Gathering shards takes to long.

[Tiggy]

It's encouraging people to buy bots. Cost of shards on AH are to high. It takes at least 1k any element shards to craft for a day. Having a skill on a timer that lets you gather 3 shards instead of one every five minutes sucks. Why don't you make it 25 shards instead of 3? GATHERING SHARDS IS BOOOOORRRRRINNNNG. It takes me three gd days to get enough shards to craft for one day! Shards from leves, retainers, questing or anything else is not enough.

And housing is to expensive. I was told it would depreciate daily but I'm not seeing it.

A) You're right something should be done about shards, but at least a lot of different activities hand them out.

B) The houses absolutely devalue every 6 hours by a small percentage until such as time as they bottom out if I remember correctly. They are GUILD houses. Not personal houses. As such they are supposed to be more expensive.

[Doki]

Make/join peiseskin map parties. Each map gives someone 200ish shards.

[Gerolan]

Not sure why they removed then from the dailies :/

[mindful]

I did not read all the post , But you guys do know your miner venture can get shards ever 40 min and get 30 them at a time at around lv30 ish . So if had 2 or more ventures out there . ever 40 minutes and doing nothing can be 60 shards, not sure if botanist class got shards on it like miner does.. Not sure if the time and amount will change when get to lv50 on the venture.

[Penguinmayhem]

words words words

If you personally feel that's okay, then that's your opinion. I don't. Many many other people don't. Many people feel that this amount of harvesting shards is tediously unpleasant and not enjoyable. However, while you claim that you can do all that with one finger, in my experience, harvesting things in this game is just involved enough that I can't do it while doing something else, but not engaging enough to not be staggeringly dull. Then again, the fact that gilsellers are making such vast amounts of money from marketing shards and that people are willing to buy them should be proof enough that I am far from the only one who finds gathering shards absolutely horrible.

No, I don't level-grind by making patrician's gear. I'm materia grinding because you need stupid numbers of materia to make anything i70 at all and the melding RNG is an asshole.

And as to the comments about retainer harvesting, and for that matter, how spending two whole hours getting a single outfit together isn't very long, maybe we should stop and consider that not all of the people playing this game have quite that much free time. What about the people who can only play for an hour or two a day, at most? That's a return on retainer harvesting of, at best, thirty shards a day. That's enough for five bowls of dagger soup. A day. Is that really 'okay'?

[Felis]

I didn't even think of having my retainer do it for me! Would you happen to know off-hand how many they can gather in one trip?

30 shards with good equip
20 shards if the gear is not so good
15 shards if undergeared

[seorin]

This problem could also be fixed by having a high gathering stat increase yield. For example, imagine if (unbuffed) gather chance above 100% increased yield by one for every extra 20%. So a low level gatherer still gets one per hit, but a max level gatherer with materia and the best tools might get 6 or 8.

That would correct the imbalance between shard gather rate and consumption rate, not to mention fix it so low level materials don't regularly cost more than high level ones. It's kind of silly that a top of the line gatherer isn't any better at getting shards than a naked level 20.

[LemmingKingXXX]

30 shards with good equip
20 shards if the gear is not so good
15 shards if undergeared

For reference, I've been able to clock about 100 shards in 6-6.5 minutes and about 1000 per hour if you really concentrate, 900 on a more casual effort.

[Penguinmayhem]

I've been able to clock about 100 shards in 6-6.5 minutes

A claim as preposterous as that demands video evidence.

I'm sorry but I absolutely fail to see how that is even humanly possible. Considering that even mashing the button gives you about three seconds between hits, you only get four shards per node, and the nodes are often more than ten seconds apart.

[PROBOUND]

as much of the higher level items require some crystals and even clusters to craft, and less shards.

As a crafter with all 50's, i would assume you were aware that X-Stat Potions require 15 shards per synth.

Whoever thinks you wont need PILES of shards as a crafter to be productive is seriously mistaken. The 2 most profitable classes atm are the Consumables (CUL/ALCH) both of which need TONS upon TONS of shards to consistently turn a profit.

TLDR: Keep grinding away on those DOL's or fuel the Bot Storm and purchase from the AH.