Ehcatl Sealant....

[Sibyll]

People who did the Ixal quests can get it for free
people who don't like to put some work into it should buy it with gil from people who did the work.

This is how MMO markets work ^^

It's not really a matter of work but rather the lack of any chance for people to catch up in crafting. If a crafter can afford to buy the sealants he's going to do it because getting those off hands gives him an advantage. A crafter trying to catch up doesn't have this luxury.

Which leads to the question of why bother attaching these mats to a daily if you are going to just let the rich crafters (or RMTers) skip all the "time gated" aspect and get to the finish line? It's not like it's going to make a dent in the crafters wallet and they'll make it all back when they start selling the high end items.

It just seems like it would have made more sense to have these be untradable so that people actually had to go through and acquire the mats themselves (like the Artisan Main Hand HQ turn ins) rather than just letting people buy their way through it all.

I'm just not sure what they were going for with the way these were implemented.

[StouterTaru]

It's not really a matter of work but rather the lack of any chance for people to catch up in crafting.

It's the same way for everything. You don't just ding 50 as a DoW/DoM and get fully equipped in top level gear in a week or two. Within a couple major patches, you can very easily be on top.

Top tier crafters have put in quite a bit of effort to be in that position, you can easily reach it too with much less effort than it took them. If you don't want to put in the effort, you're always going to be a tier or two down from them.

[Sibyll]

Snip

I think you are slightly missing my point. The Oaknots are, more or less, equivalent to tomestones in the sense that they are time limited.

Now using your DoW/DoM analogy, imagine if the Ironworks gear cost soldiery (which people would have had capped) and the tomes were tradable. This is the same thing as releasing a new tier of crafting mats that cost the same token that the previous tier and having it be tradable.

Saying that I don't want to put in the effort is kind of a dubious argument on your part. I'm saying that rich crafters are buying the sealants, thus skipping the Ixali Quest line and all the dailies associated with farming up sealants. Isn't that also lack of effort?

[StouterTaru]

snip

So people that have worked hard to be at the top have an easier time staying at the top than someone starting out? That's pretty much every single aspect of every single MMO.

You sound like you want to be on equal footing with the top tier crafters, but even if they had made the sealant untradable that wouldn't be the case. Sealant isn't the only bottleneck in hitting 4 star crafting.