Materia System

[Physic]

EDIT: in response to Peregrine's post on 120k finished product, with 12k start up cost...

That's just not true. If the mats to make the end product cost 1/10th of the final value, best believe in no time at all, a bunch of other crafters will jump on it and the end product will be worth nearly the same as the materials, effectively losing crafters money, or at best - breaking dead even.

This was how it worked in XI for a very long time (I can't comment on the past few years, since I haven't played). There were exceptions like elemental beads, of course, because there might only be 1~3 people on any given server who even had GSM 100.

A great example was something like Scorpion Harness and Scorpion Claw. You'd probably lose 50k~100k as a Bonecrafter if you NQ'd a Harness after buying the Claw, but that was balanced out by the chance to HQ. This game is slowly morphing into that right now. Months and months ago, I could make Banneret lances at 800~900% profit with just NQs, because I was one of 2 Goldsmiths high enough to do the synth. Now, I lose money if I NQ, but make a decent chunk of change if I HQ. It feels pretty balanced to me, right now.

There are also niche markets for gear that's not often crafted anymore, and potential to profit off of it. I recently dropped about 500k on a set of rank 20 crafting gear to finish up my last craft, when months ago it would've cost 50k for the set. I think it was cool to see that the only ones I was looking for available in wards were being sold by someone who realized that trend and capitalized on it, even though I was clearly getting ripped off in contrast to the cost of materials to make the gear I bought.

The market, on Selbina at least, is not broken right now by any means.

That happened to scorpion harness much later in the game, it was a 6mil item for a long time, wasnt till they had better, more easily attained gear that it dropped.

Here is the thing, there is no chance of failure on the first binding. So why should it cost more than repairs, which have a chance of failure? Only because of marketing.
Peregrines point, is that crafters wont want to work by commission, when they can make money. There are a lot of crafters who wont craft if you bring them the items, why? because if everyone gathers items themselves, the crafters as a whole wont make money. They may do it for their shell mates, but not for the average joe. Heck i remember early on in this game, when someone joined a crafting LS and they said their ls had said they can make item for people anymore, just wait till they make it themselves.

Its not in the best interest of a corporation of crafters to offer socketing services, when they can make more money off selling socketed items. And it would be logical to do this, if SE makes the system this way.

heres the key, crafters will pass any costs of materia back to the people they buy it from, and a cost for them doing the work, will it be a reasonable cost? probably not for some time.
Compound that to the fact, the crafter has the least invested in these ventures. Adventurer buys gear, wears it does whatever to get attached, gatherer farms up catalysts. The only thing the crafter does for this system is a guaranteed synth, why are they the ones that control the final product? The one who puts in the most work is the materia creator, unless the catalysts are super rare/in insane places to get to.

Maybe they should make a socketing npc and just leave the crafters out, or make it simply an option. Crafters will be making way more items, and thus already getting something out of the system.
We dont need to add an extra middleman cost to the prices, and basically ensure that it will be more profitable for crafters not to socket things for people with the required items.