Fall back and regroup: time for crafting autoleveller?

[Peregrine]

The reasons being made for adding an auto-crafting system are more convincingly used when arguing to improve the crafting system itself.

The time spent on encoding an auto-crafting feature and all the calibrations/controls/conditions involved would be better spent on improving the crafting system itself. Which is exactly what I believe Squeenix will be doing!

And yes, the trip to rank 50 is a massive grind. THAT IS THE POINT! To dissuade people from feeling obliged to max everything out and have nowhere left to go. If you're complaining this game is too boring at later levels, you're probably over-playing it too.

The point is futile. Just as chickenwuss players skirt challenge by taking 6 archers to it, kiting everything, glitching NMs, and cheese and weasel the hell out of any game they can because they think they're entitled to it, those same chickenwuss players CHEAT the concept that time spent levelling crafting is to be rewarded..

They shirk the time with their controllers and bots, and go straight to the reward.

End it. Autolevel real players back up to speed. Sure they'll rage. But they never deserved an advantage in the first place.

[Peregrine]

This ultimately has to do with SE choosing the wrong kinds of players to dominate crafting. They're encouraging cheaters to prosper when they set up a system like this. The whole thing needs fundamentally changed, or every player needs to have official access to the advantages some are squatting to advance in this system.

Of course, memory controller players and cheaters would hate the concept, since advantage is why they took to memory controlling and botting in the first place. They'll do anything to get ahead. When they talk about how effort should be rewarded, they're not even talking about themselves. They're just pretending they did because we have to assume they actually worked for it.

And they probably just macro'd it all.

[twinkles]

There is no sense of accomplishment. Time, it turns out, is a very easy thing for mmo players to mindlessly plow. It is the cheapest form of challenge. Do you really want crafting to be dominated by the kinds of players who simply have the most time to hit the enter button repetitively? I don't want our economies run by that kind of person in real life, so why would this one be different?

Guess we don't see eye to eye on this one, because i certainly felt a huge sense of accomplishment when i dinged 50 GS, even if just that the pain of grinding a million axes was done. I get what you're saying about time and reward those that have the most time, however it seems a pretty standard practice (not saying i agree with it) to use time as measure of crafting progress, with the other being shear economics(which imo is just a monetary form of time).

[Tiraelina]

That's because all of the indirect time sinks got thrown out so you get stuck with the direct one.

• Materials rarely ever being the limit.
• Shards turned into another bot friendly grind with Alchemy.
• Every Recipe in the game being auto-learned from spamming unrelated synths.
• Synth difficulty or amount of materials used has no real bearing on SP gains.
• Guild Mark's are completely trivial to max out on.

The only part of crafting that doesn't actually penalize you for not spamming enter is HQ'ing but the current system to rank up at all without tripling your time invested is borderline botting. Even then HQ'ing is still highly random and boils down to repetition with the amount of materials available. The "gameplay" we got stuck with I could very easily solve by taking 2 seconds to make a macro on my G15 if I really felt like it.

I don't have a DoH above 32 because I know from everyone else I've talked to says it's not different from start to finish except how long you are spamming a single item. I'm also unwilling to play a game that essentially requires you to be watching another form of media over paying attention to the game at all.

Most want to complain they don't want a system where you can grab a pile of materials and press the craft button and go AFK. Instead trying to throw meaningless penalties on it so that the time they wasted might mean something. All we have over that system in terms of interaction is being required to hit Enter every 15% with no benefits or reason to attempt otherwise, if the synth requires doing anything else it's not worth it.

For a system where they went down to the details of making every item that went into a Synth being visible on the finished product. I really don't know how we ended up here in the first place.

PS. Slippery slope arguments make you look like a 12 year old and add nothing meaningful.

[tymora]

Aion had autocrafter, can't say I like it.
I ended up buying thousands of materials from *****drumroll***** bots, because the "grind" shifted from crafting to gathering materials.

Put it simply, this doesn't fix the problem. It just sends it somewhere else.

[Pyrix]

How about making the synthesis process less tedious? I personally love the depth of the crafting system, at least in terms of the materials available and how many different things you can make.

