Crafting Needs a Place in Endgame Raiding

[stephenjd3]

Anyone saying crafting is fine as is has blinders on. The current collasped/near dead economy and the fact this is the only game doing it this way in the whole mmo market

when 2.0 first launched crafting gear was incredibly important it wasent until they raised the myth tome cap to 475 that made it less important, but guess what and its good news, crafting gear will be pretty good this time around since the best gear 110 will be coil, and with RNG more and more people will need to buy crafting gear, i90 crafting gear with materia? will prob be better then most i100, so it will be a great stepping stone for coil and statics working on coil.

There is nothing wrong with the way crafting is right now. Whats wrong is how easy it was to obtain the best gear in game (thanks to myth tomes being able to buy coil equivalent gear) but no more, chances are crafting will be lucrative

Also I've made millions of off crafting, and when I was still logging on, my shit was still selling, sounds like you may also not know how to use the market.

[Sylve]

better question is why does SE keep wasting time developing crafting and gathering stuff when they keep insisting they want it to be pointless.

Pointless for Raiding Endgame Content, yes. Look at Crafting in nearly every other MMO. It's all just for making gear to wear into Raids.

XIV is changing that up a bit. Change is scary. I like the direction of Crafting, and I've always hated Crafting in MMO's. Vanity options, Housing stuff, entry level raid gear and useful consumables is what Crafting should be about. I never want to play an MMO again that forces me to buy my gear at massively inflated prices just to be allowed to into a Dungeon. The Combat Content should not be held hostage by the Non-Combat crowd, which will happen if Crafters could make Allagan equivalent items.

If that was ever true, Vanya and the like would have always been more popular than darklight.

However, you must always figure out the the path of least resistance. The majority of people may simply get Mytho/Coil for 90, then jump to 100 with Soldiery and ignore crafted ilevel 90, no matter if they beat the 100 or not.

Min/maxer might be all over penta-melded ilevel 90s, but for the majority, that won't even register as a viable alternative.

The problem was that while Vanya was a BETTER choice than Darklight, Crafters made it unrealistically expensive and thus out of reach for the majority of players.
Hell, i remember getting my SCH to 50 and wanting the Vanya Robes.
At 450k Gil for a NQ Robe, and 600k+ for the HQ one, going all the way up to 1million Gil for a HQ with some useless Materia Melded in.
I even farmed up the mats for the Robe myself, started asking around for Weavers who could make one with my Materials, of the 7 who responded in the week i was asking, 5 would only make it if i paid them the full market price for buying it off the Boards, and the other 2 demanded 'tips' of 100 - 200k gil or they wouldn't do it.
I decided nope, bugger that, I'll just get Darklight, Free and only inferior on side stats.
Now that Vanya isn't in demand anymore, as the progression focused players all have their i90 kits now, the price of Vanya has dropped down to as low as 10k and is now affordable as an alternative for new Jobs to Darklight.

[Docent]

The problem was that while Vanya was a BETTER choice than Darklight, Crafters made it unrealistically expensive and thus out of reach for the majority of players.

Look at it from our point of view, maybe? When I was making Vanya Robes for profits, I paid 100k per philo mats. So at 900k cost for just those (then clusters, cocoons, rose gold, etc.), and the chance of landing a NQ if you "fail" the synth (I use fail here, but I mean "not get a HQ"), you lose more than 200,000 gil (Because you wouldn't be able to sell a NQ vanya around then for more than 600-700k).

We "charged" millions for Vanya because the people who ran dungeons sold the philo mats for so much. It has nothing to do with us trying to rip people off, it has everything to do with us selling things above cost.

[Sylve]

Look at it from our point of view, maybe? When I was making Vanya Robes for profits, I paid 100k per philo mats. So at 900k cost for just those (then clusters, cocoons, rose gold, etc.), and the chance of landing a NQ if you "fail" the synth (I use fail here, but I mean "not get a HQ"), you lose more than 200,000 gil (Because you wouldn't be able to sell a NQ vanya around then for more than 600-700k).

We "charged" millions for Vanya because the people who ran dungeons sold the philo mats for so much. It has nothing to do with us trying to rip people off, it has everything to do with us selling things above cost.

