Crafting Needs a Place in Endgame Raiding

[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.

[Sylve]

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.

Well, i guess we just look at the HQ a little different. I view it as a bonus, something a lil extra. NQ Vanya melded is still as good as Darklight. If i farmed the Materials for it, then the NQ is the aim, the HQ is the bonus.
It would still be a profit of however much you sold it for, just not as large as had you gotten HQ, since you never invested money into the making. Only time.

I still maintain that crafters should simply not have bought the Philo materials for that much. By being the only ones demanding, you do have control over the price point. A vocal boycott of MB Philo Mats would have driven down the cost of materials and end product considerably. Which would allow you to sell on volume instead of making bank on a single item once in a while.

I'm glad to see you have a solid opinions though (mine are opinions too ). Too many posts are junk, just mindless ranting about how it "should be better".
I don't think Crafting has a place in Endgame Raid Content. Because thats the reward for doing that Content in the first place. Vanity sets, that being gear with a unique appearance, is an excellent way to keep Crafting relevant for Combat Classes. Housing is mostly just for fun, but again keeps Crafters in business (but only if you make it affordable).

Materia Melding i think just needs to be changed completely. A lot of people want side stats that are not CRIT/DET/ACC. I'd like to see Materia moved from offering just stat boosts, to making small changes to the way skills work. Nothing so powerful as adding to the Damage Reduction from skills like Rampart, but something like:
"Increases the DoT duration of Touch of Death by X seconds, but reduces the Potency by X"

It'd give gameplay options without making it critical to success, and give Crafters and Melding in general a little more purpose.

[Susanoh]

I still maintain that crafters should simply not have bought the Philo materials for that much. By being the only ones demanding, you do have control over the price point. A vocal boycott of MB Philo Mats would have driven down the cost of materials and end product considerably. Which would allow you to sell on volume instead of making bank on a single item once in a while.

By this logic, players wanting high level equipment could have also boycotted that equipment, which would drive the prices of that equipment down very quickly, and cause crafters to not want to bother buying philo materials to make them any more. Then the people selling philo materials would lower the prices because crafters would no longer be buying them.

You seem to have this unrealistic expectation that it's the crafter's job to collectively control what prices are, but that is just not how the market works at all. For tome sellers, other tome sellers are their competition, and for players buying high level equipment, other people buying high level equipment is their competition. The same goes for crafters. You aren't going to see some mass collusion going on between every crafter on the server any more than you'd see it with any other group, because if anyone did try to start something like that, the rest of the crafters would just pass them by. What you're suggesting would just never, ever realistically happen in a free market with so many competing individuals.

[Penguinmayhem]

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As a crafter crafting endgame-tier gear, your greatest competition is the game itself constantly encouraging and even pressuring all players to simply ignore crafted gear entirely and go straight into dungeon grinding.

It's not just that crafted gear is inferior to the highest tier of non-crafted gear by a huge margin, it's that ALL the endgame crafted gear has dropped gear that is almost exactly identical in stats and also doesn't cost gil.