4.05 crafting disappointment

[Lulza]

4.05 crafting disappointment

It's not just a disappointment, it's a disaster.

Two new ridiculously overpowered skills that render most other skills useless, remove any variety or decision making in rotations or how much to spend on melding.

By extension they also destroy the gathering game by making hq items worthless.

The crafting dev team is better than this, it's almost like a producer walked in screaming "make it easier" and they just chopped CP costs.

Crafting is permanently broken until they increase the CP costs on Prudent and Manipulation II.

[Cleanse]

Ehhh....

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...=1#post4303576

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This is all conspiratorial, and shows no proof of them making crafting easier for bag space reasons.

People are still having random HQ ingredients pop into their bags as they gather for themselves, some people feel safer with a certain % to start a craft off with, etc. Aside from those that have the gear and know-how to use full NQ mats... which is probably a small number, SE's net gain on server resources is minimal.

If they wanted to ease their servers and allot for more bag space by eliminating the need for HQ materials, they would have scrapped the ability to gather HQ items from new nodes at the start of the xpack. This is either intended to get more people crafting or was an 'oversight' when trying to add cool new abilities.

[QT_Melon]

You realize "reducing" is not synonymous with "eliminate"

[Vandril]

You realize "reducing" is not synonymous with "eliminate"

Yes, as he said...

People are still having random HQ ingredients pop into their bags as they gather for themselves, some people feel safer with a certain % to start a craft off with, etc. Aside from those that have the gear and know-how to use full NQ mats... which is probably a small number, SE's net gain on server resources is minimal.

There's tons of simpler, more realistic reasons that SE would have made crafting easier. Your explanation honestly sounds like less a reason and more a very tiny side effect. This would have an extremely minimal effect on server stress even on a large scale. So minimal, in fact, that I doubt it's even by a measurable extent.

[magnanimousCynic]

Two new ridiculously overpowered skills that render most other skills useless, remove any variety or decision making in rotations or how much to spend on melding.

What do Prudent Touch and Manipulation II have anything to do with melding? Feels like you're just throwing that out there.

By extension they also destroy the gathering game by making hq items worthless.

Haven't we consistently had rotations throughout the patches that required minimal or no HQ mats for 100%? HQ materials will always be valuable to those who don't have the best gear, don't use the best rotations, or are using the minimal melds required.

The crafting dev team is better than this, it's almost like a producer walked in screaming "make it easier" and they just chopped CP costs.

Have you ever considered that they do want crafting to be easier so more people do it? The 61-70 skills are a good indicator that they want inexperienced crafters to have an easier time to craft items. Is there a problem with that?

Besides, our rotations will naturally become better over time. Since we keep getting more and more CP while rotations stay at somewhat the same duration, we will naturally make better rotations with higher HQ% chance.

Crafting is permanently broken until they increase the CP costs on Prudent and Manipulation II.

Do people not want new and better skills? Unless you want SE to make skills that are worse than what we had or skills that are too niche for general use (3.0 Specialist), then we will eventually get skills that are better than our old ones.

Seriously. It seems like some crafters here developed Stockholm Syndrome with their relationship to Hasty Touch.

[QT_Melon]

There's tons of simpler, more realistic reasons that SE would have made crafting easier. Your explanation honestly sounds like less a reason and more a very tiny side effect. This would have an extremely minimal effect on server stress even on a large scale. So minimal, in fact, that I doubt it's even by a measurable extent.

And he also said right after

If they wanted to ease their servers and allot for more bag space by eliminating the need for HQ materials, they would have scrapped the ability to gather HQ items from new nodes at the start of the xpack. This is either intended to get more people crafting or was an 'oversight' when trying to add cool new abilities.

So again, reduction is not equivalent to eliminate. When you multiply the factor of how many items can be consolidated that "tiny amount" adds up for a player having to juggle mats. Don't confuse "less stress" on the servers, as a way to not have to include more inventory slots for the players. They're making it easier for player to decide if they need both stacks of materials in their inventory instead of adding more slots.

Think of it as SE giving us a shoe tree and shelves to figure out how to organize things instead of worrying about where they need to knock down a wall and make a bigger closet.

[Cleanse]

Like I said, and you bolded, if it was an intentional way to ease bag space / server stress they would have stopped making HQ materials be a thing, but they didn't.

They're making it easier for player to decide if they need both stacks of materials in their inventory instead of adding more slots.

Unintentionally.

[Elamys]

What do Prudent Touch and Manipulation II have anything to do with melding? Feels like you're just throwing that out there.

They're so strong that you don't need to meld much, not to the level you needed to before.

Have you ever considered that they do want crafting to be easier so more people do it? The 61-70 skills are a good indicator that they want inexperienced crafters to have an easier time to craft items. Is there a problem with that?

It's obvious they wanted crafting to be easier, but for those of us who have been dedicated crafters for a while, we just want something that makes our work feel worthwhile.

Nobody is saying they don't want new skills. Nobody is saying they don't want other people to be able to craft. It would just be nice if there was a set of crafts for those who want to have a bit of a challenge, instead of just hitting a button and AFKing.

[Vandril]

Don't confuse "less stress" on the servers, as a way to not have to include more inventory slots for the players.

It may be a bit of both, but to give you an idea how the current inventory works, is that this is apparently inherited from legacy code. The inventory system still uses design from FFXI (2002) since the game was originally trying to repeat the success of that title. The inventory system has created quite a bit of technical debt. What the game does in order to prevent as little loss of your items as possible (as well as cheat prevention) is that creates a capture point/transfer of all your inventory every 15 seconds.

It does this for example, every time you zone or queue into duty.

What you're describing in your earlier quote is how the inventory system the game uses causes server stress. You insinuate that the reason they're having trouble giving us more inventory space is the server stress it causes. If your argument that they made HQ materials almost unnecessary to reduce the need for increased inventory space is to be taken at face value, then you're saying that they made this change because the other solution (actually increasing inventory size) would increase server stress. Perhaps it would have been more eloquent for me to have said "to avoid increasing server stress", but the basis of my point doesn't change either way.

When you multiply the factor of how many items can be consolidated that "tiny amount" adds up for a player having to juggle mats.

No. No it doesn't add up to a significant amount at all. That's exactly what I was saying. Even on the large scale, the difference is so minimal that it may as well be a margin error. You don't make design decisions based on effects equivalent to margin errors. It's much more reasonable to assume that the effect this has on player inventory is a coincidental side effect of the change rather than even a small part of the reason behind it.

[QT_Melon]

Never underestimate how something "small" stacks up when you have a playerbase this large. If the Devs don't want to add on due to stress, they're going to find ways to alleviate the need for more inventory slots, even more so since there are more patch cycles ahead meaning more items to accrue.