Quote Originally Posted by Commat View Post
What do you like about them?
She's trolling. I personally don't hate the mini games themselves, but their mechanics seem to be made as an afterthought, not as a core mechanic and even less as a staple activity of the game. Doing them once is interesting, doing them twice is okay, thrice will pass, but doing them a thousand times trying to level one of the disciplines will cause a player to quit. It could perhaps be acceptable to do them once or twice per week.

Every idea of enjoyment related to crafting and gathering was gone for me the second day of beta. I could have trained my dog to craft and gather for me, had it thumbs to manipulate the gamepad, and i can't believe SE estimated our average intelligence to be low enough to be perpetually entertained by such mini games.

Chocobo Raising in FF7 was a fun mini game. Triple Triad in FF8 was another. Treasure hunting in FF9. Blitzball in FF10. Square has proven it can make entertaining mini games, so why do they think we like spamming the same exact craft a hundred times per day?

Digressing & Ranting mode: ON

Also, i think "leveling crafts" for the sake of it (grinding) is wrong, however it's also true that you can't keep up your DOH and DOL at the same level of your Disciplines Of War without grinding. I don't think a blacksmith would make a thousand hammers he doesn't need and can't sell just for training. Why? Because he doesn't have that many materials (and time) to waste and because training doesn't work that way. Crafting an item should give you experience points only the first few times you craft it and you should be able to level your crafting discipline at the same speed of your fighting class just by making the items you and your friends need. Crafting excellence and exclusiveness should be only determined by the difficulty of finding or processing materials, not by the amount of grinding someone does or by how advanced their grinding bots are. Furthermore, i shouldn't be able to get twenty marmot pelts ready for crafting when i'm not looking for them. Only someone with the tanning tools should be able to do so, for example (one would think that amidst all the low res cartoony environments and ugly characters WoW has people would see that it's actually such mechanics that made it big...)

Digressing & Ranting mode: OFF

Then again, i don't see SE ever changing the crafting mechanics in design, so maybe, if we're lucky, they'll speed it up or remove the progress bar.