Suggestions for relevant crafting without making top gear buyable

[Roth_Trailfinder]

And to limit the number of players able to craft these items by having players having to select a main-crafting job,

Being able to create anything is a good thing, not a bad one. It is a trade-off : do I find a crafter to make Item X for me, or do I spend the time and money to level up that crafting class high enough to make it myself? How much is the Item X worth to me, compared to the value of my time and plat/gil/whatever it would take to level and gear up enough?

Everquest originally allowed (assuming there were recipes that could take you that far) you to take only one crafting skill higher than 200. At the time, the max was 250. A few years after the game's initial release, they offered something new : Alternate Advancement Points, which were another pool for you to fill with experience gained from completing quests and killing mobs. I forget if it was Luclin (the 3rd expansion) or Power (the 4th expansion) that did it, but one of those two offered an AA that allowed you to take an additional skill higher than 200, per rank. Additionally, a t some point they also raised the skill cap to 300.

Now, EQ only has 7 general tradeskills, compared to FF14's 8 crafting classes. There are a couple class-specific tradeskills, only Rogues can do the Make Poison skill, only Shaman can do the Alchemy tradeskill, only Gnomes (regardless of class) can do the tinkering tradeskill, but because those are not available to every character, they are not part of the "general" tradeskill pool.

Now ... having "everyone" able to craft anything from those 7 general tradeskills sounds like a bad idea, based on things that people have said, both here and on the GameFAQs.com boards. Yet .. it has not hurt EQ at all. There is plenty of competition for crafted stuff, yes. There was also a decent enough market for it - one that is mostly dead due to the age of the game and the top-heaviness of the playerbase, rather than the rampant undercutting that most castigate in FF14 - decent enough that even today, people can make a nice profit off of going and making stuff and putting it up for sale.

My point is that having everyone able to do everything crafting-wise is not a detriment to this game. It is a factor, but it is both a positive and a negative, depending both upon how one chooses to view it and upon how one chooses to react to it. Just as people choose to level only one class (with at most 2 others for their cross class skills) you have people who choose not to level their crafting classes. And, just as you have people who choose to hit 50 in all their combat classes, you have people who choose to take all the crafting classes to 50 as well.

It is part and parcel of the game's Armoury System : what's the point of being able to be any crafting class if you are, even at max level, gimped because at some point months ago you needed to be able to make some 2 star item from a different crafting class? That would be analogous to being able to be a BLM, but because your main is SCH, you can only wear up to i55 BLM gear. If they were to somehow limit what you could craft to one of the 8 classes, you would still have competition based upon how many others went that route. You would also merely have a bunch of boxed characters pop up whose sole purpose would be to craft stuff that the main cannot. In the end, there would be just as much competition amongst crafters as there is now.

(Note - by "boxed" I mean a character run on a second account. Other games also use the term "bot" for such characters, but that term has certain negative implications here in FF14 that do not apply to the characters I am talking about, and as such to the point I am making.)

[MPNZ]

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Oh, I agree. Especially, since that is what i looks like they had in mind when developing this game. I'm just listing it as a way to create demand and mark up prices in order to pacify the players who are into crafting. Also, I never meant that they should limit players to only one specific crafting class at lv50, and the "main-craft" is something I meant for crafters to do after they hit lv50. Most of what I suggested was ideas for more alternatives to crafting gear for combat classes and more for all the classes in general with vanity, travel, and stuff.

TBH, the housing items were released way too soon, and they really need to give crafters something else that would get them excited and filled with some kind of purpose. I don't think a little bit of restrictive crafting is going to hurt us if it doesn't create specific gear for specific classes, and I think this is a nice compromise to what they want to do and what the crafters are demanding.