.) They need crafted gear - the only bypass to the current tier's weekly loot lock - in order to access the content they want to do, and they know it. Which means they may choose to get that gear earlier to have an easier time on P5S and P6S.

Therefore, they have a bigger first week expense spike, both from buying (and slot melding) crafted pieces to fill in their gaps and from having two bursts of "first clear potions" for P5S and P6S before the prices lower. A few weeks later, they've cleared P7S and are well into P8S, meaning they spend every week doing three reclears. Then for their prog, they face P8S' door boss every instance, drinking more potions in the hope that the party can get past it to the phase they want to work on. Unlike our earlier dabbler, this player is pretty much guaranteed to clear the tier on content (unless Earth constraints stop them), putting them at four reclears a week including a door boss fight. Their consumable costs still dominate the total; a highly consistent static that reclears efficiently might bring their tier-long costs below the dabbler by reducing their consumable use! Though if that static does optimization runs after reclears... imagine drinking 2-3 potions every pull for 6+ hours. Or 4-5 potions per pull in late Ultimate prog. I've done bulk food and potion orders for Ultimate raiders, and I'll do so again, because they go through so many potions.

(We've still not considered anyone who actually has a strong reason to overmeld their crafted gear. That's reserved for people who'll hit a fourth floor enrage in week 1 of the tier, at latest week 2, before tome and Savage gear makes the DPS check doable without it. Plenty of Ultimate raiders don't clear Savage that fast.)

You say you don't have a set schedule, which means you probably don't reliably have Tuesday evenings open, which means you have basically no access to statics - and would have an even worse time of PFing the tier than I described, having to endure the lower clear rates of non-prime-time parties. Does that sound cheap and easy to manage to you?

Having expenses high enough to struggle with doesn't require anything mystical. It just requires a fun profile slightly different than yours, that promotes raiding high enough to go for it despite limited time. That's what Amarande meant with

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Originally Posted by Amarande

Those who don't set foot into hardmodes at all until tiers or expansions later to harvest mounts and glam might not feel there's any issue at all.

Those who tend to catch the "yanno, maybe I should try EX/Savage" bug after a while tend to be horrifically affected all over the place.

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Casuals generally don't have required expenses. Raiders universally do.

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Originally Posted by Amarande

PFs, even learning PFs with the insane requirements OP points out (this has been a thing to some degree or other for some expansions now, and not even just for Savage, e.g., you can hardly even get in on the first wave of learning parties for an odd patch EX without ilvls that demand fairly extensive Savage experience, and if you miss that first wave ... well ... that's been a community problem for years now that no one has really found an effective answer to).

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The excessive item level requirements have definitely happened in previous tiers, but Abyssos has had noticeably more of them, what with the "everyone's had time to get crafted" assumptions, balance issues, mitigation issues, and people staring at P8S' DPS check. The players may be typing the item levels in, but they do that in response to the game conditions and SE should still factor that into their analysis of the data, hence my point. Exacerbating the "first wave" effect doesn't help anyone.

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Originally Posted by Amarande

Perhaps I overemphasize or overthink it, perhaps not.

The main reason I so heavily opine against Discord is that it seems that a very large contributor to community problems in FFXIV in particular is that certain groups of players (especially what one might call the "smarter than the average bear casual") tend to be especially poorly served by the currently available communities.

The normal antidote for that would be, of course, to found one's own community; in fact, that's what usually happened with hobby communities especially in the days when independent forums were the dominant form of organization. If a forum was sufficiently disliked, other ones would naturally spring up and the activity would shift. Especially difficult or toxic forum leads would frequently find themselves presiding over tumbleweeds. Everyone was happy (except them, I suppose).

Unfortunately, Discord (due, primarily, to having gone over from becoming just a chat service like IRC or teamspeak to being full-blown social media in the mainstream eye in these times) places a much heavier onus on the owners of (especially) openly discoverable communities than forum hosts ever did (including the possibility of getting removed from the entire platform including other communities for running, or even sometimes for being a member of, an insufficiently moderated server), strongly discouraging people from going that route. Private Discords do abound, but most of them tend to as a result be so small and have so few actively playing members at any given moment as to be of little help when it comes to actual in-game activity desires.

And it's painfully clear that the FFXIV community is not, in this day and age, particularly interested in communities that are not conveniently accessible via a Discord invite. Even SE's expansion of cross-world communications in-game has not particularly helped, e.g., most CWLS (except hunt CWLS) are dead silent even when several members are active.

