Even if they removed red scrip caps, crafting would still be dead.

[Alahra]

It's such a shame at the end of the day because there was so much potential.

Thus far i was actually having a blast with DoH. I like the way thing got more challenging with 35/70 durability and good proc strangling, i know that sounds weird but it forced you to come up with new rotations and ways of thinking. The collectibles system is a great idea, again with so much potential that ended up being just a flat money wasting grandest.

Mhm. I've always enjoyed the puzzle-solving aspects of crafting, learning to marginalize the effects of the RNG, and so on. Those aspects have remained the same (though most of our new abilities are pretty much inconsequential, which is sad), but they've greatly complicated the other side of crafting when it comes to the availability of materials, the generally higher number of materials required to make stuff, and the pointless grinds for scrips.

And of course, they made nearly everything crafters produce pointless. HQ leveling gear is unnecessary because of quests, i180 gear is pointless because of the ease of gear acquisition combined with the extreme scarcity the scrip system imposes on them, and potions are undermined by their ready availability from treasure maps. Culinarian seems okay, I guess? If that's your thing.

[Katchoo]

Mhm. I've always enjoyed the puzzle-solving aspects of crafting, learning to marginalize the effects of the RNG, and so on. Those aspects have remained the same (though most of our new abilities are pretty much inconsequential, which is sad), but they've greatly complicated the other side of crafting when it comes to the availability of materials, the generally higher number of materials required to make stuff, and the pointless grinds for scrips.

I could not agree with you more. The immense satisfaction of levelling my second craft to 50 (goldsmith) and learning as i went up the levels how proper rotations worked by my self was glorious. And with the crafts now it's been the same. Testing out different variations of things that we would have thought useless.

Culinarian seems okay, I guess? If that's your thing.

As it happens it's my favourite class and the only one i got Lucis on, probably because it ended up being the only class i would use for high end crafting on a regular basis (yes i was the company food bitch)

[Kaaylryn]

It would be nice if there was an item that could be made that only you could use. Like a book for my SMN that I would need both a level 60 ALCH and SMN to equip. Maybe a special glow or design and stats equivalent to raid weapon. But as things stand right now, I will get my CUL to 60 and pretty much forget the rest of the grind.

Crafting is its own little mini game where crafters craft for other crafters and gatherers gather for other crafters. I personally see no point to it all. Each to their own, but the grind attached to every aspect of the game is getting to be a bit much for me. And this is not even taking into account the god awful RNG also attached to every aspect of the game.

[Kenji1134]

^ Yep.
This could be somewhat justified if you could make your own raid gear.
Lets say that you could buy some specific component for half the Page costs of a given piece of gear, in order to craft it yourself. Boom, you now have a reason to be Super Geared Omnicrafter, WITHOUT messing up the economy or getting a "massive" lead on everyone else.

[Katchoo]

^ Yep.
This could be somewhat justified if you could make your own raid gear.
Lets say that you could buy some specific component for half the Page costs of a given piece of gear, in order to craft it yourself. Boom, you now have a reason to be Super Geared Omnicrafter, WITHOUT messing up the economy or getting a "massive" lead on everyone else.

This is exactly what the could have done simply with collectables.

[GunnarWolfram]

You mean something close to this or a derivation of this??
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...red-by-DoW-DoM

[Wizel]

Culinarian seems to be the only crafting class that is worth is right now, with Alexander Savage out everybody wants food, I made around a million yesterday just messing around between blue scrip timers. No other craft is really worth it except making crafting/gathering armor/tools, none of the battle gear is relevant, there are no glamors really that somebody would want that cannot be made on non-red scrip recipes and the gear is so outclassed why would you spend 20+ million or whatever on it?

My plan is to just save up scrips for the 180 gathering tools and the 180 Cooking main hand and just cook up a storm and rake it in. With profits from that I will be able to afford the off hand knife and gathering tools which will in turn making gathering and cooking even easier.

[Leafont]

I like specialization, but this whole gated material system is just the wrong way to go about it.

[Nyalia]

Crafting just for the fun of being able to craft more and more things is fine. It's a fun minigame. Looking at it as its own sub-game, even just how it is now makes sense as far as the "crafters only really exist to craft for crafters" thing goes. I'm okay with the endgame of crafting being glamours/housing/minions/airships/barding/etc with high requirements where you have to craft a ton to be able to meet the requirements, like it was back in 2.55. If you wanted to do everything yourself, you needed to work up the crafting ladder to make the turnins for better crafting gear so you could make better crafting gear, and then you had to do interesting things to get the master book II, which was a sort of crafting DPS check. Then, you had to grind some leve turn-ins to get the mats to grind for lucis turn-ins, all the while running maps, Ixali quests, and GC turnins for the moonstones. The reward? You could make high end glamour items, like the Wootz/Ebony/Bright Primal weapons, the Kirimu/Arachne/Wootz gear, and so on.

That was fun, and that was well designed. It required enough stuff that only you could do that you couldn't just buy everything from someone else. You had to make the turnins for your artisan's/supra/lucis/master book II. You had to turn in the leves for the lucis token mats. You had to gather the moonstones and had a variety of ways to do it.


Now, in 3.0, you have only two avenues available to you to get started on endgame crafting gearing: spend millions of gil on final products (or their mats), or spend tens/hundreds of millions of gil on materials to make red scrip turnins (it's about 4m a week). How do you get millions of gil? There are many ways, but none of them are crafting level 50-60 items. Level 50-60 items are worthless because quests give them out like candy. I routinely trawl the MB looking for level 145 HQ craftable gear that's selling, HQ, for 3k. The materials cost about 75k. Oh, and if there weren't any on the MB, they're still worthless if you fail to HQ them (and HQing gets hard at 145/148 with appropriate-level gear) because NPCs sell them for 1/4th the price of the materials. So, how do you make money? You sell materials instead of using them. How then do you make your blue scrip turnins? Simple, you wait for Dragon Fang Earrings to show up and spam them, stockpiling the mats until they come up. How do you make your red scrip turnins? Easy - you don't. Why would you?

