Please increase yields of shards for DoL

[Mayoyama]

Hello community team

As the prices of shards, crystals and clusters continue to increase on many servers, including mine, it is becoming increasingly discouraging to many players who would like to enjoy crafting but are put off by the costs of the shards, and the sheer number of shards needed to craft things at the higher end - particularly 45-50+ where you spend up to 11 (?) shard per attempt to craft anything, and things like undyed wollen cloth and undyed felt, which are used so commonly used, consume such a large amount of shards if you need to make these in any sizeable quantities.

Would it be possible at this stage of the game to revise the amount of shards (and possibly crystals) that can be yielded though DoL classes (miner and botany). I think the clusters are still ok at this stage but it is so easy to burn through hundreds of shards and then need to either spend quite a long period of time farming them up one by one (and occasionally using the elemental wards), or spend a large amount of gil on shards, many of which I am sure were either obtained through botting or through the tradecraft leve triple hand in trick people have been abusing since 2.0 (and is being fixed in 2.5).

[Mayoyama]

Either this idea... or allow us to break down the crystals/clusters into lesser forms like you could in FFXI.... type of desynth perhaps? Or maybe a new action?

[NationOfZealots]

If the idea applied to a retainer's increase in shard ventures then yes, please! Otherwise I don't support, still too many botters on my world.

[Mayoyama]

If they made shards easier to obtain, less people would feel the need to "support" botters by buying their shards from the MB....

[MilesSaintboroguh]

You have a few nodes that boosts your gathering quantity by 1 if your elemental resistance is above a certain threshold. Use those elemental skills in your gathering class to boost your your gathering to 4 units. Pop a few cordials. Bam, you just gathered a ton of shards. If you're a hardcore crafter, then perhaps you should ask your FC to help you gather shards and crystals. You also have levequests tradecrafts that give shards too.

As for breaking down clusters into shards and whatnot, the devs basically said no due to balancing and programming problems.

[Kiara]

The other end of this spectrum is what they did in 1.0:

* Shards flowed freely from nearly every creature you killed *and* you could gather a bunch.

The end result was that Shards were so abundant it *killed* any Bots / RMT. Even people who didn't craft had plenty of Shards (Clusters were rarer of course). The prices were super low, and it basically made it so Shards weren't an "issue" when you wanted to try Crafting or just selling / trading a bunch to LS / Friends, etc.

By making Shards such a pain to gather, it's ironically allowed RMT / Bots to thrive: Because it's SO TEDIOUS those with "Unlimited Time / Manpower" (i.e., RMT hoards or Bots) have the advantage and many regular players just resort to buying them off the Market Boards at high prices (compared to 1.0).

[Kenji1134]

Here is a relative simple solution.
Increase shard yield by 1 for every 100 combined points of Gathering, Perception, and GP-400.
Increase crystal yield by 1 for every 150 combined points.
Increase cluster yield by 1 for every 250 combined points. - maybe

The idea is that a bot who can gather shards with a 100% success rate from lets say level 3, will get 1, maybe 2 shards per hit... maybe.
To comfortably reach 2 or 3 shards, said bot would need to get to at least lvl 10, and get some actual gear.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, a lvl 50 player with their class mainhand, militia offhand, HQ class gear, and HQ accessories, without any melds will have... ~323 gathering, 321 perception, and 573 GP.
This amounts to a total of 1217, -400 = 817/100 = +8 shards per hit.
As well as +5 crystals per hit.
And potentially +3 clusters per hit.

Lets focus primarily on shards. If every lvl 50 gathering suddenly got 9 shards per hit, while some random bot only gets 1... suddenly the bots need to work 9x as hard to reach the same productivity.
Of course the simple solution is to get said bot leveled, and *heaven forbid* get them actual gear to they can reach at least 6-7 per hit to be somewhat productive.
But they are bots, they hate putting in actual effort because they could be banned at any moment.
Plus with real gatherers getting 9, maybe 10 with top end gear, shards per swing, gathering will not feel like such a chore.

[Mayoyama]

The other end of this spectrum is what they did in 1.0:

* Shards flowed freely from nearly every creature you killed *and* you could gather a bunch.

The end result was that Shards were so abundant it *killed* any Bots / RMT. Even people who didn't craft had plenty of Shards (Clusters were rarer of course). The prices were super low, and it basically made it so Shards weren't an "issue" when you wanted to try Crafting or just selling / trading a bunch to LS / Friends, etc.

By making Shards such a pain to gather, it's ironically allowed RMT / Bots to thrive: Because it's SO TEDIOUS those with "Unlimited Time / Manpower" (i.e., RMT hoards or Bots) have the advantage and many regular players just resort to buying them off the Market Boards at high prices (compared to 1.0).

This is what I had in mind...while I didnt play 1.0 (I got into alpha/beta and didnt like it), the idea of having an abundance of shards seems to make sense in reducing crafter's reliance on bot-generated shards. I have fc members willing to donate to me, but at the same time they too dont wish to have to spend several hours to then replenish their personal stocks.

When this game launched, or shortly after, I could get shards for 30g each or less because of the sheer number that flooded the market with people getting them from low lv DoH quests, leves etc... now I'm lucky to get most shards for less than 90-110 per which doesnt seem that much but it realy adds up when you start needing to buy them in lots of 1000-2000 at a time, per type of shard... and clusters are anywhere up to 1.7k per!

The outlay for someone looking to start crafting seriously (and has no high level crafting experience) now is quite high due to the sheer number of shards they will need to get all the artisans/supra/etc... not to mention if they then want to try desynthing artisans stuff for their own mastercraft/FCIII's