This, I feel, has contributed heavily to the environment of there being an insufficient variety of communities for everyone to find a comfortable home. Were everyone to be able to readily find an active community compatible with their pace and playstyle, as is the case in other MMOs (even WoW!), I feel like many of the factors under discussion would be of far less import in the first place (with the exception of the ultra-short window in which to make gil off of crafted gear, perhaps). But this is clearly not the case.

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So, in short, to answer my question: Discord does not have anything to do with the issue at hand. That is, it doesn't have an effect on gearing and/or making money from crafting.

This rabbit hole you went down is largely irrelevant here. Whether or not it has any impact on FFXIV drama I'll leave to people who actually experience/take part in said drama and said Discord communities. I play the game, consume video content related to FFXIV on youtube/twitch, and read/reply on the official forums here, and reddit. I don't deal with that crap, and it's clear that while you seem to, it doesn't actually have any bearing on the intended conversation points of this topic.

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Originally Posted by Aurelle_Deresnels

It's not about defining "casual", it's about making sure that purchasing power is working out across the whole spectrum from casual to hardcore. So let's dispense with the endless argument on the boundaries of "casual" and look at different points on the spectrum, both in purchasing power and in expenses.

Purchasing power first.

At the root, the primary constraint on a player is not gil. The primary constraints are time and fun. If a player is out of time, they can't make more - they have to drop some content they're doing, which might lower their income. If a player isn't having fun doing certain content, eventually they won't do that content, no matter how much gil it makes. Gil is merely a medium for the exchange of value, including the value of time.

Let's first look at the time aspect. Every player only has so much time they can spend on the game per week before running into Earth limitations. Whether that amount is 2 hours or 60 hours, there's a limit. That limit can also vary over longer timeframes; for example, some people can take a long weekend off work to binge MSQ, and other people can't.

Second, let's look at the fun aspect. Every player has their own profile of content they find fun. And for some players, that profile doesn't include the timegated goodies like retainer ventures and Custom Deliveries. (Personally, I'm quite happy to work with the timegated goodies as a part of my income. But when half a dozen people who don't know each other tell me about the chore aversion / mental burden that such things induce for them, I have to believe them that it's a real phenomenon.) Further, many players will only do so much of a content type before it stops being fun and starts being boring. If they get bored, eventually they quit.

Thus, a player's earning potential - the upper limit of their accumulating purchasing power - is determined by their time and fun profiles, and how the economy gives trade value to those profiles via barter and gil.

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In summary, you don't really have a way to set a baseline because you're coming from the place of "everyone has different earning potentials based on what they're willing to do". Which, well, is obvious. There's a reason that I only addressed a specific portion of the original post: That's the part I could speak to. I'm not going to play the infinite hypotheticals game with you, because that's just a rotating door of moving goalposts as opposed to anything objective.

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Originally Posted by Aurelle_Deresnels

You've said yourself that you don't do any content harder than Normal Raids, and perhaps similar things like Alliance Raids. Which is all well and good, and also means that your required expenses are effectively zero, both in gil and in time. It doesn't matter to your ability to access content if you get crafted gear later or not at all - the Normal Raid and Alliance Raid gear, along with the tomes you get just for doing those, will keep you above minimum item level for that content. And that means you don't have the time expense of capping tomes either. It doesn't matter to your ability to access content if you meld materia to your gear, because the content you do is designed not to need it. After the minimal repair fees and teleports, which the game showers you in enough gil to cover, you're free to spend your income on whatever you please without affecting your access to content. In personal finance terms, all your in-game income is disposable.

Why do I put so much emphasis on "without affecting your access to content"? Because plenty of expenses do affect one's access to raiding content.

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And this kind of thing is why I said what I said above. You made assumptions based on what I told you, some of them incorrect given you didn't include the other contextual information in said post. For example, I don't do alliance raids much beyond the first month, maybe two. I notably dislike 24-mans. Any large scale content like that is annoying to me for a number of reasons, even if Aglaia is pretty nice compared to the others I've done (all but nier). Likewise, I mentioned tome restrictions a number of times because I do cap my tomes. I mentioned that I purchase my gear primarily with tomes and normal raid drops. My "cost" isn't zero, given you count time in costs, because I have to spend time farming tomes and raid gear. Like, say, the 10 normal raids I had to do today in order to win 4 rolls for gear turn ins.

You also use your last line to pivot completely out of the realm that I was speaking to. You're now heading towards the hardcore content. All this talk of how you want casual players to have buying power. I mention that I don't have any trouble there with minimal input outside of tomes/raids. Now you transition into EX/Savage raiding. Which, again, isn't the casual's wheelhouse.

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Originally Posted by Aurelle_Deresnels

Those are both examples of expenses, but they kick in at vastly different levels of seriousness.

