Why is Crafting still in the game?

[MurakumoMillennium]

I recently gained a few levels on blm, which is why I'm back to hq crafted gear. If you check back after my next gaming session, you'll see that I'll be wearing a mix of crafted gear and gear that I'm getting from levequests. I don't NEED to be wearing the crafted gear, I'm wearing it just because I can.

It are more that you say crafting professions are useless, and then wear full crafted gear...

Also 32 are level for braybray gear!

[Zuellni]

It's gotten to the point where I think Yoshi just keeps crafting and gathering around because that's a "standard feature" in a modern MMO. Everything from crafted item usability to the crafting quest scenarios have been dumbed down in ARR in fear that people will focus too much on crafting and not enough on dungeoneering. (Source: "Preserving the Appeal of Dungons" http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...=1#post1578532)

It's a shame that crafting has become a skeleton of what it was since re-launch. But maybe now that the game has 1.8 million subscribers, SE can take a risk and come out of their self-imposed crafter-hate and give crafters some love. I for one would love more crafter quests that delve deeper into the stories of each city-state and its inhabitants rather than "Make X and Deliver to Y" ala the horrid Carpenter quest line.

But remember, workshops some time in the future. Please look forward to it?

[Alexander_Dragonfang]

What i would love would be for us to craft vanity gear the same way all exclusive dungeon gear is, using materials dropped on the dungeon and tomestones to craft exactly looking non-stat dyable versions of gear dropped in dungeons or tradeable for tomestones.

Want to dye allagan? pay.
Want to dye onion? pay.
Want to dye darklight? pay.
Want to dye AF? pay.

The dyable versions would be just "skins" you could use ONCE over your gear, so they match the Ilvl of the item you which version you want but you keep those stats. That would be just fine. Crafters would not craft BiS, crafters will crafts for something more than turn in leves or other crafters materials and gear.

[RaideDuku]

They should make (at least some) coil drops "damaged" and you have to take them to a crafter to get them repaired to use them. They'd be untradable, but you'd have a system like materia where the person with it opens a window with the crafter, crafter agrees to fix it, and it's done without the gear actually changing hands. Now you have something for crafters to do end game, and you make sure people still have to run dungeons to obtain the gear in the first place.

You have my contact info, SE. Let me know if you want to give me a job. A corner office, if you'd please.

[Sessurea]

keep dreaming of ways u wont be making money off of crafting...

[juniglee]

As many have stated, the reason crafted gear can never reach the level of dungeon gears is for a few reasons:

- Vertical progression: In this game, all we need is "one gear set to rule them all". Just by context, the iLevel system means that as long as you are capped on primary stats, you are technically geared enough to take on the toughest fight in the game, which is Twintania. There is no reason to have more than one set of gear, unless you're a hardcore min-maxer (ie. those people with separate sets for Warrior MT, Warrior OT, and Warrior pure DPS, and even in this case, your Warrior MT set is still enough to do the OT/DPS job).
- Combating RMT: We also know that crafted gear simply introduces an outlet for RMT to abuse. The reason dungeon gear is non-tradeable is to prevent RMT (but look at how selling runs is about the same as selling gear too). If crafted gear were to be non-tradeable...then what's the point of even having crafted gear at all? Combined with the above fact of vertical progression, an i90 crafted gear is equally as good as an i90 gear from Coil, and there's literally no reason to have both - one or the other is fine, simply for the max primary stats (ie. VIT +15 on i90 accessories for tanks) you can gain in the current point of time. If you were given the option to buy them outright instead of farming a dungeon for your drop, people would be geared in a day or less, as long as they had money to burn.
- Pace of Gearing: If you were to able to be geared within a day just by buying everything, why do Myth caps exist now? How would we implement caps such that you can only buy an i90 piece every week or fortnight from the marketboard?

That said, I believe the only way to make crafting relevant is horizontal progression. Perhaps introduce some stat that makes specific fights easier. For example, being able to craft gear with innate Fire Resistance for Twintania, then being able to meld any required secondary stats like Accuracy in order to take on Twintania. Introduce more secondary stats. Knockback Resistance? Chance to inflict Piercing Resistance Down debuff every x seconds? I don't know, something needs to be done to put them on the same level, but not have one invalidate the other completely.

Otherwise, it'll be just a mere afterthought. I do enjoy crafting myself, but recently I've lost the joy in crafting, because I don't craft anything else other than spiritbonding accessories.

