Ishgard Restoration: High Difficult Recipe Rewards

[MrThinker]

5.1 You do not nerf Prudent Touch or Delicate Synthesis, and make every move 100% guaranteed. What’s next? An HQ button?

*looks at Trained Eye and sweats silently*

[Ethelwind]

@CookiesNCreams
Thanks for your kind and constructive feedback.
I agree with the long term subscriber vs short term subscriber view and your summation is quite spot on.

I'm on the same page on the majority of issues which committed crafters like you and others on these forums post - not all - but most.
I agree in its too easy, but don't agree with some of the suggestions which reduce accessibility for all types of players out there. I want it to be accessible for everyone, but committed crafts should have some advantage somewhere and thats just not there - at all - right now. I do not consider melding a real advantage, although one could viably argue against it.

I also like FF a lot and crafting was one of the highlights for a long time - compared to all the competitors out there. I'm just seeing it diluted more and more and 5.1 just kind of was a straw that broke the camels back for me to remain silent, especially after testing and seeing that its just overboard now.

I'm hopeful though that Yoshi will follow through as the backlash seemed much larger this time around than in the past.

I'm usually happy if there is at least some minor form of bonus / 'shiny' which separates players who do crafting out of practicality and change of pace and those that genuinely enjoy it and spend their majority of time on it I can live with it.

I also don't think I recall any game with the exception of EQ1 and UO in the last 25 years that was ever succesful long-term catering to crafting player types like us. All more or less bombed, but some survived ok-ish after catering to less committed players - hence the trend we've been seeing the last 10+ years.

Good night for the day

[Ethelwind]

Some ideas i would love
The following are just some ideas, are partially contradictory, probably have popped up many times and so might not be feasible or perfect.

1. Make normal gear the norm and balance around it. Not that simple with 1000's of items in the aftermath though.

2. Give more negative and positive effects which can be counteracted.
- Harder to macro <--> less accessibility = definately a dilemma

3. Make HQ the exception and harder to make with the best crafting equipment (more mats, only HQ mats, etc.) with a chance for success and failure always
- = more expensive & less affordable and potential for frustration, but sweet if successful
- = net money gain similar as lower demand but also lower supply.
--> Income of crafters should not / cannot outstrip other avenues of income massively. There has to be a balance here.

4. Crafters name only on item if you activate 'increase difficulty' and only on HQ items --> we might deny it, but crafting with 'brand recognition' factor is sexy to many crafters

5. Give us back epic crafting tool quests a with small bonuses (+3% hq, + 1% crafting, +10% reclaim) --> personally I'd favor that over the 'for me' mind-numbing overmelding, i'd rather craft tons of items (ala a whole house) than hit some rocks at specific times to gather some random currency to turn into xyz.

6. Give crafters an alternate 'xp' crafting advancement path they can invest in skills, e.g every x million crafting exp (2, 5, 10) you can raise a craft stat by 1 (maybe cp needs more xp).
- Reset it every major release and only carry over small amount (e.g. 5%)
- It would also completely fit in the FF mold.
- I personally think, someone who crafts 1000 items, should have it slightly easier, than someone who only crafts 100 items


7. Give us more grades of items or allocate % to HQ. (both gatherers and crafters)
--> Very tricky and from a development perspective not sure how this could be implemented without creating issues in data/inventory storage.
- I would completely love the idea of gathering a 87% wood combining it with a 53% ingot and getting lucky and creating a 65% HQ item.
- It would allow HQ to become open end, ie. item gets created at 45k quality (=50% hq), but you can push as far as is possible and if you're lucky your 100k quality that you could have gotten, becomes a 75% hq item. If you get the 6 exceptionals, yay bingo you got 97% and have had you're lucky day for the year.
- This idea is mainly stolen from SWG, one of the best crafting experiences there was until NGE.

[VeolE]

*looks at Trained Eye and sweats silently*

*Sweats intensely*

[NanaWiloh]

Gonna have to disagree with you on that. 1.0 - 3.5, gear was considered pretty hardcore to do consistently. Why? Because only the hardcore or serious crafters had the will power to sit through RNG’s bull crap. Casual players in general don’t have that drive to do that.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad Square Enix (supposedly) looked at my controversial casual and hardcore thread and decided to add harder recipes for Ishgard, but as Liam stated, the damage has already been done. Things just will not be the same anymore like they once used to.

However, they have the opportunity to turn Ishgard Restoration leaderboards into a hardcore only thing, kind of like savage raids. There’s just too many hardcore crafters that either quit FFXIV or just stopped crafting as a whole because of how laughably easy and accessible endgame recipes have become.

