Quote Originally Posted by Mhaeric View Post
Two-words: Game balance.

The trade off for you not having to sit in front of your computer while you craft stacks of items is that some of those results will fail and you have an incredibly low HQ rate. If you want to guarantee success then use careful synthesis, since the speed is about the same. Its either set it and forget it, or 100% success, not both.
That has nothing to do with balance whatsoever. You are not offering any advantage to any player, nor are you making any particular function obsolete. There is no question that every player above level 9 can complete a recipe with 100% success.

The failure chance, as far as I can tell, exists because they didn't spend the time to properly develop crafting spiritbond formulae, so it's all per-craft. Easier to balance by "lolfail" than to figure out how to make the spiritbond scale properly with quality gains. Fortunately, they also didn't think consider combat gains, so spiritbonding even level 4 crafting gear is faster by combat means.