Quote Originally Posted by Katchoo View Post
This always raises an interesting point for me. Your entertaining yourself with something else WHILE playing a video game that should be entertaining you in the first place. If i have to do something else while playing a game then there is something wrong with the game in question.
This is easy enough to say, but think about it. If we're going to have a crafting/gathering system in the first place, then items will need to be gathered. Gathering is pretty much inherently a repetative process. Anything repetative - ANYTHING - will become routine and boring if done for long enough. So, really, the only way to "fix" the system would be to remove gathering entirely. And this also includes DoM/DoW gathering (killing monsters for meat, skins, bones, and such), as that can also be repetative.

Maybe that does appeal to you, but keep in mind that while this kind of thing can be considered "work", there's a considerable portion of the playerbase who would not be happy to see it go. Why? Because they're producing something. They may not enjoy the actual work, but they get satisfaction from producing something as a result of that work. Much like real life, really. And just as in real life, when performing the work, players will come up with ways to pass the time more enjoyably. While working in real life, a worker might listen to music, for example.

On another topic touched on in this thread, Crafter/Gatherers in this game aren't fond of the Favor gathering system. For these people Ooids and such aren't a product; they're just a frustrating step in a long, convoluted crafting process. Straight gatherers, on the other hand, after a few hours work gathering these things now have an inventory full of saleable goods to unload for sweet, sweet profit.

The Favor gathering system was put into place in a large part for much the same reason that the specialist system was: too many people were doing everything themselves. It was far from uncommon for a crafter to have every craft leveled, and every gatherer leveled as well. These crafter/gatherers would gather all their own ingredients, and craft all their own items. Folks weren't buying each others' goods, and this hit gatherers particularly hard; while it was possible for gatherers to make a modest profit pre-Heavensward, honestly there were a lot of better ways to make money. With the Favor system in play, however, trying to do it all yourself became a LOT more time-intensive. I think that SE was hoping that the Crafter/Gatherers would choose one or the other to focus on. (The specialist system was even less successful due to the almost non-existent benefits of specialization; SE pretty much had to brute-force the issue by introducing specialist-only recipes.)

So, for all you folks complaining about how SE needs to make the process easier, cuz it just takes too long to do anything, well, that's just was SE wanted to happen! For straight gatherers, favor items are among the most profitable things they can dig up. Asking SE to remove the Favor requirement of the crafting process is pretty much straight-up asking SE to make gathering unprofitable again. For folks that insist on being top-notch both as gatherers and as crafters, you're just going to have to deal with the added time-sink.