This red scrip system doesn't seem very casual-friendly..

[Fenral]

My actual plan is to get the red scrip gear for Blacksmith first, and by that time my Miner will be geared enough to switch to grinding Favors instead. I can sell the mats I don't need and keep the ones I do to make the tools for my other two specialist crafters: Armorer and Leatherworker. As Leatherworker I will have access to recipes for most Armorer and Leatherworker gear, as well as belts and gatherer accessories with no red scrip equivalent. For the gear I can't craft as these three, I can rely on friends who chose to focus on other crafting classes, as well as this thing called the Market Board.

This will take time. And money. I am okay with this. But by the time I actually get to the point where I feel comfortable crafting the above, supply and demand will be at a much more stable place than they are now, if Ehcatl Sealant is any indicator. I will never be an omni, but I never intended to be, and the current system is ideally suited to the style I always preferred.

[Yumi_umi]

To sum it up,
There is atm, no carrot on the end of the stick.

We r chasing a loose string that has nothing on the end.
We might not see anything till 3.1+ so for now SE has brainwashed some ppl into mindless grind zombies.
I thought this game was catered to casuals .-.
U cant be a master crafter without being a master gatherer atm as there is little to no supply of red mats on the board lmao.

[Ossom]

I hate to say it, but this is very likely SE's intent - make it possible for really dedicated players to advance their gear faster, but gate it behind a mechanic that forces you to be really dedicated to going that route. Then provide the slower option for the people who can't be bothered with the "fast" method.

Have to agree, I have friends who have already made 4-5 pieces of 2 Star crafted equipment (I myself have only made 3) and then I have friends who are doing the red scrip turn ins and will be getting their first tool Thurs/Fri.

If you wanna gear up your crafters fast, then you need to invest the time, it sucks we know, comparing it to Alex Savage makes Savage look a little easy, that's not a problem with the system itself but more with the Rng rate of the favors, its too low, increase it a little and lock DoW/DoM behind blue scrips instead and I think the system will be good.

[RiceisNice]

...
I hate to say it, but this is very likely SE's intent - make it possible for really dedicated players to advance their gear faster, but gate it behind a mechanic that forces you to be really dedicated to going that route. Then provide the slower option for the people who can't be bothered with the "fast" method.

They're already gating the material purchase along with red crafting tokens as well so the amount of progress you get per week is still blocked by that anyway (unless you pool your crafting tokens or purchase off MB). Crafting already has a natural dependence on gatherers to get their items, but requiring an average of 90 minutes of gathering for one material craft is obnoxious for a self-sufficient crafter when you already have red crafting scrips being a weekly lock.

[Ronivan]

I'm a casual player, I can play the game 3, max of 4 hours (not everyday). I'm a casual player and why I don't feel its casual-friendly? Most of time in game, 90% of it, were as a crafter. So whats the point of paying the game now? I'm locked up in a pointless cap system, the only time I really need to play the game is every Thursday, the rest of time is farming materials for the red scripts and trying to get some gear for my BLM. Actually to be honest, craft is almost useless. I don't have money to buy new stuff, so I depend much of what I can make by myself, but I'm tied on the favor system, its impossible for me, I don't have enough free time. I can't craft anything so I should wait what, one year to get my jobs geared? This system is so ??????? friendly.

[JonBigwood]

Getting the best gear has always been very difficult and needed a big effort. People were getting their luminary tools at the start of the game with a huge grind and for not a lot of stats, for example.

Red scrips are casual friendly in the sense it is easy to get red scrips. The crafter red scrips are quick and easy to obtain, you don't need HQ items, collectability equivalent to just about to 50% HQ, much easier. Retainers bring most of the materials needed. You need to level gatherers and retainers if you want to save a lot of gil on mats.

The gathering red scrips are more difficult, since you have to wait for the times. About 9 trips a week to a couple of nodes is not that much. Not that I think it is fun to do, but getting the Supra tools going to one node wasn't fun either. Edit: You don't need HQ, just collectability. Much easier than HQ.

It is casual friendly also in the sense that a hard core gamer will obtain no more than 450 red scrips a week, he has a cap that a casual player can easily meet too.

For very dedicated players there is the crafted melded gear, much more difficult or expensive to get, but they can get it much sooner.

Edit: Other question is just now we are working to get a gear we don't really need, except to craft the 2 star items that need very difficult mats and most players won't make the effort to craft. The very dedicated players will have a big edge to make money when new recipes and gear come, that has always happened.

[Ronivan]

They're already gating the material purchase along with red crafting tokens as.....

In my opinion, I really doubt SE will ever remove the Red Script Cap. The reason is that their whole Craft and Gathering system depends on that to keep the current crafting state. If they ever remove the caps, lets say for Red Craft Scripts, it would ruin the
gears that would be made by other crafters and nobody would to do favors. Now if SE removes the Red Gatherers Script, it would become much more easily to make the new gear by craft, as you would not need to worry wasting you weekly cap scripts. You see, one script cap removal kills the other, with some minor changes. I think that the max SE will do in patch 3.1 is increase the caps to 900 or something like this. We will be a slave to this mindless cap system as long SE needs to squeeze money out of subscriptions. I will not be surprised if they don't change the caps at all in 3.1.

[XiXiQ]

I'm a bit over it all these days. Had most crafts/gathers at 4*, but I'm done with grinding to grind for an RNG chance.

[JonBigwood]

Now about the favor mats needed for crafting, limited by needing the red gatherer scrips.

Looking back, there was a moment when demimateria was needed and required a big grind to level desynthesis. You would either spend a lot of gil buying demimateria or spend a lot of time (and some gil too) leveling desynthesis. People who leveled desynthesis made a lot of money selling demimateria, by the way.

Later the Ehcatl Sealants, gated by a weekly limit of how many you could obtain. Much easier to obtain than the mastercraft demimateria, and obtainable by crafters not necessarily at top level/gear. But with a weekly cap limited by the beast tribe allowances. A player could sell the sealant for nice income if he didn't plan to start crafting the higher items soon. Crafters could buy the sealants if they needed more than the ones they obtained. (Or people who asked a crafter to craft for them for a fee could do that.) Later the beast tribes cap was doubled so the offer of sealants was made easier.

Now with the favor mats it is not so different than with the sealants. You need a leveled gathering class to obtain the mats (instead of doing the Ixal tribe quests like the sealants.) Probably at first the gatherers will keep the gatherer scrips for themselves to get better gear (likely main tools at least) but soon they may start to do the favors and sell the mats if they don't plan to craft the gear, supposing they want to earn gil. I wonder if the time needed to gather the scrips and then the weekly favors is much more than the time needed to do the daily beast tribes of one week.

The difference is you don't know what mats you will get, and you did know what sealants you would get. I don't know if the average gils obtained selling the weekly favor mats is higher or lower than it was selling the weekly sealants.

[Ronivan]

In the future, craft in FFXIV will be resumed in weekly caps, just like it is for WoW, where there are caps for everything. However, its not how I like to play, I don't want to pay a subscription to have to wait a year to get what I want. There are limits to which I consider caps to be good, and this new system crashes all limits. If this bullshit of weekly caps continues, its time to move on to another game.