Unlike Blue Scrips, Red Scrip rewards are based on the recipe itself, not just the level of the recipe. So, Goblin Jig gives the same amount of Blue Scrips as a piece of body armor of the same level, but Bladed Steel Jig gives ~1/5th the amount of Red Scrips as a piece of body armor (4 red for minimum collectability, 4 red for medium collectability, 4 red for max collectability). So, no matter what you do, it's ~10k per red scrip. That's 8m per body piece, and 4m per left side piece, and 13m per main hand. You'll never make that money back. Any item you would be able to make for that one class that you might want later, you could buy for a tiny fraction of the cost of being able to make it yourself. It's 37m per class, just for left side/main hand (I haven't looked at offhands or accessories yet). What item in that class will sell, after the first week of craziness, for 10m more than the material cost? What item will sell for 5m more than the material cost? Heck, what item will sell for 1m more than the material cost? I've never seen such a thing, and I doubt we're about to. You can get any item that endgame crafting would allow you to get by buying it for a tiny fraction of the fortune it costs to gear up yourself.


So, I've decided that, until this is changed, I'm not going to get any red scrips at all. They're not worth it. I'll just get all crafters to 60, get the level 60 Patricians equivalent, and then stop crafting. I'll make all my money desynthing for materials whose price has shot up due to the absurd Red Scrip system, and when that stops being profitable, wait until the next desynth-related money maker is released. Desynth doesn't require new gear. With Desynth, you can make a profit while leveling it, unlike the new crafting system where your money all goes into a giant hole behind Rowena's. The crafting and gathering endgame really is dead for me. They're fun, but not fun enough to spend my entire fortune on gearing up one class only to have no way to make that money back.

Even if they release recipes that require the new gear, one person who has more time than me to play this game will spend some small portion of their billion gil fortune to get the new gear, then they'll make stuff at slightly more than cost and sell it, undercutting everyone else but still making them a profit because they can just keep crafting all day long. With the bar of entry this high, there's no way for casuals to craft profitably anymore.


Yay, thanks for making crafting "more" accessible, SE Maybe next time, instead of making the end products of mid-range crafting trivial to get, you could make the mats easier to get instead to promote more casual crafters? That's how you make something accessible, not making it so that nothing crafters can make before endgame is worth anything by giving it all away as tradable quest rewards, and then gating the crafting-exclusive items behind ridiculous gil gates. Time-gating is fine for accessibility, but gil-gating destroys accessibility completely.


Solutions for future content:

• Make quest rewards of gear be Aetherial items instead of HQ craftable in the future. That way, they're untradable, so it doesn't destroy the crafting market for gearing up alts and selling items for other people's GC turn-ins. And yet, you still get to gear up two classes completely for free. If you could limit it to one class, that'd be even better!
• Increase everyone's free retainer slots by 2 so everyone can have one of each type of retainer. That way, everyone has equal access to easy mats, not just the people with the RL cash to get extras. Or, give everyone who has bought at least one retainer another one for free. That'll make the retainer slots more reasonably priced without overly favoring people with tons of RL cash, while at the same time increasing your revenue by incentivizing people to get that first paid retainer slot.
• Make the weekly token item something you can grind out by completing hard crafts that do not take expensive materials or multiple other crafter/gatherer classes. Either make them be base materials, like Amphiptere Leather, Adamantite Nugget, Chimerical Felt, and Aurum Regis Nugget, or make them be useless items crafted from recipes in the current Master Book (Master Book III in 3.0) that do nothing else. Make the crafting grind be a crafting grind, not a crafting plus millions upon millions of gil grind.
• Give a daily and/or weekly bonus to crafters/gatherers like DoW/DoM classes have now. Daily and weekly bonuses flatten the playing field and make things more accessible by giving casuals a means to catch up to people who do nothing but play 24/7.
• When determining the upper limit for material costs, don't use whatever you used for 3.0 (unless you planned for red scrips to be 10k each?). Instead, use a formula based on the desynth yields of vendor-bought items. If the cheapest way via desynth to get, say, Adamantite Nuggets is to desynth Serpentskin Hunting Belts of Scouting (not saying this is true - I haven't done the math for ARM yet), then consider the upper limit on the price of Adamantite Nuggets to be the price of Serpentskin Hunting Belts of Scouting divided by the chance to get it from a successful desynth (in this case, 11,880/32% = 37,125 gil). Or, factor in the other mats as well, which will bring that down to more like 20k. You can create a system of equations pretty easily to determine the correct price ceiling on a material at endgame. Desynthers like me will sell the mats at above that price until it stops being profitable, which means it'll get down to that price pretty fast, and then drop when gathering bots are better at gathering than desynthers. Unless it was planned that red scrips be 10k each, this math does not appear to have been done.
• Let specialists get cheap, untradable mats for red scrip items by spending blue scrips or gil. This make specializations actually special.

[Kazzoey]

That's really stupid. If they want these equips to be really hard and expensive to make, then let them be on par with the good gear out there. Why would I even bother spending hundreds of millions of gil and countless hours on one set of i180 gear to resell for 1/10th of the price I payed to craft it, when I can just get a Law set in 2 days with far better stats? Or a quick full set of Prototype accessories? Or the new Esoterics set? They all take drastically less time to make and they are all superior in every way shape and form.