Let's say that a player decided to take their first step into high-end content with Storm's Crown EX (6.2) at launch. Storm's Crown EX has an official minimum item level of 600, and players take that seriously because the heal checks are designed around it. Going in with less gear than that is putting undue burden on your healers, and PFs will rightly lock it out en masse. At launch, a player who hadn't done high-end content before 6.2 had a maximum item level of... 599, brought down by the one unaugmented ring. So our dabbler has to spend either gil or time getting a current-tier piece to reach minimum item level. But you can do that in Normal Raids or with the new tomes, so that's not so hard, is it?

Being minimum item level or just above, now they're expected to fill the materia slots on all their gear for the first time - with current materia X. Suddenly, their damage output matters. Assuming they got a Normal Raid or crafted ring, with a single materia slot, they have 21 slots to fill: 10 two-slot pieces from the previous tier, and the one one-slot piece they just got. (Other scenarios are worse for their total expenses, requiring more investment in gear or melds.) Using the Aether markets since I see that's where you are, materia X in the desirable substats was often running over 25k each. That means over 500k in materia just to set foot in the fight - or any high-end content while it's current - and it's not even the expansion launch rush on materia! Not for overmelding, but for slot melding.

The fact that they're expected to use raid food for the first time pales in comparison. They can use last tier's (cheaper) food, and EX fights only take a few hours to learn and a few more to get a weapon from, with no weekly commitment. 20k or so of old food will do.

The next week, our dabbler takes their shiny new EX weapon into P5S. (Along with at least one tome piece, possibly two, and more Normal Raid gear, which means 75k or more in materia to refill slots as they upgrade despite taking the materia out of the old pieces.) Assuming they find a party accepting item level 600 instead of going "but everyone had time to get crafted" and demanding 610 or even 612, now they need current raid food. Going in without it is asking to die to raidwides. If they take 3 hours to learn the fight, riding the first wave when PF is good, they've spent 30k in food... and maybe hit enrage instead of getting the clear.

The more serious and experienced raiders, who have more polished rotations and have learned to learn faster, were mostly in the 605 / 610 / 612 parties or in statics. Our dabbler's group, determined to clear despite potentially taking a few deaths or Damage Downs near minimum item level, faces an expectation of Savage but not EX: raid potions.

Raid food is used on a per-unit-time basis. Raid potions are used on a per-pull basis when trying to clear. And P5S is a three-potion fight. (So are P6S and P7S. P8S is four-potion, counting both halves together.) Pushing for that clear on the first day of Savage, while their potions could still be 10k each, they could easily drink down 60 potions trying for that first kill. 600k in potions is no joke, an expense almost as high as everything else they needed to get this far!

And for their trouble, they got... access to [Duty Complete] P5S parties next week, a book, a less than 3/8 chance at getting an accessory (one person can win multiple of the 3 drops), and access to P6S once they hit item level 605. Because Savage, unlike EX, isn't farmable. They can enter P6S without buying crafted gear - their second week of tomestone and Normal Raid gear can get them to 605 alongside that EX weapon - but if they want to guarantee getting gear from P5S, they have to come back week after week. Which means two things:

They have to use food and potions every week. Even after they're well past minimum item level, they'll be expected to use food for heal planning and incentivized to use potions to maybe salvage close pulls. (If they care about logs to show a prospective static, that makes potions mandatory.) A few weeks later, at the peak of PF competence for the early fights of a tier, the prices for food and potions will have settled to about 2.5k each, and they'll have plenty of 100+ potion weeks reclearing P5S and P6S before they can hop into P7S prog for the week.
Capping tomes is no longer optional for them. Every week they have to make sure to do it, at least for the first ~8 weeks to get their BiS pieces, or they'll fall behind the rising tide of PF item level requirements. And they can't do it in Savage, because each of their reclears only grants 30 tomes.


They don't wind up touching crafted gear, because their tomes and Normal Raids have taken care of the item level 610 requirement for P7S by the time they unlock it. But between raiding itself and capping tomes, they're now spending 9-12 hours and ~300k gil (food, potions, melding gear as they upgrade) every week that they weren't before. That pushes out other content from their time budget, and they can't check retainers often when raiding - when a party enters and leaves instances won't line up well with venture times. The only way (within ToS) that they can make active money in this time is the uncapped tomes they generate alongside capped tomes, and potentially materia / desynth fodder from however they cap tomes.

Do you want to gear up your alts, therefore going back after your main job is done with P5S gear? 300k a week is over 1.2m a month is over 8m a tier even without farming during unlock, and if they clear P7S or P8S they add to that weekly figure. And that's before factoring in the fact that they probably make less gil than they used to, since basically every other combat activity is gil-positive with some diligence and they had to push something out. Suddenly the fact that they can sell tomes to offset their potion costs is a big deal - and so is the fact that they couldn't last tier.

