This red scrip system doesn't seem very casual-friendly..

[Fenral]

Nor do you "need" the current AF pieces to gather things arm because nothing currently ingame requires it

But when they patch in new nodes that require those stats, and there is still no crafted gear that comes close, where will you be?

I want to craft the new gear. There are no favor mats available. So yes, I am forced to grind out 11.25 hours a week of favor mats if I want to craft. Worse, because I need to get a guild member to do it as well, because 9 red gatherer tokens do not produce enough mats for 9 crafter tokens.

Hold up. That sounds almost like you're cooperating with other players to craft. In an MMO.

My condolences on the loss of your vertical-integration scheme, but considering exactly how valuable the new gear is to crafters, and how long it takes to get the scrip versions, I understand the devs not wanting players to be able to produce these pieces in any real quantity right at launch.

[scarebearz]

Hold up. That sounds almost like you're cooperating with other players to craft. In an MMO.

In 2.x I used to cooperate with many crafters and gatherers.

In 3.05 I don't, as the people that I used to cooperate say the system sucks and is not worth their time and effort for next to no reward. As such I can barely gets mats to craft anything, if I resort to the MB for mats, again no good as almost nobody selling them.

[RiceisNice]

..

If we're following patching patterns, we won't see new nodes until 3.2. And even then, you still need the offhand to be crafter, and all crafting gear needs to be crafted (you could do scrips, but there's a huge stat deficiency and probably won't be enough by the time new recipes roll out).

Even with cooperation, the timesink is utterly absurd to make one piece of crafting equipment. The materials themselves are already gated through crafting scrips so it's not like people are going to be bursting out of the gates on release week anyway. We had already decided to pool the materials obtained from red crafting tokens to one person so they can pump out offhands for the FC, but what we're hitting with now is that the materials also require favors that have a 15-minute gathering timer attached to them, for an incredibly varied yield due to RNG.