So Thursday's maintenance is supposed to bring crafting/gardening adjustments...

[Reinha]

All the other reward systems in the game have the game rewarding players for their achievements, but Crafting uniquely rewards you by allowing you to make rare items and sell them to other players, thereby obtaining your reward in the form of income. Flipping this around though, to players who are not crafters it seems that the game penalizes them because of the high cost of certain items on the MB.

It's not a penalty to not be able to afford something on the MB, because buying things on the MB is entirely optional. SE could have went the route where MB and trading don't exist and we have no other option to get those items than to craft them ourselves. Right now we are given the option to trade it. I would call it a blessing both for the seller and the buyer. Another route for SE could've been to regulate prices. But that kind of system can essentially be reduced to an NPC selling everything "crafted" for gold for a set price (already in game for certain items) and DoH endgame being making tokens to exchange for gold. I think that would be rather dull and boring. What we have here is a very successful, thriving free market with fluctuating prices, which offers some amount of excitement for those who don't wish to participate in combat.

So it leaves those players who most would probably call casual, the players who might play 2-3 hours a night, dipping into things here and there, running a dungeon one night, or doing FATE or leves another, and spend hours chatting to their friends; it leave those players literally stuck in the middle with the more mediocre gear, little chance of having millions of gil available to them, and surrounded by a *very* unsympathetic bunch of players.

I am one of those players who only play a few hours a day, without focusing on anything special. Yet I'm happy with some of the rewards being locked behind a grind. I enjoy always having something to do and those long grinds offer exactly that. As for being rewarded for casual play, there is already beast tribe mounts, tome + hunt gear, spiritbonding while leveling or doing fates and hunts, achievements, easy glamour (vintage AF, dungeon greens, CT, poetic gear), dungeon minions, Cactpot (never won jumbo but I already have all minions) and challenge log. None of this requires much effort but it's still rewarding. In the past 5 months that I've played I have made over 6 million gil just from selling quest rewards, materia that I got from leveling gear and gear drops I didn't use. I've also gotten a variety of mounts, pets, titles and a couple of glamours. Trust me, this game showers you with stuff just for showing up. It's quite shocking to see some people on the forums asking for even more stuff to be given to them for no effort.

The point I am making is that the game has ample reward systems for players who can and do focus their time and effort in specific areas, it has ample rewards for those with more than the average amount of time to play. What the game does a terrible job of is rewarding players with a broader play style.

As I said above, there are quite a lot of rewards for doing the casual stuff. However, I have a suggestion that would further reward casual dabbling in everything. Better Grand Company rewards and making more activities reward GC seals. Hopefully patch 3.1 has more GC ranks and rewards included.