Is it me or is the Crafting market going to die?

[Kakure]

Short answer? No. The crafting market is not going to die. The economy is broadly cyclical and the examples in this thread are mostly things for which there is high availability and low demand. Demand for materia will skyrocket when we get new craftable DoH/DoL gear, although the prices will probably be lower than they would have been if SE had not changed materia extraction.

The longer answer is that there are economic ramifications to having an accessible crafting system in which everyone can make everything for themselves, but there probably isn't a lot SE can do about it because players are notoriously awful at understanding the big picture and accepting that what is good for them personally might not be good for the game as a whole.

Back in 2.x, SE recognized that the crafting economy was struggling (lots of people competing to sell the same few pieces of end-game gear) and they took some steps to make it better. They made crafting more challenging, but players complained about the difficulty and their frustrations with RNG. SE added desynthesis as a specialized, siloed companion system to crafting, and players complained about the shared level cap. In Heavensward, SE added full-on crafting specializations that (a) limited competition by artificially siloing crafters and (b) forced crafters to buy and sell among themselves. (The specialist system also made single-class crafting viable, but that's not relevant to my main point here.) Players, of course, complained because they wanted the ability to make everything for themselves. Oh, how they complained. For years players whined incessantly about the specialization system and SE walked it back piece by piece, leaving us with the irrelevant, vestigial thing we have now: a tiny handful of specialist recipes and specialist job crystals that don't really fit with the overall design of modern crafting.

There's an old joke about MMO balance:

"Nerf rock; paper is fine." - Scissors

Everyone wants high prices when they are selling and low prices when they are buying. Everyone wants independence (self-sufficiency) for themselves but interdependence for other people; they want their own money-making niche but resent the next person's and they want to procure all their own materials while also selling to other players. Everyone wants to be special and everyone wants to be the best. Some people don't like crafting and they just want a quick, accessible, utilitarian system to make their own gear while others who do enjoy crafting want it to be a challenging, engaging minigame. It's an impossible situation for game developers.

Recently, SE made the (IMO very sensible) decision to decouple crafting as an economic activity -- making armor and furniture and orchestrion rolls and stuff -- from crafting as a fully developed and challenging minigame, satisfying both audiences to the best of their ability. They made baseline crafting more accessible and then introduced expert crafting and the Skybuilders' rankings as an optional sort of DoH/DoL endgame for players who want that.

And players complained. They complained when SE revamped baseline crafting, declaring it braindead and pointless and a sign of SE's disregard for DoH jobs before anyone even had the ability to log in and try it out. I have a couple friends who stopped subscribing over those changes even though they understood what SE was doing and why. Then expert crafting came out and players complained some more. They understood that expert crafting was 100% optional and didn't affect any of the things they do in the game in any way at all, but they still took to video game forums, including this one, to complain preemptively just to make their displeasure known and ensure the developers didn't get it into their heads to expand the new expert system into "real" crafting.

I have no idea whether or to what degree the developers are influenced by player feedback, but I am absolutely certain there is nothing they can do to address the sorts of issues you are talking about that isn't going to cause mass apoplexy among players. Economies always benefit some people and disadvantage others. Witness our RL pandemic economy: with millions of people out of work and enormous amounts of economic suffering everywhere you look, it's actually it a pretty profitable time for rice wholesalers and makers of toilet paper and disinfectant wipes. Low prices on DoW/DoM leveling gear might be bad for you, the seller of crafted goods, but they are good for the PLD in need of new gear. Whatever balance the developers strike between accessibility and challenge or self-sufficiency and interdependence, there is always going to be a sizable portion of the player base who are disadvantaged to some degree and there will always be players convinced they did it wrong.

[Jojoya]

Because what are you leveling towards, gearing, practicing rotations, reading guides, mastering your class or chosen activity ...if when you finally reach that endgame goal it's simply handed over to you without putting any of those skills to use? Done and over just like that. What are you working towards? There's no goal anymore, no prestige, no accomplishments to achieve, nothing. You'll never be a great crafter. There's no such thing now.

Not everyone is after prestige, though. Most are simply trying to have fun and relax after a hard day at work/school/chasing after toddlers, etc.

SE's is in a hard spot of trying to decide what's best for the game. They're not going to be able to make everyone happy.

As for master recipe gear, you're completely off track if you think being unable to craft it means you cannot enjoy and play endgame content. You normally get PvE combat gear by doing PvE combat. You know, farming tomes, clearing dungeons, beating Nier, beating Eden Normal, beating Varis and Ruby EX, maybe even stepping into Savage. Now? You simply spend peanuts in gil at a MB and bam, you're endgame geared, most of that content is invalidated and you can go back to being afk. How is that great game design? Why does Master Recipe gear need to be handed out free at the expense of our crafter endgame, when DoW/M has so many sources for it?

Crafted gear is relevant at 2 points in content - when a new Savage tier is released and players want the pentamelded gear to give them a tiny edge in progression (which lasts about 2 weeks), and when players are going back to farm old Ultimates so they'd again rather get the pentamelded gear available on demand over farming for Savage gear with the relevant ilvl.