It didn't take many dungeon runs at all to get enough tomes to buy the Philo materials for Vanya stuff. The laziness of many Crafters led to an inflation in those material prices. You could easily have made hundreds of thousands of gil profit by getting your own Philo Tome materials.

Worse yet, you were BUYING the mats for that price! So of course people will keep putting them up expensive. Crafters could easily have simply stopped buying them and forced the prices lower, the resumed buying them when they reached a better price point.
But they didn't, and even the ones who farmed their own Materials still tried to sell them for up to a million gil a piece.
Farming your own mats but ending up with a NQ piece would allow you to STILL make a couple hundred thousand in profits since you paid nothing to make it.
And then the people who bought mats tried selling NQ stuff at HQ prices to make up for the mats they bought!

The biggest problem comes from the fact that many people refused to farm their own mats, it drove up the prices for even the ones that DID farm their own. Some people were making millions in profit with zero gil investment, because the guy who bought 900k worth of mats needed to make a profit.

Add to that a general sense of greed among Crafters, no Crafter would work to make a piece with no gil investment AND sell it at a low price point if half the Market Board is taken up by people who bought mats and overpriced to make their cash back, the farmer would simply take advantage of that and sell stupidly high, which is exactly what happened. And we see where that led don't we?

As for people saying to make craft mats drop from raids, if that happened, we'd end up with the Vanya at launch scenario all over again, as the Raiders who have no need of your craft gear and sell the mats to make equivalent gear at stupidly huge prices. Which naturally, the crafters would snap up and then saturate the market with overpriced stuff again.
Hell, by all means go for it. Set up that system. I'll just take the 3 Statics in my FC, have them sell the mats ridiculously high for a few weeks, then use the spare (free) mats to make our own i90s to sell and we can make millions upon millions for our bank with no effort required whatsoever. Should the other FCs start selling cheap, we'll just use our bank to buyout the entire Board and resale at inflated prices to manipulate the market back to inflated prices.
Now imagine some of the bigger FCs with 10+ statics doing the same thing.

Byebye economy.

[Susanoh]

Worse yet, you were BUYING the mats for that price! So of course people will keep putting them up expensive.

Yes, that's how supply and demand works. The same goes for the crafters who put their items up at a high price. If there's high demand for a product, people will sell it at a high price. That goes for people selling tome materials, and people selling finished products. You can't just blame the crafter every step of the way, when it's not the crafter who determines what the prices are, but everyone involved.

[Jynx]

The laziness of many Crafters led to an inflation in those material prices.

One could say the prices are also a part of the "Laziness" of raiders, if they weren't lazy they could make their own Philo gear and never need to buy anything right!?

[Docent]

Farming your own mats but ending up with a NQ piece would allow you to STILL make a couple hundred thousand in profits since you paid nothing to make it.

I don't disagree with all you're saying, but this little bit is plain wrong.

Opportunity cost. If I'm sitting on 900k of Potashes, and turn it into a 600k robe, I don't make 600k, I lose 300k.

It's still a higher RoI (Return on Investment) than plain dropping the robe (which is 900k loss).

Every time a crafter attempts to make something, there is a chance we won't HQ (unless you have a 100% HQ recipe/crafting set, which is pretty hard to get). If an item is worth X, and has 90% to HQ, you have to factor in that 10% chance of ending up with a loss when you calculate in in your average profit margins, otherwise, you're better off just selling the mats.

[Doo]

I maxed craft awhile ago, not fun playing the undercut game. I only use crafting to help myself and friends out.

[Speeral]

I maxed craft awhile ago, not fun playing the undercut game. I only use crafting to help myself and friends out.

Sadly Doo this is why you weren't making money all those people massively under cutting only missed on money for themselves, I have almost never under cut anything I was patient and I had items that were volume items like electrum I used for day to day income and one whole retainer with the big ticket stuff lvl 45 and up items that I replenished as stuff sold. I have turned over about 125 million since launch and I am not even max crafter... I just did the same thing blindly mined ore, wore crappy sb gear, turned ore into ingots. Sold ingots and material for steady income to the tune of 1.5 or so mil a week

The prices for things now makes this tighter but its the most basic and simple way to make gil... all my CT runs I always had a few pieces I can spirit bind as long as I kept up about 170-200 dps in there it didn't do anything to the raid.

[Arkghyom]

It's a theme-park MMO. You won't see this happen.