is it time to allow Collectibles on the market board?

[Millen1]

I have no issue with crafting as a group activity, but it's far too easy to cheese your way through it with Gil and borrowed macros already. This stands in stark contrast to combat jobs, which absolutely cannot be played well without putting in some effort. I personally feel this isn't a good situation. It diminishes the experience for players (it's basically just a series of mindless hoops if you level via purchased Levequest items), and it harms the economy by opening the floodgates to people who have absolutely no interest in crafting, but want the money and items it can bring.
For this reason, I think there should be a series of road blocks that force people to actually progress as crafters in order to achieve max level. Part of that would be eliminating the ability to purchase turn-in items of any kind, Levequests or otherwise. Another part would probably be altering the macro system. I'd love to see regular macros eliminated entirely from crafting, but have an 'Planned Synth' option introduced alongside Quick Synthesis. It would have some conditions placed on it, like Quick Synthesis, to ensure that it only replaces regular crafting once an item is relatively trivial to craft (say, once you've HQ'd an item on your own, and/or once you over-gear the item by a certain amount). But, it would replace the macro system for crafting - and eliminate the need to have stupid shit like /wait commands in there.

Would this make crafting less convenient? Absolutely. But in my mind, it would bring crafters more in line with combat classes, in that success would require a real degree of effort. And, coupled with a long-needed system allowing items to be transferred / shared between alts, it wouldn't needlessly impede someone who was leveling crafters for the second, third, etc. time.

So far the best crafting was in ARR. The books to learn the new crafts were a challenge. They were in no way easy or fast. SE should have a look at the ARR system of crafting for 5.0. The gear and main hand should stay craft-able instead of a turn in after a certain number of HQ items are made like in ARR. The tools are useless without the books though they would help someone interested in crafting learn how to get the books with better gear. The crafting job quests. I did like how the mats were given and you could keep trying. No buying from the MB and the level 66 skill was locked behind actually doing the job quests. The HW/SB book system of get x number of scrips is unrewarding and doesn't help raise a players understanding or skill with crafts.

[Vhailor]

So far the best crafting was in ARR. The books to learn the new crafts were a challenge. They were in no way easy or fast. SE should have a look at the ARR system of crafting for 5.0. The gear and main hand should stay craft-able instead of a turn in after a certain number of HQ items are made like in ARR. The tools are useless without the books though they would help someone interested in crafting learn how to get the books with better gear. The crafting job quests. I did like how the mats were given and you could keep trying. No buying from the MB and the level 66 skill was locked behind actually doing the job quests. The HW/SB book system of get x number of scrips is unrewarding and doesn't help raise a players understanding or skill with crafts.

Agreed, especially given the relative lack of challenge for a lot of the recipes right now. If you hit the minimum cutoffs to attempt a recipe, HQing it reliably isn't far behind, which strikes me as odd.

There's a lot wrong with crafting, suffice it to say. Hell, I still don't even like the gearing paths; I remember literally skipping the entire set of Scrip gear on my way to Ala Mhigan stuff. That shouldn't happen. The whole system right now reminds me of a mindless time filler; there's relatively little challenge, it's pretty easy to gear up, and once you've geared up, HQing most anything is almost trivial. There's got to be a better way than this.

Also, I swear I remember there being progress-boosting material states in FFXIV 1.x. They were yellow-coloured orbs, IIRC. Why in the ever-loving fuck have we not gotten those back? Balanced properly, those would lend a tremendous amount of reactivity to crafting, that simply doesn't exist now.

[KisaiTenshi]

Also, I swear I remember there being progress-boosting material states in FFXIV 1.x. They were yellow-coloured orbs, IIRC. Why in the ever-loving fuck have we not gotten those back? Balanced properly, those would lend a tremendous amount of reactivity to crafting, that simply doesn't exist now.

Because that was RNG. It's reflected in the "poor, good, excellent" states when you do it now. In V1.00, (and I may be mis-remembering this, but good gawd was it terrible) you also lost all the materials early from this IIRC. In the present system, "poor" tends to follow excellent, so you can at least predict the use of "wait" when doing things manually. Macros of course ignore the state, because you're just brute forcing the quality by following specific patterns. Existing crafting has RNG in it, but you can also just get a perfect item every time if you outgear the recipe.

