Does Anyone Think Crafting is Too Slow?

[rekijitsu]

She's trolling. I personally don't hate the mini games themselves, but their mechanics seem to be made as an afterthought, not as a core mechanic and even less as a staple activity of the game. Doing them once is interesting, doing them twice is okay, thrice will pass, but doing them a thousand times trying to level one of the disciplines will cause a player to quit. It could perhaps be acceptable to do them once or twice per week.

Every idea of enjoyment related to crafting and gathering was gone for me the second day of beta. I could have trained my dog to craft and gather for me, had it thumbs to manipulate the gamepad, and i can't believe SE estimated our average intelligence to be low enough to be perpetually entertained by such mini games.

Chocobo Raising in FF7 was a fun mini game. Triple Triad in FF8 was another. Treasure hunting in FF9. Blitzball in FF10. Square has proven it can make entertaining mini games, so why do they think we like spamming the same exact craft a hundred times per day?

Digressing & Ranting mode: ON

Also, i think "leveling crafts" for the sake of it (grinding) is wrong, however it's also true that you can't keep up your DOH and DOL at the same level of your Disciplines Of War without grinding. I don't think a blacksmith would make a thousand hammers he doesn't need and can't sell just for training. Why? Because he doesn't have that many materials (and time) to waste and because training doesn't work that way. Crafting an item should give you experience points only the first few times you craft it and you should be able to level your crafting discipline at the same speed of your fighting class just by making the items you and your friends need. Crafting excellence and exclusiveness should be only determined by the difficulty of finding or processing materials, not by the amount of grinding someone does or by how advanced their grinding bots are. Furthermore, i shouldn't be able to get twenty marmot pelts ready for crafting when i'm not looking for them. Only someone with the tanning tools should be able to do so, for example (one would think that amidst all the low res cartoony environments and ugly characters WoW has people would see that it's actually such mechanics that made it big...)

Digressing & Ranting mode: OFF

Then again, i don't see SE ever changing the crafting mechanics in design, so maybe, if we're lucky, they'll speed it up or remove the progress bar.

This, a million times this. I enjoy doing the crafting leves to keep up the Land/Hand things, but that should be it to keep it on par with your other War/Magic classes. The fact War/Magic leves take 5 minutes to do at times as opposed to Land/Hand ones is sort of a pain as well, but if they just made it so that crafting leves were enough to REALLY keep your crafts up, I would be happy even if those leves currently take *much* longer than the battle leves.

I also think you hinted at a good concept, that crafting the same thing over and over shouldn't somehow make you a more talented Blacksmith. If I'm a Blacksmith that does nothing but make Hammers all day, then I'm not a very good one. Maybe if the game encouraged and rewarded you a *lot* more than it currently does to create something new and useful, then yeah, it would probably be a lot more fun. As of right now though, you may as well be crafting your thousands of weapon grips or hammers if what you want to do is keep your craft up to par with your War/Magic disciplines.