Crafting seem to no longer be a viable solution for making Gil...

[Antoine_Lenheim]

@Caimie_Tsukino

I mean, I full well understand that there are some enlightened and zen-conscious crafters out there, who know some secrets and gimmicks, or who simply are too hardcore, and they make millions even now. Like, of course, I specifically outlined that in the end of my post, that sure, you can still make money and have fun, if you know your thing. But I was talking about my own experience with crafting, why I personally think it's no longer as profitable as it was. And my own experience, I imagine, can be the experience of any other, let's say, casual crafter out there.

Because, again, let us go back in time. Maybe in my original post i phrased myself a bit too crudely. Those weren't days of easy profits as crafter, those were days of "high risk/high investment - high gain/reward". It was not easy by any means to level up your crafters, you didn't get as much exp doing regular crafts, you only had GC, Rowena and levequest turn-ins as a stable means of levelling. Then, once you hit max level, you needed endgame gear and that was a pain in the ass to get, mats were expensive/hard to obtain, your crafting rotations were luck dependant and also, if you didn't level up all your crafters at once, you're screwed because you needed those cross-class skills for your rotations. Oh, and good luck getting all the materia you need for your gear too. But, once you do all that, once you go through arduous process of leveling and gearing your crafters, you were ready to start raking in millions. There were only a handful of endgame omnicrafters on servers, you didn't have as much competition, during HW times, you could sell crafted items needed for Anima Relic for hundreds of thousands of gil per item and it was almost an insta-sell, because, again, only a select few were able to craft them. And I'm not even talking about crafted battle gear, pots and other stuff. Endgame crafters had that "elitism" factor.

And what do we have right now? SE have made crafting so accessible that demand is no longer greater than supply. Crafting hell lost its elitism factor. Dumbed down crafting, you can learn all the needed skills on one crafter without much need to level others (ofc you still need to but I'm talking about skills here). Leveling them all is a matter of a week maybe, you have increased exp for crafting items, just spam Firmament, custom deliveries, leves, other turn-ins. Cosmic exploration will probably make leveling your crafters and gatherers even easier again. All recipes now, even master recipes, are easily macroed because of how dumbed down crafting is, you just sit back and relax while your macro (or even crafting plugin) does all the job for you. With all that, with how accessible and easy crafting become, it's no big wonder why everyone is a crafter now and why market is so over-saturated. This is what basically was my point.

And if we go back to my personal experience, during this patch, I've tried to sell some of the new items myself. I wasn't trying to race others, I had a casual approach, I came from work, got my master books, started gathering new mats, then sat for a while to craft some new crafted green sets. Then have put them all on marketboard, and went to sleep. On the other day, when I woke up, I only sold ONE item, while the rest were way down under all the undercutters. Okay, I adjusted my prices, went to work, came back, sold NOTHING. Again, a wave of crafters and undercutters got me. I adjusted my price again, played a bit, sold one item, went to sleep. Do I need to tell you what happened on the other day? Yeah, undercutters. From all the sets I've putted on mb, I only sold like, three items. And these are the brand new, freshly out of patch, i740 gear pieces. Imagine such a thing during ARR or HW, where day 1-2 of the patch, market is already full with these things, and people are undercutting one another in order to just secure a sale. I actually found out that it was much easier to sell intermediate mats, like Cronopio Leather, instead of a finished gear piece. It sold much better for some reason. But yeah, I guess you can see my point a bit clearer now?

I can't sit in front of my screen of all day, monitoring and adjusting prices when I see someone undercutted me by 1 gil. I also can't (and don't want to) race other crafters and sell new stuff ASAP, before others even put much on the marketboard. It's okay if you do and I understand crafting is still a viable thing for earning gil if you're into that. Sure. But for me, in my personal opinion, this is why crafting isn't as good as it was for making gil now. Not to the point of not being worth it, just not as good as it was.



EDIT: By the way, is there any use for these expert things that you can craft? Why do people buy them, I never saw them being used in any crafting recipe. Do you turn them in somewhere?