That said, the issue really in regards to collectables is that you can just "buy" the materials from the NPC's. So you're basically turning a 1K purchase into a collectable value directly instead of being forced to buy materials off the market board and thus keeping up the gil sinks in the marketplace. If you can just buy the collectable directly, then people can just trade it directly in for scrips/experience to level that crafter without actually doing the work. Now you might go "well what's wrong with that?" and I say everything. If you want to allow this, then you must make it so the NPC's can not sell any precursor materials to producing a collectable.

What I mean is that the anything you can "buy" from a NPC to produce a collectible, can not, and should not be able to produce a collectable to be put on the market. Otherwise players can just flood the market with these things since they require little effort to make and are cheap.

[Solarra]

So, basically, O.P. you want to know how we'd feel about people being able to buy Master Crafting and Gathering Books, Scrip Items and Scrip Gear for gil, rather than actually going out and doing some crafting or gathering?

I'm against this idea. You can already level crafting and gathering classes to max by buying your leve turn-ins and I know people who've done that. However, you cannot get certain materials, the master books and the Scrip Gear without making some effort yourself.
To me that strikes the perfect balance. For people who have limited play-time, only want to level their crafters for repairing gear or who are levelling an alt class to cover more specialisations, the Leves offer a nice shortcut. Making Collectables purchasable is just going too far. The whole point of them is that they are something you have to do for yourself rather than simply hitting the MB and buying your way to the rewards. If that is too much effort or just not fun for you, then maybe Crafting and Gathering aren't for you. I don't think major changes like this should be made to accommodate people who either don't like the content or are too lazy to actually do it.

[Alien_Gamer]

Also make it so it's impossible to use macros in crafts. To encourage people to understand how the abilities work.

One does not follow the other.
Current practice, buy gear, look up macro, copy macro to game, click button.
Your suggested practice, buy gear, look up the list of skills to craft the item, click lots of buttons.

Removing macros doesn't force people to learn. Also, macros work just fine in combat; the only area they don't work is maximizing DPS, using a macro means you're on a 3sec gcd instead of a 2.5gcd because you can't do less than 1sec intervals. Since crafting doesn't have an equivalent of DPS its an irrelevant comparison to make.

[Tridus]

If they are sellable on the marketboard, then what is even the point of collectables? The House of Splendors could have just ask for HQ items. The entire point of collectables is make or gather the item yourself.

Most crafted items have a makers mark on them, so the game knows who crafted it (consumables are the obvious exception). If they wanted you to have to turn in HQ items you made yourself, they absolutely could have done that without collectables. A lot of the collectables are easier to make than the HQ equivalent because HQ is binary while collectability is on a range (and doesn't have a chance to fail at 97%), so they can have tiers of success instead of flat out pass/fail.

[KageTokage]

We have enough crafting/gathering bots around as it is and giving them a method of easily powerleveling alt accounts would likely only make things worse.

[Talraen]

You'll be hurting people who have crafters leveled on multiple alts (split specializations and gear repairs). So deffo no on that one.

I have two alts with level 60+ crafters (waiting on the Stormblood crafting beast tribe quests to get them to 70), as well as one with a 50+ crafter who isn't far enough into Heavensward to do the Moogle beast tribe quests. So I should be hurting myself... yet I've actually never had my main craft a hand-in for any of my alts. Leveling alts is only at all hard if you do it when the content is new.

[Isala]

Collectables are to Crafters/Gatherers what Dungeons are to Combat. It is something that you alone can do to get a type of currency, whether that's tomes, or scrips. Being allowed to spam buy all that just gives out free currency, and that completely defeats the point.

[Enlial]

I wouldn't have any problem with them doing that, except that it seems like it'd make the whole collectible system pretty superfluous. Why not just change collectable turn ins to HQ only turn ins?

Edit: On second thought it would create a separate market for those items (as opposed to HQ items), which might be a really good thing (active economy = more gil sinks in the form of taxes, which benefit everyone)


Edit2: In response to all the comments defending the sanctity of collectables: that might be the case if they were actually difficult. They arent. Im also kind of curious why theres this notion that gil isnt something that people earn, and that anything bought with gil is inherently meaningless