Current tier Savage gear will always be superior to the highest ilvl crafted gear. Current tomestone gear will always be superior to the highest ilvl crafted gear. Crafted gear has never invalidated end game gear and never will. At best it's been a temporary shortcut while players farm the best gear. Otherwise it's just a substitute for those not interested in doing the content needed to get the better gear, or for those who want it for glamour.

As for 100k not including mats being "huge profits", it's sad new crafters don't realize just how badly they have it. We really don't care about gil anyway, it's not hard to make, we have plenty. It's crafting itself that we miss.

Let's not pretend that they don't care about the gil. If they didn't, it wouldn't be getting mentioned.

When the post comes down to "I can't sell this item for as much as I used to" it's definitely about the gil.

Sorry if you miss the old crafting. Personally I'm having a blast with Expert. I make time to do Expert each night on top of all the other things I'm doing in game. I groan when I hit that string of 9 Rapid Synthesis failures in a row then sigh with relief I when I still manage to squeeze out a high enough rating to turn in. I boggle when I get those massive strings of good luck so I've got a max rating item in relatively few steps.

I've got long term achievements to work towards. I'm helping to advance the stockpile for my world so we can gradually creep closer to new housing. I'm making lots of scrip I'm using to buy the emotes and other items to give to friends who don't craft or gather, or to even sell on the MB for that gil that crafters allegedly don't care about.

What is it that you find lacking about Expert that it is not retaining your interest?

I predict the gil making window will be less than a week. Neo-Isguardian gear was below 1 mil within 3 days and crashed entirely within the week. They sold very slowly too. The materia markets barely change with patches. We'll have macros up day one for the 5.3 gear.

So it really is about the gil as much as you'd like to believe otherwise.

[Liam_Harper]

You know what, sure. You're right on everything. Eden normal is worth farming every week, no one wants to accomplish anything, Expert is worth grinding the same rotation for 3 months for a single mount and endgame crafters are all just gil obsessed. I get it and that's fine if the current game makes people happy.

I can acknowledge what I really liked about this game is simply dead. The indepth crafting system, class depth, the Hunt with its server community and so on, it's not coming back and there's no point in causing arguments over it. I'll leave it be at that.

[Renkei]

Now there is more demand on Materials then finished products it seems especially since crafting is a ton more accessible people are willing to pay more for materials right now just to have their name on items, mostly its because they are making everything easier and more accessible at the same time they are neglecting things in design due to their work on another game. a bit unfortunate.

[Shadygrove]

After obtaining some battle relics, the relics replaced some of the i480 weapons (unused, not yet spirit bonded) that I crafted for my jobs. So I put them onto the market... only to find that they were outrageously cheap... I mean, seriously, 69,000 gil for an i480 endgame weapon? Sweet Jesus. They're practically worthless! I knew the prices are low, but I was still expecting something over 100K, ya know?

Is the crafting market going to die? I dunno. But I'm positive that the demand is low and supply is high!

Caimie, I have never seen the high end crafted gear market crash so quickly as in 5.x.

That said, I'm a lazy crafter. Once top end crafted gear fell under 150K / piece I gave up making it for sale, just for friends and FC members. Even so I have more gil now than when I was selling Rakshasa gear regularly. Its not that I have found other profitable crafts or am even selling lots of gathered items.

Well let's see, the new relics are i485 and have 5 materia slots open making them effortless to meld. They are also really easy to get. I have one for all my 80 jobs at this point. Why would anyone be interested in the crafted gear?

It isn't just the weapons, its the armor and accessories too.

[Kabooa]

Not everyone is after prestige, though. Most are simply trying to have fun and relax after a hard day at work/school/chasing after toddlers, etc.

SE's is in a hard spot of trying to decide what's best for the game. They're not going to be able to make everyone happy.

You can't make everyone happy about everything, but you can have something that makes someone happy across every spectrum. They are attempting this, and while most of the time it's a half measure to be expanded later, it's effort expended, and I think it should be applauded.

We won't always get what we want out of it, but someone will.

SE does listen to feedback, however, they understandably, very rarely, ever directly lift ideas. It is bad precedent to actively implement an idea sourced from a user unless it is objectively the best solution, and even then, multiple people will come to the same conclusion about how to do something without interacting with each other. Much as people like to harp "SE doesn't listen", what they really mean is "SE doesn't listen to me". We can take a journey down the patch notes and directly point out every time feedback has been taken into consideration and implemented.

I like the expert system and would like to see it come into Mainline crafting, so long as the granular reward system is also brought. The granular reward, done well, alleviates much of the concerns that surround Expert crafting, as well as smart picking of what recipes actually utilize it.

And I personally think not connecting it to the Relic system was a bad choice - Optional grind tie in for a shiny reward is exactly the kind of thing to encourage people to give it a try and keep at it.

[hqdm]

Homogenization has been the steady trend over the last few xpacs rly.
I first got into crafting because I wanted cheaper gear to spiritbond, and spiritbonding has been the large sustaining point for me all this time.
I spent a lot of 2.x experimenting with different routes that were much faster than Urth's Girth or w/e it was, then swapped to sbing mostly gemstones and lanolin and whatever via quicksynth. I ended 2.x with about 66k lanolin.. the last few stacks finally sold only a month ago lol.