[CamAlch]

I would have loved to have seen a system them involved both high level crafting and endgame dungeons. For example instead of obtaining an Ifrit weapon or accessory upon defeating Ifrit, you obtain a fragment of Ifrit's Horn that can be used to craft a weapon/accessory. This concept could apply to any equipment and any content and it supports both aspects of the game.

On a related note, I loved the system in 1.0 with battle regiments where you had to do something specific to get a drop, for example breaking off Great Buffalo's horn.

[Felis]

On a related note, I loved the system in 1.0 with battle regiments where you had to do something specific to get a drop, for example breaking off Great Buffalo's horn.

Yes, this was good.
But it was not with battle regiment. It was with specific skills from specific classes
Like Concussive Blow from PGL to break an antelope the horn or to punsh away the head from a skeleton
http://lodestone.finalfantasyxiv.com.../battle02.html

[Sessurea]

yes yes but people gearing up through myth alone are at least contributing to the health of the duty finder.

[Chayala]

This is going to be a little bit of an odd rant on crafting that I have. People say that you can't expect crafting to be awesome and give you the best end game gear without unbalancing things. I say you're insane. Let's run down a list of games and how they managed to do some really awesome things with crafting.

Everquest - Scars of Velius probably one of the better expansions in terms of lore even with the unfinished storyline of the tower of frozen shadow. It had a three way war that you could participate in. It had GOOD gear you could craft that only raid gear could beat. On the same note it also had some of the hands down best loot, a shawl of awesome stats and bonuses that was the end of a long line of quests (Perhaps less grinding and waiting and more relicy like current games. If i hadn't been a druid with track this woulda been even more hell for me). The best of the best crafted gear often DID outperform raid gear. But it was no drop. And involved raiding in many cases. And involved putting in time and effort. So, you go into the next expansion. Good gear to craft and some nice toys you could use as well. Each expansion till the latest ones had good craftables but they required people to go and do things and minus things like bows(which gave up AC in a slot most tanks wanted so it was geared towards rangers or swapped in for pulls) very narrow in scope.

Anarchy Online - Still going. VERY VERY involved crafting system. Have to use your level up stats to go into crafting rather than going into other stuff that would help you in combat. Often leads to crafting bots. But the crafter needs items that are gotten from dungeons as baselines and it's very VERY well done even if it is archaic.

DAoC - This game had wonderful gear with no stats at release. high quality giving huge damage resistance and damage(Store bought 85% quality drops 85% quality in most cases, some quests and drops could be 85%-100% quality but for the most part the only way to get above 90% was to craft it which had a bottom level of 90%. This had a very VERY bad crafting system by today's standards but it had an order/delivery service you could use to cap out your skills and make money from the begining of the game no matter your level and the ability to salvage items and use them for siege engines and defenses. In Shrouded isles you could enchant your gear that was crafted and even OE(over enchant) with the chance of breaking it. The amount o enchantment it could hold was based on it's quality. It wasn't till most everything got nerfed and EA pushed most the stuff that made the game good out the door that the game started dying).

EQ2 - Actually had a better crafting system than this game. I'll just leave it at that since the game itself didn't grab hold of me for very long.

FFXI - This game had so much in crafting. Cooking that was not just viable but essential. And not just essential but situational. You needed to figure out what food you wanted or needed and often times this changed as you upgraded gear. Cooking was huge, wood working alchemy and others were used to make things such as ninja tools and arrows and other consumeables that allowed people to perform at a higher standard. While again an Archaic form of crafting compared to say EQ2 or this game it was really fun. Add on to that the best tank gear for it when HQ'd or the gear for Promy(the empty gear for the first few) were really useful. Fishing bait was made cheaper. You could get items from vendors or you could get a crafter to amke one cheaper maybe. Or make a HQ of it.

What do 4 of the 5 of these have in common? 3 of them have had paid subscribers for around a decade. They've had closer knit communities because people work with one another. Raids provide gear yes. Crafting provides gears. Raids provide crafting materials FOR gear(Specific drops not this bullshit you buy from the vendors). Even if it's not open world(or even if it is and you handle it like rift or the Odin/Behemoth fights and make it a bit more forgiving. Iunno about you guys but I think that collecting the shards of Odin's sword and going on an adventure to restore it to it's true glory or crafting behemoth horn weapons, having to do all sorts of stuff to bring out the primal force that is a behemoth would be an interesting storyline AND work well.(Because honestly, the behemoth outside the CT is a hell of alot more scary than the one inside).