That player didn't use any crafted gear. Now let's consider a raider who did.

This raider had their experience of getting their feet wet last tier in Asphodelos, or possibly beforehand. Their prior experience has polished their rotations and learning to learn, so static or PF, they expect to set foot in P7S in week 1. Their Normal Raid and tomestone gear will not get them to item level 610 in week 1, and they need to reach that item level before going in or they'll die to raidwides. (Seriously, even now healers need to know if someone's in 610 gear, because that character will need extra heals that the rest of the party at 615+ won't.) They need crafted gear - the only bypass to the current tier's weekly loot lock - in order to access the content they want to do, and they know it. Which means they may choose to get that gear earlier to have an easier time on P5S and P6S.

Therefore, they have a bigger first week expense spike, both from buying (and slot melding) crafted pieces to fill in their gaps and from having two bursts of "first clear potions" for P5S and P6S before the prices lower. A few weeks later, they've cleared P7S and are well into P8S, meaning they spend every week doing three reclears. Then for their prog, they face P8S' door boss every instance, drinking more potions in the hope that the party can get past it to the phase they want to work on. Unlike our earlier dabbler, this player is pretty much guaranteed to clear the tier on content (unless Earth constraints stop them), putting them at four reclears a week including a door boss fight. Their consumable costs still dominate the total; a highly consistent static that reclears efficiently might bring their tier-long costs below the dabbler by reducing their consumable use! Though if that static does optimization runs after reclears... imagine drinking 2-3 potions every pull for 6+ hours. Or 4-5 potions per pull in late Ultimate prog. I've done bulk food and potion orders for Ultimate raiders, and I'll do so again, because they go through so many potions.

(We've still not considered anyone who actually has a strong reason to overmeld their crafted gear. That's reserved for people who'll hit a fourth floor enrage in week 1 of the tier, at latest week 2, before tome and Savage gear makes the DPS check doable without it. Plenty of Ultimate raiders don't clear Savage that fast.)

You say you don't have a set schedule, which means you probably don't reliably have Tuesday evenings open, which means you have basically no access to statics - and would have an even worse time of PFing the tier than I described, having to endure the lower clear rates of non-prime-time parties. Does that sound cheap and easy to manage to you?

Having expenses high enough to struggle with doesn't require anything mystical. It just requires a fun profile slightly different than yours, that promotes raiding high enough to go for it despite limited time. That's what Amarande meant with

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That's a WHOLE lot of unnecessary text to say that it's difficult to go from a casual playstyle into competitive hardcore early weeks progression style savage raiding. It ignores the fact that someone will have to play far more than your standard casual player to even attempt to prog savage. It ignores the fact that even casual players such as myself won't need to buy much, if any materia if they aren't overmelding, because various roulettes throw crystals at you to trade for IX/X materia, not to mention all the materia you get from extracting spiritbond. I haven't purchased a single materia, and I have a couple dozen of each potentially useful X, along with 40-70 crystals to trade in for them should I need any in a pinch. That's without doing In Need roulettes more than once or twice a month.

Seriously, this is basically just an elaborate "but it's hard to move from casual to super hardcore with no delays". Duh? I even mentioned in one of my posts that I don't do the content of actual challenge because of this level of time committment. That time being either gathering and crafting gear/food, or earning gil, or even the time for prog itself. The whole incredibly specific scenario is only slightly more realistic than me trying to go into UCOB and beat it in a single lockout with a random PF group despite the fact that I've never tried it before.

All in all, you're basically assuming absolutely worst case scenarios for everything, and combining them all together to create far larger problems than actually exist. Problems along this kind of thing DO exist, but not nearly in the numbers and with the frequency you make them out to be.

You'll need to come back down to Etheirys and maybe not throw out a novel of mythical theoretical scenarios when a chapter of properly grounded possibilities will do. At least, if you would like your ideas to be considered by those who matter.

Since there's a few posts that are mentioning the time gated content and it would be a bit of a challenge to quote all of it, I'll say this real fast.

Savage is absolutely time gated content just like the rest and has always been time gated content. The way the gate is setup is different since it depends on the gear level of those playing and what the average individual raiding is capable of. Like people get very disillusioned by the world first groups and the hardcore gamers, but hardcore raiders are really burning about a full time jobs worth of hours mastering these fights, and they have to deal with maximizing absolutely everything due to the limited gear they have at the start of a tier.

