Ability to Downgrade Elemental Crystals into Shards.

[Fated]

In order to give RMT another outlet to make money.

[Zumi]

Should prob be desynthing and should be alchemy

[kyuven]

The time I've spent waiting for a new tank after we votekicked the last one for trying to hold the party hostage or waiting for a healer when the last one dropped, when I (or someone in the party) could have just changed to fill the missing class so we were only waiting on an easily-replaced DPS.

It's been discussed before, but the major reason is the reverse of that: People could queue for a dungeon as a tank and then switch to DPS as soon as they got in.
If it seems overly petty, keep in mind it actually happened.
Breaking down crystals seems like a great idea until you realize it would obliterate the profitability of shards for lower level players. Granted that already happens because of RMT, but they don't need any MORE help, y'know?

[coldreactive]

It's been discussed before, but the major reason is the reverse of that: People could queue for a dungeon as a tank and then switch to DPS as soon as they got in.
If it seems overly petty, keep in mind it actually happened.
Breaking down crystals seems like a great idea until you realize it would obliterate the profitability of shards for lower level players. Granted that already happens because of RMT, but they don't need any MORE help, y'know?

Nailed it.

[Grimmel]

Breaking down crystals seems like a great idea until you realize it would obliterate the profitability of shards for lower level players. Granted that already happens because of RMT, but they don't need any MORE help, y'know?

Except low level characters have all the means to make money without shards. As they level up; doing quests and leves, they shouldn't be looking to grind shards to make their money. Heck they couldn't even sell the shards till they obtain retainers and by then they should have a good amount of gil from story missions and side quests. So saying this would ruin the profitability of low level players is mute when they have literally nothing they need to be spending gil on. By the time they reach 50 on one class they have other things to do to make more gil in a quicker amount of time than spending 3 hours a day farming less than 1,000 elemental shards.

The demand for Crystals and Clusters would still give legit gatherer's a way to make gil as I rarely see any RMT farming those.

[Ryel]

Breaking down crystals seems like a great idea until you realize it would obliterate the profitability of shards for lower level players. Granted that already happens because of RMT, but they don't need any MORE help, y'know?

While i get what you're trying to say, this always has been and always will be faulty reasoning.

legitimate players should never be punished content wise for something that RMT may or may not do, the pressure should be on the STF to ensure that RMT don't run rampant as opposed to hurting game content.

[Sylkis]

/1234567890

Greetings,

There has been a lot of discussions and feedback regarding shards and I’d like to respond to what I can.

• Shard yield
  The development team understands the shard yield amount to be an extremely delicate issue. They are very carefully looking into whether they increase the amount of shards yielded and how much they would increase it as they give consideration to the economic effects.
  
  
• Methods of obtaining shards
  Looking at the current shard yield and the amount of shards used in recipes, we are currently looking into new methods of obtaining shards; however, we will not be making it so they simply drop from monsters.
  
  
• Crystal and cluster breaking
  There have been some comments about the feature in 1.0 where you could break down crystals and clusters, but we do not have plans at the moment to implement this. The concern is that it will become difficult to control the prices of individual shards if they can be produced from crystals and such.
  
  For example, in the future if there are requests to increase the cluster yield, being able to break these down into shards would overflow the market, and as a result it becomes much easier to use clusters, but the prices of shards would drop.
  
  
• RMT issue
  We understand that there are RMT issues surrounding shards and the STF is after them every day.
  
  We’ve mentioned this many times already, but if you notice any suspicious activity it helps us a lot if you could make a report by going to [System Menu] -> [Support Desk] -> [Contact Us] -> [Report Cheating].

[Grimmel]

/1234567890

• RMT issue
  We understand that there are RMT issues surrounding shards and the STF is after them every day.
  
  We’ve mentioned this many times already, but if you notice any suspicious activity it helps us a lot if you could make a report by going to [System Menu] -> [Support Desk] -> [Contact Us] -> [Report Cheating].

And yet the RMT we report for this exact behavior are still up and running months later from the day we've reported them. It is also increasingly difficult to report the bots that tend to hide underground.

[kyuven]

legitimate players should never be punished content wise for something that RMT may or may not do, the pressure should be on the STF to ensure that RMT don't run rampant as opposed to hurting game content.

It's nice to dream, I guess?
RMT is already the reason we can only mail people on our friends' list, as well as the reason we can't send friend requests to offline players.
Anything that has to do with pricing automatically has to take RMT into consideration upon implementation.

[Adrian74]

Change job in dungeon?....I'm seeing how that'd be easily abused already....

"I want to farm light for my BLM nexus but... Always using BLM is just too boring... Uhm... I'll use any of my other DPS!... And before the last boss I change to BLM, yay!"

That, to be honest, would be awesome in my case, but...I doubt that'd be something SE would want to deal with.

Oh, for the shards... I have 9999 of each element... Do you know how? UHm... Okay, we are all noobs after all! I'll happily give you my secret!...I... Just... You know... I have someone that likes to rob things from houses and to bring me fishes... Tired of it I sent that person to gather shards for me instead...

PS: It was a joke, I don't have 9999. Mostly always around 8000... The excess above 8000 is sent to market board.