A true solution to omnicrafting.

[Verdan]

Omnicrafting puts a lot of power into the hands of a vanishing few. It's a terrible idea to encourage, and they know it and have talked about it. Omnicrafters don't want to give up that power, but the game designers have made it clear they don't like it for various intelligent reasons. I don't know why they didn't take the logical step of recipe restriction.

[Ksenia]

The trouble with the 'we hate Omni crafting' bandwagon is, it ignores the leveling and rotation scheme of FF14 crafting. You need 8x50 to actually craft in this game, asking people to level all 8, use identical rotations for each 8 and not be an omni crafter is absurd.
If you look at the new actions 50+ they are all proc based and they all have a 70% base to work so SH II is mandatory assuming anyone uses them and nobody will. None of the new rotations use any of the new actions.

Even to use the Job system, show me 2 crafts that can craft without obligated leveling of all the other crafts. If they want to eliminate Omni crafting, they need to phase out Omni rotations as the one and only way to craft. They don't want to do that.On the contrary, I expect them to use Omni crafting as the template for future Uber/ Ultra /extreme hard DoW/ DoM content, where you template a full 50 DoM/ DoW to do it. Swiftcast for Whm is already an unwritten law. I expect this to be the trend.

[Niwashi]

It hurts the market, hurts the economy and at the end, hurts the player base, specially those who want to start getting into it. Yet you call it a strenght?

It's a strength because it lets the crafting be designed around crafting and not be about manipulating the market. It's a strength because it allows players to actually play the game rather than find other people to play it on their behalf. It's a strength because it lets players choose what they want to advance and what they don't.

And as far as the market goes, it's a strength because it doesn't allow anyone to corner the market on anything. You can't corner the market if you can't make anything that I or other players can't make ourselves. With omnicrafting allowed, the only way I'll buy from you is if I'd rather buy from you than make it myself, and that's the way the market should run. The game should be open for everyone to play, not limited to where each player gets only a few bits and pieces of it.

Economies need to be driven by supply and demand, skilled and SPECIALIZED artisans who can make the goods, not all of them. That is what keeps the economies running. If everyone could be/do everything there would be no such thing as an economy.

The only part of that you got right is that they're driven by supply and demand. But as you pointed out yourself, there are other ways besides limiting people's options to generate that demand (or to limit the supply for that matter). A lot of players aren't interested in crafting, and a lot of others want the results of it before they finish leveling and gearing up enough to be able to make everything for themselves, and many even who can make everything choose to buy a lot of the pieces because it saves them time. That's all the demand any game needs.

(I'm pretty sure it's also all the demand any game has, at least any game I'm familiar with. Games that require specialization just have omnicrafters with a host of alts. This game's real difference is just that we're allowed to do all that with the same character.)

[Verdan]

The trouble with the 'we hate Omni crafting' bandwagon is, it ignores the leveling and rotation scheme of FF14 crafting. You need 8x50 to actually craft in this game, asking people to level all 8, use identical rotations for each 8 and not be an omni crafter is absurd.

This is a cause, but the effect is not desirable. You're right that Omni crafting came about organically through a probably bad decision to put very important skills as capstones; people quickly realized they needed stuff like Comfort Zone and Byrgot's Blessing to make things and had to take it all the way up to get there. This is similar to how other jobs work, but the difference is that you'd have to take them to cap to get those skills. Sure, every White Mage has to have Thaumaturge up to 26, but not all of them took it even up to black mage. Every Paladin is gonna want a Conjurer up to 34, but that doesn't mean they're maxed. For crafting, everyone who cares about crafting has taken several professions up to 50 because they had to. Of course once they're there, why stop? Why not also start making things from those disciplines?