Most people who are doing savage are doing it at most like a part-time job or below that standard, so something like 28 hours or less per week. It doesn't matter what people think: You can't expect a group of people going 28 hours or less to match people who are doing 40+ hours on the content.

In all honesty, it's not a very good system even though it is a tried and true system. The amount of time it takes to get through all of it is highly variable and difficult to schedule as people doing it have different goal posts and times. Usually all the fire hits the fan on the third and fourth fights when it comes to the raid drama and burn out.

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Originally Posted by Almandaragal

In summary, you don't really have a way to set a baseline because you're coming from the place of "everyone has different earning potentials based on what they're willing to do". Which, well, is obvious. There's a reason that I only addressed a specific portion of the original post: That's the part I could speak to. I'm not going to play the infinite hypotheticals game with you, because that's just a rotating door of moving goalposts as opposed to anything objective.

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Are you willfully misreading me?

As I have said repeatedly, I care about the entire spectrum from casual to hardcore. Therefore, I care about raiders too.

I am not interested in setting some single-point baseline and ignoring all other points, because I am not interested in ignoring other players' experiences. The fact that you personally have no problems on your specific point of that spectrum does not mean that there are not problems for other people on other parts of that spectrum.

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Originally Posted by Almandaragal

You made assumptions based on what I told you, some of them incorrect given you didn't include the other contextual information in said post. For example, I don't do alliance raids much beyond the first month, maybe two. I notably dislike 24-mans. Any large scale content like that is annoying to me for a number of reasons, even if Aglaia is pretty nice compared to the others I've done (all but nier).

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I assumed no such thing. I said

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Originally Posted by Aurelle_Deresnels

You've said yourself that you don't do any content harder than Normal Raids, and perhaps similar things like Alliance Raids.

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See that word "perhaps"? As in "maybe, maybe not". And you do, in fact, do Alliance Raids, even if you choose not to do them for very long after their release.

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Originally Posted by Almandaragal

Likewise, I mentioned tome restrictions a number of times because I do cap my tomes. I mentioned that I purchase my gear primarily with tomes and normal raid drops. My "cost" isn't zero, given you count time in costs, because I have to spend time farming tomes and raid gear. Like, say, the 10 normal raids I had to do today in order to win 4 rolls for gear turn ins.

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None of which you require to access the content you choose to do. If you choose not to cap your tomes or get your preferred Normal Raid pieces every week, you will still be able to access next tier's MSQ and Normal Raids (and Alliance Raids, and everything else casual). You are of course welcome to do it, but you do it because you want to, not because the game requires you to.

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Originally Posted by Almandaragal

You also use your last line to pivot completely out of the realm that I was speaking to. You're now heading towards the hardcore content. All this talk of how you want casual players to have buying power. I mention that I don't have any trouble there with minimal input outside of tomes/raids. Now you transition into EX/Savage raiding. Which, again, isn't the casual's wheelhouse.

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How many times do I have to repeat myself that raiders should also have purchasing power? We're in a thread about Abyssos Savage, for the love of Hydaelyn. You're the one who's taking this as purely about casual play.

Sure, I also care about casual players who have expenses for other reasons (glamour contests, house decorating, etc.), but raiders having a problem is sufficient to demonstrate the existence of a problem.

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Originally Posted by Almandaragal

That's a WHOLE lot of unnecessary text to say that it's difficult to go from a casual playstyle into competitive hardcore early weeks progression style savage raiding.

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If you think someone doing their first Extreme is "competitive hardcore early weeks progression style savage raiding", you are woefully misinformed. Even my second example, with the person hitting P7S in the first week, is merely high midcore.

True competitive prog, the world races, mean arranging the statics well in advance, arranging for a 9th man and in some cases a 10th man as support, taking time off work, pentamelded gear, 12-16 hour days at minimum ... Savage tiers are often raced in a single roughly 24-hour shot, multiple raid days are more for Ultimate races.

And then there's the non-competitive hardcore statics, the ones that don't bother with the world race but still want their week 1 tier clear. Those usually form closer to the tier and dispense with the support players, but they still take time off work and they have a new expense of their own: split clears. As in, outfitting two characters per player, a main and an alt, with pentamelded crafted gear, and clearing each of the first three fights twice. (Why? Because that gets them two sets of raid drops to help with the final fight's DPS check, via using four mains and four alts in each clear and feeding all the loot to the mains. World race statics don't bother because split clears mean falling behind groups who can go without the extra loot.) Which means more expenses - those statics can easily break 10m per player for that one week, without having to preorder their gear.

Did you see any of those in my last post of examples? No, because I wasn't talking about hardcore raiders.

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Originally Posted by Almandaragal

It ignores the fact that someone will have to play far more than your standard casual player to even attempt to prog savage.

