Quote Originally Posted by Luxea View Post
Redundant feature.

You already can get away with minimal interaction via DF. Melding too? Come on, the whole point of a MMORPG is to interact with each other so you can't do everything without depending on others PLAYERS. It's not hard to make friends, really, start by greeting people in your FC/LS/dungeons/pf, if things are well, add to friendlist, if they ask for help, offer, or if you need help, ask. People on the internet aren't out to bite you.
I think it needs to be stressed that the "interact" portion of this is in the sense that you're actively seeking real people to do something for you. For anyone who may look at that as not being a form of interaction to build lasting relationships, it isn't supposed to be lol. It's just a tool to interact between each other, no matter how minimal said interaction may be. It's your typical craft request sort of thing. Hello's/request > action > goodbye's/reward. The same sort of interaction that might happen with IRL stores or services... which is literally how it traditionally was designed to be in MMORPGs.

Having said that though, I don't see the NPC addition to be of any detriment to the game. This does practically nothing on the scale of reducing interaction. Again, going back to the IRL stores reference, how meaningful is that to someones daily social life? If you're a typical socially healthy human being, not much. Keep in mind that it also removes the uncontrollable burden on both parties of present.

Starts with the player wanting someone to meld, where the variables are 1) finding someone capable of melding, 2) finding someone with those capabilities that is willing to do it, and 3) said person is willing to do it for an acceptable price (ranging from free to X). If any of those are not there, the seeking player is out of luck... and socializing does literally nothing to help it. In fact, if such a streak continued, it'd be possibly detrimental to socialism in general, due to an outlook that said server is unhelpful/dead/etc, not to mention an overall distaste for the game. Of course, the option to level crafts is there too, but that's another matter.

If they want to add in a limitation of basic melds only to NPCs, that's fine. That's probably the preferred approach to this, given the new means of materia use. Personally, I'm one of those crafters who don't actively heed the requests, unless it's someone I know... even then, I may not lol. As selfish as it sounds, I didn't level crafting with the sole purpose to help others or be at their beck and call. Having crafting as a large reason to why I played MMORPGs for over a decade, I've dealt with more than enough situations where people request crafters for something, which in turn made me wait around for 30-60min or more for them.