Quote Originally Posted by Hvinire View Post
We understand that the cost of materials for 2-star crafts is a bit high when it comes to their ingredients purchased with Allagan tomestones of philosophy. Therefore, we will make the necessary changes to recipes that use more than 1125 tomestones and scale them down a bit so all of the recipes will no longer use more than 1125 tomestones.
Posting this here to notify crafters that aren't aware, and also to discuss SE's attitude towards crafting generally.

This issue, which had been identified from the very start, was left unacknowledged and unaddressed for months. We were therefore led to believe that this was not a problem, but a feature of the 2-star crafting system, however broken and nonsensical it seemed.

Players adjusted their routine to farm up these philosophy tomestone ingredients and crafters priced them accordingly. I doubt this will spur people to unsubscribe, but it removes incentives for these farmers/crafters to log on and play.

I'm not saying that this change is not a long time coming, to be expected, or fair. The market will recover and will be much healthier than it is now.

I just find it extremely strange that when their stance toward the economy has been so cautious (abolishing shard/crystal/cluster conversion/synthesis, withholding price information on housing, delaying repair cost decrease, and delaying high-level dungeon gil drops), that they would make such an announcement that obliterates the 2-star/philosophy ingredient market overnight.

They could have silently made this adjustment for 2.1 and indicated it in the patch notes. Of course, this would have angered players that purchased the big-ticket items right before the patch. I don't know what the more sensible approach is, but I'm not particularly certain if this is a genuine step towards transparency (which would be great) or simply a misstep that signals carelessness and incompetence with handling the in-game economy.

I lean towards the latter. Viewed alone, this change is fantastic. However, given their track record towards crafters, this change shows SE's lack of concern. Why sit on this glaring problem for so long? Why use us crafters as guinea pigs for their economic experiment?