Why is a Level 50 culinarian failing Quick synthing maple surger?

[Mhaeric]

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.

It very much has to to do with game balance. The ability to press a button, walk away for 15 minutes and come back to a full stack with essentially zero effort is all about game balance. This is a large part of why there are sanctions against botting. This is just an official version of botting with a drawback added to make it so it's not the go to way to craft.

[Gamemako]

The ability to press a button, walk away for 15 minutes and come back to a full stack with essentially zero effort is all about game balance.

OK, tell me, what has lost out if there is a no chance of failure? How is having NQ items created an advantage compared to mashing Careful II and manually synthing 100% of the time? What are you balancing against? There is no balance issue here. The entire point of Quick Synthesis is to provide a means to avoid the frustration of having to do so. A player doesn't need to be around for that, and having stacks of NQ items you could already 100% HQ is already the drawback. Once geared, you can set up a macro to 100% HQ every item with NQ materials.

This is a large part of why there are sanctions against botting. This is just an official version of botting with a drawback added to make it so it's not the go to way to craft.

No, that's what the reduced experience gain is for, and the entire thread has nothing to do with leveling through quick-synthing. Attempting to level through quick-synthing would cost an insane amount of gil and materials.

[Mhaeric]

How is having NQ items created an advantage compared to mashing Careful II and manually synthing 100% of the time? What are you balancing against? There is no balance issue here.

Advantage: You don't have to be at the keyboard. Your point of 100% HQ rate with a macro doesn't apply here, because the comparable atk action to Quick Synthesis is just spamming Careful Synthesis as it can be done in almost identically the same time as Quick Synthesis. If you want to HQ, then you have to spend the extra couple of steps per synth, which bumps up the completion time a significant margin and is its own balance check. The only difference between Quick Synthesis and Careful Synthesis spam aside from failure rate is whether you are atk or afk. This is what they're balancing.

It's clear you don't think atk vs. afk is something that needs to balanced, based on your quote, "A player doesn't need to be around for that," but SE disagrees. Other games have decided to go with your view, and allow 100% success on their mass synthesis systems. This game has not. I suspect SE wants people to actively play their game, not press a button and 15 minutes later, voila! This is part of their solution to discourage that. Just because there are other balance checks in place, for the same and additional reasons, doesn't mean it isn't a balance issue or that it shouldn't exist.