"Overhaul" please stop.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

I mean, ultimate exists yet there's a plethora of combat duties that are easy. Why shouldn't crafting be that way? It was over complicated to begin with. Now they have a baseline they can go from.

Besides, no one ever manual crafted. It was never a skill thing. It was always meld to this point, then use these macros. Super hard.

[Fawkes]

If Crafting and Gathering becomes dumbed down to point and click like FFXI and every other MMO, I will no longer have any desire to play this game.

Everything being easy and accessible, also turns everything meaningless, unfulfilling, and absolutely un-engaging.

There is no journey, there is no experience, there is just you pressing buttons and getting meaningless things. Some people can be artificially sated by such nonsense, most people in fact, but I dont play Final Fantasy for that kind of satisfaction, I play it because normally it has depth, thought, quality, and richness. FFXIV is beginning to seriously lack those qualities in exchange for instant meaningless gratification.

While the story is still good, the fact that everything is so trivial, and the playerbase has become nigh unbearable at either spectrum, the story cannot float this boat for me.
FFXIV is effectively becoming the worst Final Fantasy game in the series. And sorry popularity does not mean quality. In fact, popularity normally means the exact opposite.

Presumably SE has numbers on how many people engage with crafting and they aren't happy with how low it is. IIRC that's why we got the Ixal beast tribe, to try and help boost the number of people who engaged with crafting. So it's probably also why they made Moogles and Namazu even easier, and made crafter EXP silly easy to get, and now made crafts almost difficult to fail at by upping the success rates of abilities, and made it so you don't need to be an omni-crafter.

If you want content like the Ishgard restoration that is crafting focused, then I think SE needs to be able to justify adding that content by increasing the number of people who can do it, which means making crafting more accessible and less of a time sink.

[Nandrolone]

So... because you're personally not intrested in mounts, minions or titles they're not a worthy goal for anyone to work towards? They cant be a reward - even if they're untradable and have to be earned through an achievment, clearing some difficult content (which could include crafting of some kind, kinda like the first mastercrafter-books we had, if you remember them) - because you dont consider them a worthy goal?

I understand that for some people reaching the gil-limit is a personal goal and all the power to them! All I'm saying is that for some people - or at the very least me - a lot of the (untradable) mounts and titles are much better rewards and goals to work towards than a mountain of useless coin.
Wether or not they're a worthy goal for you - and I'll admit that we could do with some mounts and minions that are locked behind crafting challengens or achievments - is another question. It is however a fact that there are plenty of mounts, all of the titles and some minions that are exclusive, aka that cant be traded on the marketboard. Thats simply not something you can disagree with without ignoring the facts...

Can you please tell me how exactly are minions, mounts, or titles in any way shape or form useful to a crafter’s arsenal? Let’s start there.

Also, if you want to talk about ignoring facts, can you also please tell me how you or I have the authority to criticize or demonize someone who chooses to play the game in a certain way? Whether they be casual or serious players?

[Gemina]

Snip.

What would be your suggestion to make crafting more difficult, and not just annoying? I ask this because in the past, the devs make things "difficult" by incorporating the RNG. You spoke of quality touches being 100% now, but a complaint throughout the duration of crafting is how 'drive-a-railroad spike-down-my-throat-instead plz' quality progress was at anything less than 100%. The groans about how anything less than 100% is basically 50%, and I would also have to agree how frustrating it was.

A suggestion I have brought up were crafts that only allow a certain number of steps. However, this is essentially the same as nerfing your CP, and it still suffers from not being able to perpetuate the difficulty. They can incorporate a system that doesn't really allow a player to get to 100% HQ and still complete the craft, but then those aforementioned gripes will return in heavy force.

I honestly don't know. But I admit that innovation is not my forte. I really don't have a problem with the current crafting system though. From a perspective of seeking challenge, I never thought about it being much more than an disassemble/reassemble puzzle. Once you figure it out, then the challenge goes away. A lot of players don't even want that though, and they want the puzzle solved for them instead of using the brain muscles.

I don't think the devs are being unreasonable. In fact, I think they could probably start being a little bit more unreasonable to improve the quality of the game.

[jon041065]

I mean, ultimate exists yet there's a plethora of combat duties that are easy. Why shouldn't crafting be that way? It was over complicated to begin with. Now they have a baseline they can go from.

Besides, no one ever manual crafted. It was never a skill thing. It was always meld to this point, then use these macros. Super hard.

OP said they manually crafted as did another poster on the first page. I've also have never used macros and been crafting since ARR.

[Nandrolone]

What would be your suggestion to make crafting more difficult, and not just annoying? I ask this because in the past, the devs make things "difficult" by incorporating the RNG. You spoke of quality touches being 100% now, but a complaint throughout the duration of crafting is how 'drive-a-railroad spike-down-my-throat-instead plz' quality progress was at anything less than 100%. The groans about how anything less than 100% is basically 50%, and I would also have to agree how frustrating it was.