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I explicitly said that each player's available playtime per week is fixed. If you have a time machine to get around that, maybe you should be marketing it instead of posting here.

And yes, some players have little time and still choose to spend it raiding. Ever heard of "raid logging"? It's a colloquial term for logging on just to raid and then logging off, and it exists because plenty of players do that.

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Originally Posted by Almandaragal

It ignores the fact that even casual players such as myself won't need to buy much, if any materia if they aren't overmelding, because various roulettes throw crystals at you to trade for IX/X materia, not to mention all the materia you get from extracting spiritbond. I haven't purchased a single materia, and I have a couple dozen of each potentially useful X, along with 40-70 crystals to trade in for them should I need any in a pinch. That's without doing In Need roulettes more than once or twice a month.

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If you put that materia from roulettes into your gear, that means you can't sell said materia, and therefore can't make gil off it, and therefore would have less gil than if you didn't use the materia. In economics terms, that's the "opportunity cost" of using the materia. So it doesn't matter much whether you get your materia from roulettes or the MB, because using materia you already have can't save you any more than the MB taxes.

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Originally Posted by Almandaragal

Seriously, this is basically just an elaborate "but it's hard to move from casual to super hardcore with no delays". Duh? I even mentioned in one of my posts that I don't do the content of actual challenge because of this level of time committment. That time being either gathering and crafting gear/food, or earning gil, or even the time for prog itself.

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I specifically used two different player examples, one starting from a player's first Extreme, to show realistic scenarios of player growth that you could hopefully relate to. And once again, even with my example of an experienced raider I still didn't touch hardcore anything.

Since you don't want to do Savage, why are you so interested in posting here?

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Originally Posted by Almandaragal

The whole incredibly specific scenario is only slightly more realistic than me trying to go into UCOB and beat it in a single lockout with a random PF group despite the fact that I've never tried it before.

All in all, you're basically assuming absolutely worst case scenarios for everything, and combining them all together to create far larger problems than actually exist. Problems along this kind of thing DO exist, but not nearly in the numbers and with the frequency you make them out to be.

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Nope, those are perfectly normal Party Finder numbers. In fact, let's go to your local Jenova MB and see how expensive potions currently are. I'll save you the trouble:

https://imgur.com/sMtDXKq.png

https://imgur.com/IJI2wIw.png

https://imgur.com/F5s0AHR.png

https://imgur.com/A3K2RFp.png

All the HQ potions are over 4k each, in week 10 of the tier! (NQ is useless for any actual clear attempts, as is firmly evidenced by the frequency of people buying HQ. So are Vitality potions.) The 2.5k per potion settled price that I used in my estimates is nowhere near a worst case scenario.

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Originally Posted by Almandaragal

You'll need to come back down to Etheirys and maybe not throw out a novel of mythical theoretical scenarios when a chapter of properly grounded possibilities will do. At least, if you would like your ideas to be considered by those who matter.

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Square Enix has the numbers on potions being drank, food being eaten, crafted gear being used, and so on. They already know that raiders are an important segment of the in-game economy, and that starts well before "super hardcore".

You didn't understand this when Amarande gave a short explanation. You continue to insist that it's "mythical" when I gave grounded cases with actual math, because the short explanation didn't work. If you refuse to understand the reality of raiding, then you have nothing to contribute to this discussion.

What is truly perplexing is why release all fights for savage right away on the patch if the second half is geared for people to have higher item level in general? Pretty sure the majority of issues with savage content could be fixed by simply not pushing people or giving people the opportunity to wreck themselves on content. As much as it might take away the fun for a rather small set of players, breaking the savage into two wings is just a safer option.

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Originally Posted by Colt47

What is truly perplexing is why release all fights for savage right away on the patch if the second half is geared for people to have higher item level in general? Pretty sure the majority of issues with savage content could be fixed by simply not pushing people or giving people the opportunity to wreck themselves on content. As much as it might take away the fun for a rather small set of players, breaking the savage into two wings is just a safer option.

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The item levels required for the second half of a Savage tier are entirely attainable immediately by buying crafted gear, and plenty of players enjoy the challenge of taking them on with 'imperfect' gear before tome and Normal Raid caps allow for higher item levels and better substats. An experienced midcore raider can easily reach the third fight of a tier within 6-8 hours even in Party Finder, and spending that kind of time over a launch week is hardly "wrecking oneself on content". Splitting Savage launch in two would deprive even midcore raiders - quite a large population - of their fun, and likely break the raid gear system and tuning to boot.

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Originally Posted by Aurelle_Deresnels

Thank you for sharing your experience. Do you have any suggestions for how to give crafting and gathering skill value outside of the raid tier?