The first set of airships was the first attempt at flooding the materia market I think, but airships + fcs were still a bit rare to come by (without personal housing restrictions in place yet), so airship owners largely profited w/o making much impact in the materia market.
2nd set of airships + subs quickly corrected this in that they largely rewarded useless mats + old materia, driving the $ to minions/orch rolls/I think a mount?

Materia dived again when they added it to the scrip store, hunts, and finally 5.x it is quite easy to get now.

So, I am one of those player who fed npc lots of gil / crafted junk item up until this recent patch, but I don't think it is a common playstyle, and this change only seeks to level the playing field even more. It is quite clear to me from the series of patches since 2.0 that SE has been trying to find ways to ease more ppl into crafting and decrease the economic leverage of "materia barons", omnicrafters, and so on.

It's a bit sad for me personally, but I don't think it's a bad change.

It gives more reward to DoL post-initial rush, in that you can more easily obtain green materia by just gathering nodes, even if the mats you gather are relatively worthless, without forcing you to scrip gather + then buy materia off scrip store (but option exists!). It gives some passive income to just crafting without relying on airsubs for steady junk materia stream; I'm quite certain I'm well over 100k melded materia at this point. It seems they changed materia to npc for less at some point, which sort of sucks, but I guess they trying to kill off green gil generation somewhat. Collectables losing gil only change I rly disliked. Desynth changes flooding the scrip items also acts to kill off active spiritbonding as WS are/were a large outlet for all the extra mats produced.

I would also like to say, despite ppl often saying the market is dead, I still manage to sell ~5.5k rings during latter 1/4 of stormblood, 75-130k ea. Just weekly login and distribute rings to retainers, not bother to undercut unless they didnt sell for a wk or two. There is still a large amt of casual demand even if it is nothing like day1-2 prices, and profit/item still beats crafting pots lol. This patch I've not much time to play outside of ishgard week, so maybe only rings 1.3-1.5k sold.

But there is some happiness in playing item shop + gathering your own things and making food/potions too, so I think it's okay even now it's like 2-3k ea.

[Frizze]

Except end game gear can't be bought off the market, so I'm not sure where you're trying to go with this line of thought. This game isn't a crafting gaming, it's combat game with a rich and interesting crafting subset. Neo-Ish gear isn't end-game, perhaps that's where your mistake is.

Small correction here, but Neo-Ish IS end game gear. The highest ilevel you need to do any piece of content currently in the game(aside from i think E8S being set at 485, but if youre doing savage at that level then you already know what upgrade paths are available to you) or any content that will drop in the next patch(5.3 sometime this summer) is 480. Neo-Ish will be good enough to get you through whatever story content is dropped in 5.4(the next patch with an ilevel bump, sometime this fall), possibly up to the last set of normal mode raids(these will probly be set at i485 for the i510 drops - so upgrade one or two pieces to the next crafted set in 5.4 and youre good to que even if you make no intermediate upgrades until then). Any gear that you wont have to upgrade to do cap content for potentially 6 months is end game gear. That doesnt make it BiS, which no one is claiming. There are plenty of upgrade paths beyond this. But this works as a minimum level to do all the things.

[KageTokage]

The market for mainstream items like crafted gear and consumables already is dead as far as I'm concerned.

The profit margin is so low that it doesn't feel worth getting into undercut wars with the bot farmers to push a sale of something that goes for scarcely over 100K.

DoL/H classes being easier to level also means a lot of people are now opting to craft their own stuff instead of buying from the market which makes it harder to push sales on top of that.

[Nandrolone]

Yoshida is a smart guy, he really is. Him and his crafting team managed to make expert recipes a challenge. It’s just, I don’t think a guy like him is right for an MMO’s economic portion, at all. He seems to be very easily persuaded by community feedback, rather than trust his own judgements about economics. As a result, we get what we have now. A hell hole of end game gear going under 100K Gil in less than 3-4 weeks of release, materials taking hardly any effort to obtain, crafting rotations for master books taking hardly any effort, and so on.

He’s a really smart person and knows exactly how a game should be ran. We have seen this with 2.x and 3.x. I just think the guy is too easily persuaded by feedback and doesn’t have much backbone. Ffxiv would still be successful if Stormblood and shadowbringer crafting mechanics never existed. It’s a real sad state the game is in now, real sad. Camie and a few others have made threads calling out the BS, and it still gets ignored. (On purpose)

I sincerely hope, that in Final Fantasy 16 or 17 MMO, there is a brand new director with a brand new vision on how economics and gameplay should work. And is not easily persuaded by angry or jealous “oMg u eLiTiSt gIl hOaRdEr” players. Having Yoshida be the director of even the next MMO is just unhealthy for something brand new and will not work long term. Someone new with brand new ideas, new visions, and new backbone needs to appear. Would be amazing if it was Nomura or the director of FF13 trilogy. Basically anyone like those guys that aren’t easily persuaded by hateful/negative feedback.