A suggestion I have brought up were crafts that only allow a certain number of steps. However, this is essentially the same as nerfing your CP, and it still suffers from not being able to perpetuate the difficulty. They can incorporate a system that doesn't really allow a player to get to 100% HQ and still complete the craft, but then those aforementioned gripes will return in heavy force.

I honestly don't know. But I admit that innovation is not my forte. I really don't have a problem with the current crafting system though. From a perspective of seeking challenge, I never thought about it being much more than an disassemble/reassemble puzzle. Once you figure it out, then the challenge goes away. A lot of players don't even want that though, and they want the puzzle solved for them instead of using the brain muscles.

I don't think the devs are being unreasonable. In fact, I think they could probably start being a little bit more unreasonable to improve the quality of the game.

My suggestion would be to make it skill based somehow. My idea though, would be making touch actions only available during certain crafting conditions. For example, you can only use Delicate synthesis or prudent touch during a Good/Excellent. That’ll essentially make macros not optimal and make manual crafting a thing. It’ll also show who really enjoys crafting and who really doesn’t. But that would involve RNG.

Anything in a game that is of value or importance, usually involves RNG or putting in a ton of time and effort. For example, in resident evil 2 remake, to get infinite ammo guns, you need to beat the story on Hard Mode during a very short time frame. Any longer, and you don’t unlock it. Things that are easy in games, or involve little to no RNG, are essentially useless or not worth many people’s time to pursue. I just don’t see any way around that personally.

[MrKusakabe]

You guys are obviously just burnt out and frustrated, like everything you do over an extended period of time. Eat one potatoe chip, it tastes great and spicy. Five minutes later you grab hands full and are dissatisfied when the package is gone. Same with beer, cigarettes, you name it. We have a Legacy Player and a Crafter with "billions of Gil". The first one does not respond and the latter ping pongs her opinion a bit back and forth. You get some silent upvoters that would do so on every "Back then it was much better" statement (I can see that in LoL that I played since early 2010) forgetting that a shift in gameplay might put playerbase A off, but attract playerbase B. And that's it. That's all this thread has to offer so far, and that is far from being a drastic problem but rather two (!) people being obviously over-dosed by this particular game while basically describing any MMOs long term problems in a nutshell like so many people did before in any franchise you want to name.

I see crafters sitting around for hours, listening to the same two sound effects and pressing as many buttons as you can find on a GameBoy - often macro-assisted even. Of course this is getting dull very fast. If you "competitively craft" (?!), you basically play nothing more what a browser game could do for you: Juggling crafting windows, marketboards and drop down menus. Reducing the game to that is not a real indicator about the game's quality. Nobody would doubt visually boring browser games are getting stale quickly. So of course, nobody should doubt hardcore crafting is not different.

Sincerely,

[Razard]

FFXIV is effectively becoming the worst Final Fantasy game in the series.

aaand this is where i checked out and dismissed your whole arguement for the shrieking, hyperbolic nonsense that it is. All because of one bloody word.

Get a sense of perspective.

[Auryan]

I'll be honest, I thought this was a parody for a second. The over the top reaction, name-dropping random pop artists as a way to hammer your points, it all feels very...phony. At the very least, it's unintentionally funny.

Anyway, I think when it comes to the overhaul, you're kind of arguing something that isn't happening. Well it sorta did, in 5.1, but won't be happening in 5.2. The crafting/gathering overhaul is a series of changes and new content for crafters and gatherers. The action changes took place a few months back and subsequent patches are focusing on the added content. Revamped Diadem, Ocean fishing, more updates to the Ishgard Restoration, expert recipes that are different than the others, etc.

You can read all about this in last December's live letter and with more details coming out this Thursday.

[MikkoAkure]

Snip.

In addition to these good points, it's the nature of the genre for systems to change as the game progresses. Some things may get more simple to reduce button bloat, to make way for new abilities/combos, or to make it easier for newer players to get start more of a variety of content. If OP or others don't like the way things are, what's stopping you from making your own enjoyment out of crafting? Do you need SE's guiding hand to tell you that you have to craft the most efficient way? It's not perfect, but if things are too easy, you could limit yourself to use certain abilities only when good/excellent, craft wearing unmelded, limit the amount of CP you want to use, etc.

If you don't want to do those things and you don't like the fact that others are having an easy time of crafting, then the MMO genre may not be for you, and that's OK. It's also OK to be critical but if you're finding yourself making threads criticizing the game every week and you're frustrated with how things are going, it might be a sign that you need to step back and play something else for awhile.