Because right now, SE hasn't figured out a way to do it. And every single person who relies on a public gearset or macro, including Teamcraft Community Rotations, relies on a tiny group of people skilled enough to make those gearsets and macros - and nothing short of preorder crafting has given that group any content.

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Unfortunately, much like most content in this game with recent expansions, SE didn't interested in skill value but rather accessibility.

My own preference would be a sort of light version of Expert crafts being required for Master Recipes and for the whole Augmented Crafting gear to actually require new crafters. It's always bothered me the odd numbered patches have next to nothing for crafters to partake in because by that point everything has been marked down into oblivion. I think the Augmented sets should be craftable with a new mat to breeze a little life back into the market instead of essentially being a handout that only further devalues what little recipes we have.

None of this will happen, of course. The dev team dislikes the idea of crafters seeing gil itself as a ranking system.

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Originally Posted by Aurelle_Deresnels

Would it work the same way in a different tier? With all the things impacting the tier, it's unlikely, and hard to say exactly how it would work out... which is my point. We don't know, and any interpretation of the data that doesn't take into account all those influences will necessarily be flawed.

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We won't know until 6.4 comes around. All we do know is this tier proved surprisingly profitable despite almost everyone assuming the markets would crash within hours. Even Yoshida himself acknowledged that very same concern, and his subsequent surprise when the opposite happened. 6.4 will more or less be the litmus test since they've all but confirmed Savage will be delayed again.

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Originally Posted by Colt47

What is truly perplexing is why release all fights for savage right away on the patch if the second half is geared for people to have higher item level in general? Pretty sure the majority of issues with savage content could be fixed by simply not pushing people or giving people the opportunity to wreck themselves on content. As much as it might take away the fun for a rather small set of players, breaking the savage into two wings is just a safer option.

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Raiders essentially have only five fights dedicated to their preferences in nearly the span of a year. Delaying three of them would feel awful while accomplishing absolutely nothing in terms of speeding up gear progression. There is no "issue" in regards to pushing people. Show some self control and simply raid at a lighter schedule if you either can't keep up or simply don't want to spent a lot of time progging. There's no shame in it taking you several weeks or even months to clear compared to those clearing week 1-2.

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Originally Posted by Aurelle_Deresnels

The item levels required for the second half of a Savage tier are entirely attainable immediately by buying crafted gear, and plenty of players enjoy the challenge of taking them on with 'imperfect' gear before tome and Normal Raid caps allow for higher item levels and better substats. An experienced midcore raider can easily reach the third fight of a tier within 6-8 hours even in Party Finder, and spending that kind of time over a launch week is hardly "wrecking oneself on content". Splitting Savage launch in two would deprive even midcore raiders - quite a large population - of their fun, and likely break the raid gear system and tuning to boot.

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It definitely doesn't feel like the gear is enough if it takes a top tier playgroup to manage to barely kill the fight with what is considered to be "good enough" gear. That kind of thing makes sense in single player titles where you absolutely don't have any issues with internet connectivity, but when it comes to online play and savage, fights in the second half don't feel right until most people have a mix of crafted, tome, and coffer gear.

But this also isn't stating that they need to nerf savage as much as they need to create content that has the ability to work with more than one audience. If they can add a mid-tier wing and just increase the DPS checks on the higher tier wing, that would work far better in terms of progress and gives those who are not interested in true savage a way to access the same cosmetic options (weapons, dyable armor, etc). Would it break the current end game? Probably would considering raid finder in WoW did exactly that when they introduced easier versions for random groups, but honestly that is just showing that people were bottled into an environment that didn't work for them.

And going to mention that this is also why we have so many discussions on savage in the second half, because the tuning on the fights are not really meant for those who are more into "I like hard content but not the nightmare level content" kind of groups. I mean many of the savage fights have mechanics that without a guide would take forever to figure out for most people. Week 1 savage runners are pretty damn methodical on figuring out the strategies blind.

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Originally Posted by ForteNightshade

Unfortunately, much like most content in this game with recent expansions, SE didn't interested in skill value but rather accessibility.

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The sad thing is that they're not really accomplishing accessibility by removing skill ceiling in the first place. Accessibility is not about neutering hard content, but about offering both disability-friendly options and 'easy modes'. In the words of Damion Schubert, "the point of [his essay about gaming accessibility] is not that game designers should make games EASIER. Game designers should make the EASY parts EASIER and they should do everything in their power to make the hard parts ASPIRATIONAL. Players should want to walk that journey."*

We have easy modes. That's called Normal Mode, and it's entirely sufficient to see the story and access the game's wide variety of content. Levelling crafters and gatherers to see their storylines is similarly easy, and so are their casual endgames. This thread is about Savage Mode and its associated crafting and gathering support - the opt-in hard mode for those who desire a challenge. Removing challenge from hard modes does nothing to improve accessibility - the people in need of easy modes are not playing hard modes anyway - while driving away the more dedicated players. Not only does this reduce player enjoyment and subscriptions directly, the more dedicated players also support the rest with guides and the like, as Damion also mentions.