[Peregrine]

Aion had autocrafter, can't say I like it.
I ended up buying thousands of materials from *****drumroll***** bots, because the "grind" shifted from crafting to gathering materials.

Put it simply, this doesn't fix the problem. It just sends it somewhere else.

It does fix the problem as far as any real player is concerned. The cheating community may stop doing one thing (spamming crafts) and start doing another (spamming mobs), and thus it would change nothing from the cheater's perspective, but at least the real players can easily keep up with both with autolevelling and a simple gathering job which to date requires cheaters to haul that character over to a node themselves for the bot to work.

So what if iron ore on the market goes POOF. Gone. I really don't think a person deserves to level GSM or BSM if they're not a miner without blowing ridiculous amounts of money. That's the point. Get to work.

I would rather mats be extremely expensive than this system, because mat botting is more difficult than afk craft spamming. If cheaters want to keep up in a market where iron ore is 8k each, they're going to have to buy gil because no coblyn-spamming hack is going to supply enough.

It's a superior system. Materials should have ALWAYS dominated what it takes to get a craft to 50, because time...well that's just the easiest thing in the world to pretend you put in.

The top 10% of crafters put in a third of the time of the remaining 10% of the top 20, because the top crafters all either frankly cheat or memory control macro. That is simply unfair. The system caters to laziness, not dedication. It's got to go.

If I was a cheating hack like half the top crafters, I could have levelled 120,000 crafting SP today and never even touched the game. Just leisurely doing my Sunday stuff, periodically checking in to see if anyone reported me for afk levelling.

I refuse to do what they pretend they haven't done to get ahead.

[CrstyCaptin]

Auto-leveling isn't the answer. First it goes against everything SE is and it'll never happen. Second it just removes any sense of accomplishment about leveling up. So let's focus on how to fix crafting or just go get a bot and stop posting.

One way I could see the crafting system 'fixed' easily is to simply offer a 'quick synth' button. You use this if you just want to NQ something(no chance of HQ) and basically have it 'instantly' completed by performing one standard synth animation. Regular SP, still the same SP requirements, you're basically limited by the number of mats you can afford but instead cut down synth times to a tiny fraction of what they are now. Toss in fail rate to be higher depending on dlvl of the synth you're doing of course. Next to this you can have a 'skilled synth' button that you use the current system to attempt to HQ an item. This would be the only way to HQ anything crafting, and if you were attempting to make something higher above you that you didn't want to auto fail with 'quick synth' this would be your way of doing it.

Another solution would be to go back to a hybrid form of XI's crafting. Instant crafts all based on gaining .1s, .2s or .3s after completing an instant synth. Change up the SP requirements per level, however this would require them to go back and change a TON of drop rates for certain mats to make the difficulty in obtaining materials to synth with, not time to synth or the need to do 500+ synths for rank 49 to 50. It would also make all 'abilities' worthless.

Personally I think crafting should be 'hard' but spending 8 hours just spammin cheap mats isn't 'hard'. I'd more favor it to be expensive gil wise so that not everyone could easily do a 50 craft.

[Physic]

some one said that difficult synths dont give more sp, this is incorrect. Basically they need to make crafting very difficult to bot, and make SP gains skew way toward the difficult side. They could also add quests/content for crafters that give major SP, like crafting competitions, etc.

they basically have to make crafting way more complicated and difficult, people will complain, but oh well, the other side of making it easier, which they have been constantly doing, and also seem to be going even further in the direction of, will just lead to more bots, more people barely paying attention, and more spam enter. If they made a system so easy you can do it by turning on turbo on your controller, they have failed, and may as well just take away all crafting levels, why even waste time with an auto leveler.

I think it would benefit the system to award more exp for doing crafting adventures, tasks, and difficult synths. rebuild the system to be more interactive and consume more attention, but increase sp to match it. They basically have to destroy easy synths as a means to level up, or make it so easy synths can be instant with a bot check, and really low sp gain.

However i dont think they will do any of this, none of the things they have said acknowledges that they plan to do any changes that will make it harder to bot, or inefficient to bot.

[Radaghast]

For every extra hoop you make a bot go through, players have to do the same thing. Simplifying crafting is the better solution to making it more complicated.