Solution: Make a new mmo. For example, FF14 is mostly geared towards casual players. Make FF16 mostly geared towards ALL demographics, not just casuals. Yoshida has been confirmed to be working on a new Square Enix title. We just don’t know if it’s an mmo, a single player, or a new IP. Gonna hope it’s a mmo...

Was not touching on difficulty with my post. Touched on that enough which is why I have mostly been reading.

[Ryaz]

Casual market is fine cause unlike the hardcore market nobody is in a hurry to make Millions of gil. Biggest mistake of hardcore crafters thinking everyone is looking for FAST MONEY. I know a hardcore crafter who use to spend his time haunting the mb and crafting, he stopped doing it late SB cause the market started to plummet. He has completely stopped now as of Shadwobringers cause there is no big gil to be made anywhere, Big gil as in 10's of millions. My co-lead and some friends are all casual crafters and have manage to make millions just playing the casual market board.

Your idea of decent gil is not everyone's idea of it. 350k maybe pocket change to one player but its a fortune to another especially if they are making it steadily. Hardcore market is mostly all about gear which is why it crumbles like dry bread it has nothing else to fall back on. Casual market is gear,pets,minion,mounts,furniture, glams,materia,food,etc all the things Hardcore crafters take for granted. They also dont all crash at the same time there is always one or more making good gil.

I made millions crafting HQ espresso in bulk. Much more profitable than making the harder gear that became obsolete or harder food that sold for a high price, but nowhere near as quickly and took much longer to gather for. One round of 200 espressos (I'd sell in 10 packs) would net me 600k-1 million in a day. Over a week, it starts to add up.

[Shadygrove]

You people asking for difficulty forget one thing.

Everything is easy once you know how. Complex perhaps, like Rath's Rotation, but not difficult.

[Liam_Harper]

Unfortunately, even if crafting does get a challenging leaderboard system, it's changed the entire concept of ff14 crafting forever.

The challenge and time investment in crafting used to be leveling, the Master recipes, gearing, obtaining materia, obtaining difficult materials, theory-crafting rotations and the resulting high-end DoW gear, consumables, primal items and other desirable end-game items you could make. With 5.11, all of that has been made irrelevant and it's all entirely focused on getting a high score on a leader-board by spamming collectibles, which by nature can only fit a top 100 players or whatever we get and the rest are out of luck. Savage raids are actual content, but a leaderboard is a tiny sub-content. The old craft system we knew back in ARR, HW and early SB, which for many of us was the reason we moved to ff14, is basically over.

Your idea of decent gil is not everyone's idea of it. 350k maybe pocket change to one player but its a fortune to another especially if they are making it steadily. Hardcore market is mostly all about gear which is why it crumbles like dry bread it has nothing else to fall back on. Casual market is gear,pets,minion,mounts,furniture, glams,materia,food,etc all the things Hardcore crafters take for granted. They also dont all crash at the same time there is always one or more making good gil.

The "hardcore" market was fairly steady and rarely crashed entirely. Even now Facet gear sells consistently. However there is no such thing as a hardcore crafter market anymore.

In the past both markets were decent. In Stormblood during 4.1 when the Ala Mhigan set was released I could sell the previous white lv80 Gazelle and Twinsilk pieces for 150-350k. Right now, Dwarven Cotton pieces are about 40-90k. So while the casual player can make gil, they make far less than they used to be able to in the past. They can never work towards being able to make the big gil sellers either because those don't exist. They just don't realize it.

It's not really about gil either. The allure to crafting used to be that it felt satisfying to be self-sufficient and craft all manner of desirable items if you put the work in. Now levels and gear are handed to you, you just become a gil robot and endlessly churn out cheap rubbish on macro that everyone else has. That's all you do now.

[tdb]

With regards to this, you may be speaking for people you know—but I’m speaking for people I know as well. If a glamour looks cool (and not necessarily lewd), they will pursue it. The insinuation that it has to be lewd doesn’t apply to everyone.

Indeed. I don't mind if some of the glamour rewards are lewd, but all of them being lewd would be a massive turn off for me. I want something reasonably modest (some skin is okay, but chest and legs in particular need to be covered) and cool-looking, but without too many frills or attachments. I'm also conscious of how the gear looks in various poses, such as sitting or kneeling over a crafting workbench. For instance the Ala Mhigan doublet of crafting would be pretty cool if not for weird hanging part on the side.

I hope SE can manage to find a way to reward those crafters with high skill but only a limited amount of time to play, as opposed to those who have the time and tenacity to repeat the same moderately difficult recipe 12 hours a day. In terms of a leaderboard, this would mean rewarding those who can craft a few very high quality items instead of spamming lots of items for a high total collectability. I hope it won't revolve entirely around being lucky with the RNG either.

[Rasikko]

All those crafters took everything to 80 and never were seen again. Meanwhile Im still trucking slowly along because I still need to gear my crafters/gatherers along the way.