The formation of the Omni-crafter is baked in to the crafting system, but that doesn't mean it's good. It discourages people who want to just be, say, a cook or a blacksmith; because it makes them have to also be a carpenter and an alchemist and a weaver and an armourer and even a bit of a leatherworker. Because of this it puts economic power in the hands of a very small minority who have little use for that economic power, because they don't need to actually buy anything. It's a terrible decision that the design team doesn't like and wants to roll back. That's the point of specialization, and that's the point of gear being class based at the moment and for scrip taking so long to get.

The issue is that won't solve the omni-problem. Since Omnicrafting is the default state of people who care about crafting, there's nothing stopping them from continuing it. With scrip being based on collectable turn-ins, being omni HELPS you because you'll be able to pick the easiest way to get it. The only way to crush it completely is to start locking the ability to create recipies behind specializations. Whether it be by gear only being wearable by specialists, or recipes only showing up when you're a specialist, the omnicrafting won't go away until they attack the source of everyone being able to create everything: Everyone being actually able to create everything.

[Lemuria]

No, it needs a solution, cause it makes market interdependence impossible. If im able to gather and craft everything on my own, what do i need other people for anything?

You say this, and yet there is still a huge market (on my server at least) for crafted ingredients. People will happily pay for convenience, and I've done so myself when I wanted to craft something quickly. There's very much a market for these goods right now, even if you can't see it.

Honestly, I don't really have a problem with omnicrafting. Arguably, this is because I am one (or working towards it at least), and I'm very happy being able to make the necessary components for the items I make rather than being priced out of my trade by other professions. The huge amount of interdependence is why omnicrafting NEEDS to exist. It's no good being solely a weaver and then needing to spend millions of gil buying hallowed waters for your next synth because the alchemists felt like raising the price.

That being said, for finished goods or exceptional goods I would be more than happy to see some specialist only recipes. I currently have two specialists, and the skills they offer are junk. If there was a reason to specialize beyond some rather worthless abilities, then it would answer a lot of issues in one swoop.

[Niwashi]

This is a cause, but the effect is not desirable. You're right that Omni crafting came about organically through a probably bad decision to put very important skills as capstones; people quickly realized they needed stuff like Comfort Zone and Byrgot's Blessing to make things and had to take it all the way up to get there. This is similar to how other jobs work, but the difference is that you'd have to take them to cap to get those skills. Sure, every White Mage has to have Thaumaturge up to 26, but not all of them took it even up to black mage. Every Paladin is gonna want a Conjurer up to 34, but that doesn't mean they're maxed. For crafting, everyone who cares about crafting has taken several professions up to 50 because they had to. Of course once they're there, why stop? Why not also start making things from those disciplines?

The formation of the Omni-crafter is baked in to the crafting system, but that doesn't mean it's good. It discourages people who want to just be, say, a cook or a blacksmith; because it makes them have to also be a carpenter and an alchemist and a weaver and an armourer and even a bit of a leatherworker.

There's a big difference between making omni-crafting *possible* for those who like it and making it virtually *required* with necessary cross-class skills. I agree they went too far on how much is required, but if they want to stop that pattern, it's just a matter of not having any more cross-class skills beyond the ones already there. It doesn't mean they should limit the ability for people who actually want to craft everything from being able to.

A better pattern would have been like the DoW/DoM jobs that cross-class up through 26 or 34 or whatever, but then continuing to level multiple jobs beyond that point is completely optional and just for those who like having all the jobs. They don't have to lock people out of having multiple jobs in order to allow other people to focus on just their favorite. They let you play it either way. Crafting should be the same. Let people focus on a favorite craft or two if they don't have time or interest to level all eight of them. Let other people who do have the time and interest spread out and craft whatever they want.

Specialization is taking the issue of having too much required cross-classing and trying to fix it by making certain cross-classing impossible. That's the wrong answer, because it's removing the aspect that works well instead of the part where the problem lies. Omni-crafting should be both more possible and less necessary.

[Kenji1134]

Perhaps a part of the "Solution to Omnicrafting" would be to make ALL actions naturally available to ALL crafting classes.

