Increasing Rarity of Crafting Ingredients and incorporating Expert Crafting

[tdb]

I love that people still bring this up. The easier crafting changes have effectively made the top crafters ten times richer than new and casual crafters. They were sitting on a billion or more gil. That sort of money is ten times harder to earn than in StB or HW with everything being cheap and easily obtained now, thus their wealth is at an untouchable level that the casual player can never obtain.
If crafting was harder at endgame, it opens up the opportunity for even casual players to earn decent gil with some effort. Right now, they can only ever earn peanuts and the rich players are quite happy sitting on their gil mountain. We really don't care about gil that much. We just liked crafting a lot.

At the same time though the changes drastically decreased the utility of owning that much gil. A billion gil doesn't get you any better gear than 10 million. A full set of HQ neo-ishgardian is what, a million or so gil? Endgame combat materia practically rains from the sky so there's no need to buy any. Houses are more limited by supply, and since there's no reliable way to sell houses, price-jacking can't really happen. Glamours crafted from treasure dungeon materials can be kinda expensive when they're new, but fall to affordable levels as players farm the dungeons. I guess if you're a diehard collector and absolutely must have every rare pet and mount in the game, you could drop some serious gil on buying them. But I don't know if I'd call that sort of player a casual.

[Liam_Harper]

At the same time though the changes drastically decreased the utility of owning that much gil. A billion gil doesn't get you any better gear than 10 million.

True indeed, though it's always been that way. In the past a billion gil still wouldn't get you more than 100m would. Having silly amounts of money has never really served purpose other than just having it, which is why it's strange some players get so jealous by it and constantly bring it up as some sort of evil.

In that sense, the casual player being able to earn far less is probably not really an issue as long as they can earn enough. What some players actually miss is the challenge, the satisfaction of finally completing that melded endgame set after weeks of theory-craft and grind and having actual difficult and rare items to strive for. That doesn't exist in crafting now, so you're simply done with it a week into the patch.

[Kabooa]

In that sense, the casual player being able to earn far less is probably not really an issue as long as they can earn enough. What some players actually miss is the challenge, the satisfaction of finally completing that melded endgame set after weeks of theory-craft and grind and having actual difficult and rare items to strive for. That doesn't exist in crafting now, so you're simply done with it a week into the patch.

I too missed the challenge of sitting in Urth's font for hours on end to break materia to get that melded end-game set.