If SE was truly after accessibility, we would see things like removing the APM check QTE from Seat of Sacrifice Normal and adding better colorblind modes. I could go on about skill floors and skill ceilings, but I think you get my point.

* I would just cite the original essay on Twitter, but that's been locked due to Twitter issues. Viewing the content publicly now requires nine separate links from the Wayback Machine, courtesy of the Internet Archive, which I present here:

1. part one
2. part two
3. part three
4. part four
5. part five
6. part six
7. part seven
8. part eight
9. part nine, addenda as replies to comments

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Originally Posted by ForteNightshade

My own preference would be a sort of light version of Expert crafts being required for Master Recipes and for the whole Augmented Crafting gear to actually require new crafters. It's always bothered me the odd numbered patches have next to nothing for crafters to partake in because by that point everything has been marked down into oblivion. I think the Augmented sets should be craftable with a new mat to breeze a little life back into the market instead of essentially being a handout that only further devalues what little recipes we have.

None of this will happen, of course.

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I agree it won't happen, but it would be very nice. No one needs gear in bulk, so it can be locked to manual crafts only, while food and potions can serve as easier-but-still-current endgame since they need to be macroable.

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Originally Posted by ForteNightshade

The dev team dislikes the idea of crafters seeing gil itself as a ranking system.

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Even for crafters who don't care about gil as a ranking system, gil is a representation of value provided to the customer. Without crafted goods being worth something significant in trade, crafters get neither the satisfaction of fulfilling others' wants and needs nor the satisfaction of a job well done.

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Originally Posted by ForteNightshade

We won't know until 6.4 comes around. All we do know is this tier proved surprisingly profitable despite almost everyone assuming the markets would crash within hours. Even Yoshida himself acknowledged that very same concern, and his subsequent surprise when the opposite happened. 6.4 will more or less be the litmus test since they've all but confirmed Savage will be delayed again.

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Yes, we need a tier without confounders to be the litmus test. Abyssos is clearly not that, being full of confounders, which is why I wrote in to point them out. Hopefully we will get such a tier with 6.4.

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Originally Posted by ForteNightshade

Raiders essentially have only five fights dedicated to their preferences in nearly the span of a year. Delaying three of them would feel awful while accomplishing absolutely nothing in terms of speeding up gear progression. There is no "issue" in regards to pushing people. Show some self control and simply raid at a lighter schedule if you either can't keep up or simply don't want to spent a lot of time progging. There's no shame in it taking you several weeks or even months to clear compared to those clearing week 1-2.

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I agree. The fights are presented to allow each raider to go at the pace that suits them personally. Delays would only ruin the fun of those who want the faster pace for themselves, without helping anyone.

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Originally Posted by Colt47

It definitely doesn't feel like the gear is enough if it takes a top tier playgroup to manage to barely kill the fight with what is considered to be "good enough" gear. ...

But this also isn't stating that they need to nerf savage as much as they need to create content that has the ability to work with more than one audience. ...

And going to mention that this is also why we have so many discussions on savage in the second half, because the tuning on the fights are not really meant for those who are more into "I like hard content but not the nightmare level content" kind of groups. I mean many of the savage fights have mechanics that without a guide would take forever to figure out for most people. Week 1 savage runners are pretty damn methodical on figuring out the strategies blind.

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If you want moderate difficulty, you are welcome to take the fights at a slower pace yourself. That's how the high-end content works with and serves more than one audience. The fights are presented immediately for the benefit of those who enjoy and can handle a faster pace, especially along with blind prog. Yoshi-P has stated outright that the final fight of a Savage tier is tuned to make a tight DPS check in week 1 gear, because that's what those players enjoy.

"If we were to ship content with the same values which challenged our battle team, the top raiders would be deprived of that by-the-skin-of-your-teeth victory in the initial week of release.

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A high-difficulty raid is a special kind of battle. We want players to enjoy a satisfying, hard-won victory, and we keep that ideal in mind when making tweaks and balance adjustments. Although we failed to walk that delicate line this time, the experience will help us to design a more perfectly thrilling battle in the future."

Why ruin their fun, and the fun of the people who support them, when you could just take the fights at your own pace and let the guides come out ahead of you?