[Dev] Repair system problems

[Colt47]

There are too many loop holes with the repair system to begin with. The dark matter is nice, and being a melee player as we speak, I got my smithing to 28 which is probably the greatest success for me as a crafter. I remember and thought to myself if I leveled gold smithing I would achieve making money and repairing my weapons, wrong. The reason is that the materials are logically too expensive, thus the dark matter saved the day from expensive of items.

However, this leads another array of problems: Getting it fixed. Retainers are slow, I'm sorry but it just doesn't work for me and it took two days waiting to get my entire junk getting fixed. Retainer market halls are primarily just to sell and seek junk there. People don't charge by the dark matter, they charge by the level required to be fixed. What else is there... The npc. Ah yes the npc... let's lower the price but get things fixed at 75%. Really? Why get paid to do a half lazy taru's work?

Also, multiple jobs means multiple craft jobs needed to cover all aspects of equipment and weaponry. The cost for gil investment in getting it all to 50 (except fishing of course) is roughly 20-40million gil, and the most I ever had was just 2 million gil selling fresh equipment from quests and crystals. Not to mention is takes non stop daily (one month) to get to 50 per craft. This kills the idea of being a casual player and forcing me to be a full time crafter on every other job just to play other jobs, I just can't do that.

High crafters, especially the rich ones, sometimes they don't bother to stop and help you even if you asked. Ask another player you say? Well, sure only when they're on at a different time 5 hours latter while I'm trying to get some sleep.

In short

Repairs are costly even if a player wanted to self invest in crafting.
Most players may or may not want to do it unless offered large forks of cash.
Level difference demand in price.
Npc total failure to fulfilling adventure's needs of repairs.
Time consuming even if dedicated.
Prevention of performance & a time sink of wanting to do other activities but cant.

Solution: Get rid of it.
http://www.ffxivcore.com/topic/29745.../page__st__120

A huge voting poll was made and several others want it gone too.

You also left out that seeking repairs doesn't actually add much to the gameplay for the seeker. The individual giving repairs does get a benefit out of the act in the form of money and maybe some SP, but the only thing the person seeking the repairs out gets is the right to continue whatever activity he was previously interested in engaging in. It's not the same as seeking out a crafter to get an item produced, where gathering the components can be an adventure in it's own right along with the benefit of receiving a more powerful item.

It's pretty clear that SE has to do more than just change the cost of the NPC repairs: They probably have to change the role player driven repairs serve from being a mundane maintenance task to something higher up on the food chain. There are better ways to show that people playing DoH's are superior to the common fodder of the land than to make the common NPCs utterly incompetent at what they do. That is, unless the repair NPCs are really a part of an entire racketeering enterprise meant to rip off travelers, in which case: Adventure plot point!