Quote Originally Posted by Vhailor View Post
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.