Lets say that SE has no intention of adding another crafting class which would warrant "unique" actions, so we stay with 8.
All crafters have a unique lvl 15, 38, 50, and 54? skill. Now... this may in fact become a bit uh, overwhelming... but why not take ALL these skills and roughly space them out from lvl 1 to 54.

For instance the full set of 8 lvl 15 skills would become available from lvls 7 to 15. The lvl 38 skills become available from lvls 30 to 38, the 50 skills become available from 42 to 50, and the 54 skills which consist of 6 upgrades to 38 skills can be obtained at 52, 53, and the 6 Name of Elements all lumped together at 54. And boom, you now have "the power of an OmniCrafter" without leveling all 8 classes.

With this kind of skill distribution people would be allowed to level crafting classes that they WANT TO use, rather than everything because they HAVE TO. Granted there would be some amount of overlap due to class interdependence, but this is fairly limited. Most everyone would end up leveling Alc for glue, Arm/Bsm would likely add Crp/Ltw, Bsm also needs Gsm for Hardsilver. Wvr would need Ltw and vice-versa. Alc and Cul would end up fairly self sufficient for most recipes.

Would something like this be so bad? As it stands any "serious" crafter will already have everything to 50, cept maybe Gsm since Innovation is so-so. All this does is help to remove the NEED to be an "Omnicrafter" in order to craft ANYTHING of value.

[Felis]

A better pattern would have been like the DoW/DoM jobs that cross-class up through 26 or 34 or whatever, but then continuing to level multiple jobs beyond that point is completely optional and just for those who like having all the jobs. They don't have to lock people out of having multiple jobs in order to allow other people to focus on just their favorite. They let you play it either way. Crafting should be the same. Let people focus on a favorite craft or two if they don't have time or interest to level all eight of them. Let other people who do have the time and interest spread out and craft whatever they want.

We have this already in HW
No cross-class skill beyond level 50 (except the one element skill, but not many recipes use element from another craftin class) and only 3 crafting classes can get specialisation recipes.

[Waeksyn]

No, it needs a solution, cause it makes market interdependence impossible. If im able to gather and craft everything on my own, what do i need other people for anything? This is why the prices of most stuff go down so fast on most cases. At every patch happens the same, cause since everyone is able to make everything, the only valuable resource that gives products its healthy price tag is time, but once the crafters catch up to the first ones, that value given by time crumbles.

Omnicrafting wasn`t properly adressed, and still isn`t and that is an issue. Any properly handled crafting system and economy in any MMORPG has some sort of limiting to prevent a single player to be on their own, that is what drives the markets. Here, the only thing driving the market is time, "i don`t have time to gather/craft these mats so im buying them now". That needs to change into "I need this cause in can`t make/get it myself". An economy needs to be moved by need, not lazyness or time gated content. (horrific unpoiled node system for example)

What exactly is wrong with the economy? Things you yourself make or gather are not selling for the profit that you deserve? Or is it like most who complain about omnicrafting, you don't craft at all and expect crafted items to be cheap?

ALL base ingredients for recipes come from hunting, gathering and special acts like dungeon drops, desynth, etc. Crafters create nothing, they manipulate ingredients from others, transforming them into other things. Limiting omnicrafting does nothing to the actual source of the economy.

Artificially restricting crafts to a subset will only create demand amongst crafters themselves for crafted ingredients. All these crafted ingredients just move around inside the crafters' community. The only outcome from that would be to annoy crafters and remove money from the economy (Market board tax). As there is no real inflation, the right amount of money is currently being removed from circulation now.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with the economy and nothing wrong with leveling up all crafting jobs without restriction, just as you can all DoW and all DoM jobs without restriction.

[Nadirah]

Interdependency is what created the need for it.

It's already become obvious that they don't like cross class skills.

When EQ2 removed the need for my carpenter to need rivets from a Smith and padding from a tailor, the market exploded. Raw mats became more in demand because more folks started crafting.

And there's no rotation. Conditions pop that you need to counter. Isle of Refuge forge was a deadly encounter.