The Current Ecnomical State of ARR

[Sollux]

I suspect it's a mix of those reasons, but given how crafting doesn't involve forming an 8-man static I would think that the ratio of crafters to non-crafters should be relatively similar across all of the servers. Although, a question: How does low mat costs/high mat availability hurt crafter-friendliness? What I've found so far is that if I need something for a craft, it's generally available and reasonably priced on my server unless it requires specialization.

There are plenty of players who are also Crafters of course, but when I mentioned Endgame Crafters I was referring to the players who had their classes geared and ready for the current Endgame Crafting recipes. A properly overmelded white set could HQ all the way up to 2*, and given the potential time/gil sink getting i180/i170 gear requires coupled with no immediate benefits caused most players to not even touch Red Scrips at all. Because of this, the only players actually capable of Crafting the current 3* recipes are those who either had the gil/time to spare for the gear and were planning for the future or those who enjoy Crafting and geared their classes just to see improvements. Even combined, these types of players are an extremely small fraction of the Crafting community and I wouldn't be surprised if there was only 1 or 2 players capable of making 3* recipes at 3.2 release on smaller servers. I'm on Tonberry, a server I've been told has more high level Crafters than most and even now I usually only compete with 3-5 people max on most of my markets.

As to markets being Crafter friendly and my "(Low mat costs, plentiful amounts listed, etc.)" I was giving an example of what makes a market Crafter friendly. Some mats may be harder to find making the price rise and availability limited, and while this may not be true for Gathering mats it most certainly is in terms of 3* mats. Having a smaller playerbase means it's easier to have a monopoly on a certain market, and if you need a 3* mat that you can't make you're going to be forced to pay whatever price the person that has that monopoly deems fit, or spend a week+ worth of Scrips to change one of your classes. Higher mat cost means the final product will cost more to compensate, making it harder to sell (Or buy if you're trying to purchase it). You might make a large profit from big spenders every once in a while, but it's a drop in the bucket compared to how often you could have sold that item had it been at a more reasonable price.

If that first part about SE's goal in this is accurate, then your closing statement acknowledges that SE has failed and that they need to re-evaluate the path they're on.

Yes and no, the real issue lies with player mentality and SE's inability to interpret how the majority of players viewed Crafting. The biggest thing that caused most players to drop Endgame Crafting was the lack of any tangible benefit to gearing up. More 2* gear only helped in making 2* gear easier to Craft, but costs were so high and demand so little that there was no point to doing it if you were in it for the gil. It also didn't help that a gating system such as Red Scrips was a completely new concept and had it's own inherent flaws (15 minute Favors with no guarantee of getting anything at all was my biggest complaint). This was where SE dropped the ball.

As for the players, it took over 6 months for SE to release recipes that couldn't be Crafted with properly melded white gear. That's at least 25 weeks worth of Red Scrips, or 225 Red Scrips that could have been collected. With minimal melds on Accessories a player can Craft a 3* in full i180 gear + the OH, which costs 100 Red Scrips total IIRC. That's at least 2 classes that could have been 3* ready only by capping Red Scrips each week. Not only that, Red Scrip mats to craft i170 gear are literally 3 times easier (And cheaper) to get thanks to the increases near the end of last year. They may not have had the incentive to gear up their classes, but they had the ability to. This is the player's fault, but one I don't hold against them.