Materia needs to be expanded/uncapped or just removed and have crafted HQ's upped in stats. Because as it stands you can't stack good stats there are no side stats as people have said. And to those who said there was no good gear for crafting in WoW i'd say you were wrong. There was gateway raid stuff. Ilvl 200 or so when the expansion hit. And it was wonderful till the pity epics got thrown to everyone. You had a thriving economy and yes you have RMT. But the problem with RMT is when you put in too many controls. FFXI's biggest issues with controls was the 7 item limit on the AH. I dunno about the rest of the servers but argent dawn had a number of guilds who would flood the market undercutting super high prices by the gold sellers and had GM's actively doing their job and tracking them. This game seems content to just block them by making gil meaningless so let the RMT run free because nobody cares.

But that's my point. People DO care. Some people say "Crafting shouldn't have a place". Others say "Crafting should be able to craft great gear!" And others say "Crafting should be a stepping stone and nothing more.

My response to this is this. If this game is ever going to get out of it's gate without sacrificing the crafting classes to try (And unsuccessfully so far guys) kill RMT you need to make it so that player interaction is USEFUL for crafting. Add Tiers of crafting like the stars. Each tier would require different things. Now, if you wanted to do top end crafting to make the best gear in the game(Or rival) without setting foot in a dungeon, what's wrong with that? Should it be quick? No. Should it be easy? No. If you wanted to, could you take 1,000,000,000 light leather and then turn it into the highest quality leather (well a handful at this point probably) to craft a good armor piece in WoW? Yes. You could. Which would take less time and effort? Running a few dungeons or spending months farming and skinning boors that only give 2xp a pop(Yes I made that reference).

Crafting is as much about a sense of accomplishment and goals as what everyone wants to go on about. Some people want world firsts. Some people want their name on their gear(Signable craft crystals in FFXI. Hi). Some people want to get past the RNG that hates them(It took me 63 kills total to get a moldy earring in FFXI with a TH5 half the time because my luck sucked that bad. I actually was told to sit out of HNM's IF i wanted things because my LS actually thought that I was cursed and that if i wanted it and was there it wouldn't drop. The sad part is that the drops i got were from me running into zone and getting them after months of refusing to listen to them. A funny story but true.) This game doesn't have to be an everything to everyone game but this game has three main flaws and this is one of them.

1) Crafting and gathering have little to no reward. I don't see people demanding they make millions of gil. I see people who are like the dragoons of old in FFXI after sam nerf. They couldn't hold out the DPS themselves and if their drake died... They lost about 30% of their DPS which made nobody want them. And unlike there you can't just sub a mage job and have 3 drg's soloing IT's with healing breath). Stating 2 items out EVERY CRAFT that is useful is not really very useful. Cooking is minimal at best but it did make me money and it did have a purpose. But most people refuse to use it anyhow. I've had to kick people for refusing to use food when progressing in coil when we had people who couldn't make it. But the fact of the matter is that gatherers and crafters want to feel like they are a PART of the game. As it stands yes you can get a minor upgrade going for it. But the amount of money is insane and few have the cash to meld so expensively.

2) 100% Vertical climb. With huge a limit on who you can take(As in numbers and class composition with how limit breaks work and the mechanics they're shoving down throats). This. I never imagined why anyone would say that everything before 50 doesn't matter. I imagined a DEV would say that and mean it. The journey is worth it. I can't think of a game that i played that the journey to cap level wasn't MORE than worth it. friendships and guilds forged in the adventures had. From black burrow to westfall to Darkness falls. (Yes many different games) you had people you'd run into you'd work together and you'd have fun. You'd develop relationships and could go do things together.

