Quote Originally Posted by Lan_Mantear View Post

All it does is add an unnecessary hurdle for players wanting to get to BIS.
Honestly, what constitutes as "unnecessary?". What about time sink because of weekly lock out, the acquisition of said materia? Finding other players to group with?

Quote Originally Posted by Lan_Mantear View Post
I see your point, and I tend to agree. You are right, we are talking about melds here. However, making melds available to a broader audience will not be detrimental to Crafters. They already partially did that for certain past relic steps.
It takes away from the very little Player:Player aspect that crafters already have, as well as one of the ongoing purpose for a crafter. I would sympathize a bit more if melds were something that are constantly present like say, glamour, but instead they're done in one sitting (especially on non-crafted gear since they're all 100% slots and you can't overmeld them). Even with the suggestions of crafting a catalyst to be tradable, it becomes another revenue that takes away from player interaction, since they can instead just go to the board for their needs, and the overall demand would also be significantly lower than that of a glamour because of what I said earlier.