Crafting Needs a Place in Endgame Raiding

[Susanoh]

What you're describing is not unlike how you have to obtain your pre-relic. An item required to craft it was a dungeon drop, needed to be crafted and melded. However in reality there are listings on the market board for the whole thing pre-made and ready to be turned in for a handsome sum of gil.

This is what would happen if you made it a part of the best gear, unless you made everything BoP which would then be useless for dedicated crafters because there's no market in that. This is why crafting will always be second-fiddle in gear progression, because having a gil shortcut to gear with a RMT economy is practically pay 2 win. There's a market for crafters out there already and it is sufficient and stable.

If you want to make the point that the game doesn't want a relevant economy because they want to combat RMT, I won't argue (that may be the case actually).

I wouldn't exactly call this game's economy "sufficient and stable," though. In creating a market that items are incredibly abundant and most are in low demand due to so many better/easier to obtain options, it definitely keeps everything cheap and accessible which can be great to combat RMT. On the other hand, a market that has been designed specifically to have little meaning isn't exactly thrilling to get into either.

[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.

[Viridiana]

Such a simple solution to this. . .

Make the actual best in slot (for a few slots, not all of them) be something unsellable that requires an unsellable dungeon/raid drop. Then you make the second-best a close contender but clearly inferior, so there's a desire but not a need to get the BiS.

Oh, look, you now have a BiS that requires DoW/DoM and DoH! And heck, you could even make one of the mats an unsellable DoL gather! The best part is, since none of it can be sold, there's no chance of RMT getting involved.

[saber_alter]

Such a simple solution to this. . .

Make the actual best in slot (for a few slots, not all of them) be something unsellable that requires an unsellable dungeon/raid drop. Then you make the second-best a close contender but clearly inferior, so there's a desire but not a need to get the BiS.

Oh, look, you now have a BiS that requires DoW/DoM and DoH! And heck, you could even make one of the mats an unsellable DoL gather! The best part is, since none of it can be sold, there's no chance of RMT getting involved.

but then the person is forced to level a DOH and DOL to use it, which isn't helping them or the economy.

catch-22 much?

[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!?

[stephenjd3]

Such a simple solution to this. . .

Make the actual best in slot (for a few slots, not all of them) be something unsellable that requires an unsellable dungeon/raid drop. Then you make the second-best a close contender but clearly inferior, so there's a desire but not a need to get the BiS.

Oh, look, you now have a BiS that requires DoW/DoM and DoH! And heck, you could even make one of the mats an unsellable DoL gather! The best part is, since none of it can be sold, there's no chance of RMT getting involved.

this might be the worst idea yet

[Sunarie]

I would like crafting gear to be put on par with items you can buy with tomes (I would actually like to see tome gear be the stepping stone for getting into top tier raids and not on par with what drops in said raid). I also wouldn't be opposed to some items that are BiS, can only be used by the person who crafted them, and require a drop out of a raid. And yeah, I know that wouldn't boost the economy if it was only used by the crafter, but it would make the profession useful.

SE isn't gonna do it though.

[Viridiana]

but then the person is forced to level a DOH and DOL to use it, which isn't helping them or the economy.

catch-22 much?

Oh? I thought the thread was complaining about crafting being useless. I'm suggesting a use for crafting. Plus, y'know, only one of the mats is coming from a dungeon. That still leaves a handful of other mats that can all come from other crafters.