3) This one is something that comes from 1 and 2. People talk about this "Toxic community" often and others make fun of it. I"ll let you in on a secret. FFXI wasn't half so toxic as this game is. WoW for the longest time wasn't toxic. Most of the fights i saw were over gearscore and alot of them were from people in full PVP gear without ANY pve stats (Hit etc that you need for raiding) bitching that someone with a 'worse score got in'). One thing that got me was when someone said that people would be upset about people not having new gear and having this happen. "Oh you don't have X item bought? Bye.". Why don't you look at all the "No relic? No full Mythology? Bye." I've seen people with the "Best" crafting stuff turned away from farm groups because they literally wanted ilevel 85 or 86+. That's how dumb it's gotten. And the worst part is that Yoshi P even said he had people play WoW to get an idea on how to do this right. The problem is WoW is hemorrhaging people for a number of issues. People are getting bored. People don't feel the challenge. People bitched and moaned about boss fights in FFXI WoW and EQ. All still take subscription(Although EQ has a terrible free system that forces you to sub if you ever raided and yeah. This comes from someone who has gone back a few times.) The best parts about WoW was the storylines in vanilla and Wrath of the lich king. TBC was ok but meh. You had crafting in both of those parts of it that were wonderful. You had gear that was insanely good not just in bonuses but in being nodrop for the crafter that required either dungeon runs or very long quests. Most the people I know who quit after lich king(I quit shortly after cata came out because i wasn't a fan of my classes being rebuilt from scratch every expansion, although that game STILL has more diversity in builds than here. Funny with the multiple jobs and everything huh? Oh wait that's sad not funny. i get it mixed up.) Except for now with the preorder to 90 thing they're trying to get people up to the same level as the majority of their fanbase(Because if you look at EQ making leveling easier and others it was there to catch people up to a fan base not to marginalize the world they built). Right now FFXIV seems to be doing what other games have done or attempted to do out of necessity to bring players closer together... But instead they're using it to drive them apart. No interdependence on crafting = no friendships. No interdependence on leveling at all?(And I have to say not a single dungeon in this game holds up to scarlet monastery in vanilla. And not a single raid holds up to Stratholme(which again is a group dungeon). With the lockouts on the "mini raids" and the no lock out on the "Crappy" raids you have it so that people who want to do high end stuff either ARE elitist, or are labeled as wannabe elitist. It separates everyone. Nobody bothers working together when leveling up unless they're on the same quest and don't wanna maybe fight for spawns. You might get a heal or something. That's about it. That's a bit if too. And this brings us to some of the reasons that other players I know have stated they've left wow. "What little community is left is eroding under the trolls and the 'elite' who think they're better. And what's left is just doing free raids that you eventually face roll through with the buffs." So it seems to me anyhow that they're looking at and copying the wrong parts of WoW... They should embrace the crafter. They should allow people to have melded armor or break spiritbonded armor regardless of the source(Except perhaps the artifact armor. stuff that MIGHT be used in updates at a later date. There should be an option in the party or duty finder to select "This server only" so that people can choose to try and group up with people they might say hi to. I think in all the times i used it leveling my jobs i met... 5 people total. That's it. just 5 people. Normally i ran with 1 person who was my friend, but still. out of however many runs I did that's just terrible. You lack accountability and you give out pity "epics" to people who can't actually play nice enough with people to actually go and do dungeons with friends but heaven forbid a crafter be able to do something useful in this game? At this point there are a VERY VERY few accessories that can be used if you spend the millions to meld them. You also have food. Could be improved but it's by far THE BEST. Then you have alchemy. Not the worst because potions when poped at the right time for stat boosts CAN be very useful. Say alchemy is the most useless and I'll deny it. Vit potions have saved my life as both a paladin and a warrior and our drg has saved our life with str potions when I still ran coil. Weak yes. Useless, no. Everything else though? Totally not worth anything. And that's the point. People have different wants. Different views. You have to try and make them all happy. But when so much work was put into this you have to wonder just what is FFXIV to them? They still aren't working with the ISP's (which most games do the moment this happens or even gives them forewarning.) I came back to this game after 1.0 wanting to love it. I found some friendly people of the same mind when I came back. I loved crafting in the other games i mentioned. The pride of wearing your own marked item was nice. Having a prestige item like a coldain prayer shawl(or it's later upgrades) and other crafted items were not only a sign of grit as a crafter but also of your dedication in raids. I mean, is it really that hard to have three sets of craftables? Sub dungeons. The whites. Can be Aetherial level if melded and HQ. Dungeon, requires specific drops from dungeons but has materia spots in it. and raid stuff. Screw the tomes. You want an ilvl 100 caster staff? You need the piece off the boss itself. Personally I think that they wanted to get as much money back as possible on this game and don't want any bad press so they just say accounts instead of subscriptions whenever they release information. It makes things look good, word gets out on sites and people look into it. But in the end they'll be lucky if the end up with the "sustainable" 400k people. Because remember, "casuals" are huge in number but leave on a whim. While the hardcore little taru who's trying her little heart out to help craft gear for her free company and friends would stay. (BTW, I do not view casual as someone with no time or skill to be 'hardcore'. I view them as the word suggests. They have a casual interest. They don't care all that much. it kills time they finish story get to the point they can't progress and unsub.)