Ability to Downgrade Elemental Crystals into Shards.

[kyuven]

When I was leveling crafting classes, I actually had a surplus of Clusters, a fair amount of Crystals, and I was practically starving for Shards.

This is my main issue. Since yields don't change the efficiency of farming crystals and shards is the same even though shards are use for basically everything pre-50 (including making subcombines for lvl 50 items) while crystals and clusters are used for far fewer recipes.
Basically only one small change should be made: Change the trait that increases the yield of crystals when we use a blessing ability to add more shards when it upgrades to be able to do crystals.

[BigPapaSmurf]

Another "No" response?

Goodness... thought this was a shoe-in.

[kaynide]

While I too would love the ability to trade, I can see the mechanics they're going with. If a single cluster became, say, 10 crystals and those 10 became 100 shards we'd get a massive undervaluing of shards. As is, they have designed the farming/gathering of shards to take a specific amount of time (eg banging the pickaxe on the rock, get a shard or 3). If this happened, everyone would just focus on the clusters or crystals and MUCH less time would be spent on shard farming.

Not saying it's a good thing, but that's their point: More man-hours farming = more man-hours paying to play.

Similarly, changing jobs in dungeons sounds good (if a healer drops party or something), but it has a HUGE bag of issues attached:

-I entered a DF to get XP on my monk, and I'm the only guy who has WHM leveled? Pressure!
-Expectations that "You have you do ranged DPS on this boss and melee on that boss".

[HakuroDK]

Why stop at shards and crystals? How about sands into logs, oil into logs, logs into allied seals, seals into solidery, poetics into soldiery, soldiery into poetics etc. etc. You get the idea.

SE must have a good reason to have these distinct item and currency types. Why make them convertible? Why not keep them distinct? And why are some convertible in one direction only? There has got be better reason than I want to be able to get shards more easily. If that is all you wanted you can just boost the skills to get +5 instead of +2. But there must be balance reasons why it is where it is.

Until I can hear the good reason that SE isn't doing this (As much as Grekumah tried explaining it, it wasn't an adequate explanation), I can't really accept your reasoning.

Also, there's a precedent for converting shards <-> crystals <-> clusters and that's FFXIV 1.0. We're not saying to convert everything into everything else (though funny you should mention the tomestones, considering obsolete tomestones actually do have a conversion system into the next highest stage), but to help non-crafters better understand the necessity of this, it's like if potions were critical to combat classes, all potions were restricted by level (Hi-Potions req. Lv15, Mega Potions req. Level 30, X-Potions Req. Level 50), and for some odd reason, low level players kept getting X-Potions and Mega Potions, but their regular potion and hi-potion stocks were pretty much empty.

That is, thankfully, not the case with combat classes/jobs because the mainstream playerbase is essentially combat classes/jobs, and said classes/jobs doesn't have a reliance on keeping item stores up like crafters do. If we have no shards while leveling, we can't craft. Like, it's not a bonus to HQ or anything. We literally cannot craft without them. Even if we have all of the necessary materials to craft otherwise. And sometimes we're broke and can't buy more. For about an hour of mining shards with the shard yield buffs, I'd say that it would allow for 15, maybe 20 minutes of crafting tops.

[Ryel]

Unlike in Version 1.0, each type of crystal has been re-designed to be their own unique and individual item. Shards are shards, crystals are crystals and clusters are clusters. As such there are no plans to add a feature to downgrade from one type to another.

Perhaps this is just me but could you elaborate a bit on this?

Does this mean that lore-wise and item wise, that a Cluster is no longer a "Cluster" of Crystals joined together? And that a Crystal is no longer a collection of Shards?

Is there a reason this was changed going forward from 1.0 where the system worked, instead of now where the shard market is very obviously dominated by RMT?

Any answer at all on this would be much appreciated.

[kyuven]

snip

It's actually worse than you let on. It's more like the old days of MMOs where skills required reagents (EQ1's gemstones for buff spells, FFXI's ninja tools, EVERY fantasy game's arrows, etc.) but for some bizarre reason the ones for mega uber ultra skill were more common than the ones for basic skills. Like exploding death arrows being more common than basic ones.
Although in actuality, since crystals drop from elementals over lvl 30 and clusters only come from very specific tasks, it's a bit more lopsided...

[Ametrine]

I think what Grekumah is saying is that the current way that the individual items are programmed makes it impossible (or at least really difficult) to simply add an ability to break it down.

But I agree with everyone here. It really makes no sense that we have such a massive amount of recipes needing shard and few options to obtain a decent amount.

Would perhaps make them untradable and unsellable but far easier to gather help put a balance into it?

[Nutz]

I too don't understand the explanation that 'a cluster is a cluster...' and so it cannot be done. A Hero's Ring of Healing is what it is but I can still turn it into a couple clusters and some gold (or whatever). I feel fairly confident that that was not intended when the item was released over a year ago, but it's been made possible.

Converting downward seems like the best way to both get more shards to players and remove some advantage from botting. Sure they can still bot areas that have crystals, and perhaps more sophisticated bots can even mine/harvest clusters, though there would be more difficulties and limitations on the botter's end there. Mostly it would be a tool to lower the very large demand for shards such that RMT bots make less gil or (ideally) are forced out of the market.

An alternative route to the same end should work as well if they insist on not allowing the conversion. While allowing higher tier nodes to grant more shards might seem like a good plan, this benefits bots nearly as much as regular players, perhaps more. Buffing the shard gathering abilities might be in order, though you can use them so infrequently that they'd have to be buffed a lot to make a difference. Instead, I'd like to see shard (and perhaps crystal, though not necessarily) acquisition rate tied to the gathering and/ or perception stat. Moreover, make it such that the rate of gathering shards doesn't increase significantly until ~350 gathering/ perception, after which point it increases more substantially. This would prevent RMT from gaining much benefit unless they actually outfit their gatherers properly and give the most benefit to gatherers who have put time and money into their class.

[hallena]

All this means is that the most time efficient method of obtaining shards is to buy them from RMT on the Marketboards since they can a.) farm forever and b.) afford to undercut everyone else.

Hardly a solution to the issue of shard requirements.

The most time efficient for anything tradeable in any game that ever existed has always been to buy whatever is the currency with real money. If you want to risk losing your account then go ahead and "save time"

[mbncd]

The most time efficient for anything tradeable in any game that ever existed has always been to buy whatever is the currency with real money. If you want to risk losing your account then go ahead and "save time"

The thing is though that it isn't just the gil buyers involved in this.

It's the level 30 crafter who just wants to do their crafting leves.

It's the level 3 Botanist who is getting undercut to hell when they're just starting out.

It's the people who can't put the majority of their play time into gathering shards 1-3 at a time when they are trying to craft their house furniture and run dungeons and still sleep, eat, study/work and actually have friends outside of the game.

It's the level 50 combatant (who has never even unlocked a gathering class nor knows how to gather anything and is not inclined to learn because they're happy playing the combatant) who buys 3000 shards to give 3 to a friend to make something for him (and then resell the shards at a guaranteed loss of 5% if said crafter friend can't take them off his hands).

The shard botting has ripples throughout the entire length, breadth and depth of the game.

And every one of those innocent people who do not gather their own shards but instead buys them from an RMT'er (note though that not all shard sellers are RMT, I frequently sell water shards for example because I get them while map hunting) feeds that RMT'er gil that they can sell, bolstering their business.