Please Implement Auto-Reclaim on Disconnect (90% success, 10% failure)

[Katlyna]

there is only one solution and it probably can't even be implemented.

when you disconnect in the middle of a craft when you login you are back on the craft with the same progress and cp basically carry on where you left off.

That's the only "perfect" solution. But its unlikely we'll ever get this. So we have to encourage development to give us a simpler solution to improve what is a severely bad QoL issue for crafters (as if we don't have enough problems).

[Sibyll]

snip

I understand coding is always tricky and requires a lot of debugging, but continuing to build on a flawed foundation only makes it harder to change later down the line. For example, the fact that dots tick down based on the internal clock of the server and not when the dot was applied (hence why all dots tick at the same time regardless of when they were applied). It's nice that Skill/Spell Speed finally give a damage boost to these, but notice that it's due to increased damage per tick and not due to getting more ticks. You can imagine getting more ticks in per application could have some very interesting interactions with classes that go off of procs, but we don't get to see interesting stat itemization because they'd rather throw a band aid on than fix the underlying problem. I'd think an expansion would be a good time to look at fixing these types of design flaws.

[LineageRazor]

An expansion is no better a time to overhaul an existing system than at any other time. An expansion is just that - it's an addition to an existing architecture. There's nothing special about an expansion that makes it easier to root out deep-seated flaws, and given time and money budgets this means that it's more likely that these flaws will be worked around rather than fixed.

That said, the current situation is pretty darned frustrating, I agree, and it's something they ought to spend some time and money on. Even if they don't give us the "save state after every step" solution (which would be ideal, but if there's some kind of bandwidth thing similar to the inventory issues that prevents this solution, I guess we'll have to deal with the disappointmen), it'd be nice if, at the very least, they treated a disconnect as a "failed synth", and give us a chance to recover materials. For that matter, it'd be nice if choosing the "end synthesis" option ALSO gave us a chance to recover materials; it's irritating having to spam Hasty Touch until the synth breaks when I want to Reclaim and try again.

And speaking of Reclaim...

You all must use reclaim more than me. I haven't reclaimed in three months... I think the risk of reclaiming is terrible... and you guys are making it sound like reclaim is some kind of hack LOL.

It depends on what you're making, and on the value of your materials. There are crafted items for which crafting a NQ product is worthless, or at the very least worth far less than the cost of the materials used to create it. In such cases, you can consider creating an NQ product to be THE SAME as losing all of your materials. In such a situation, consider this case: due to repeated Hasty Touch failures, you now realize that you'll get, at best, a 20% chance of HQ. This means that if you complete the synth, you have a 20% chance of HQ, or an 80% chance of losing all of your materials (in the form of a worthless NQ product). On the other hand, if you use Reclaim, you have only a 10% chance of losing all of your materials.

This is the mentality behind using Reclaim. If you're a gambler at heart, you may prefer the 20% chance of HQ - but there's a reason why gamblers are usually not wealthy people.

[Katlyna]

This is the mentality behind using Reclaim. If you're a gambler at heart, you may prefer the 20% chance of HQ - but there's a reason why gamblers are usually not wealthy people.

That pretty much summarizes why I hate but will sometimes use reclaim. Functionally and statistically I fully understand why reclaim has use and I'll use reclaim when absolutely necessary. But I rarely gamble anything... I fight tooth and nail to not gamble haha ;-)

[Sibyll]

This is the mentality behind using Reclaim. If you're a gambler at heart, you may prefer the 20% chance of HQ - but there's a reason why gamblers are usually not wealthy people.

I don't really like gambling, so having the entire crafting system designed so heavily around it is beginning to get old. I wouldn't expect raid mechanics like this to fly, so I really don't see why crafting gets a pass. At the end of the day whether or not you fail or succeed to HQ a craft is in the hands of the game telling you so, and many times crafts are failed through no fault of the crafter. It's really lazy, and at the end of the day if this is what crafting is going to be like I just assume have WoW crafting. At least then I can make raid food/potions for my static in 5 mins rather than being forced to individually craft consumables that you can literally guzzle down by the dozens in a 3 hour session.

Crafting this tier actually feels like a huge step backward from 4*, both in terms of usefulness of recipes and in terms of pushing the RNG to the ingot/lumbers and allowing the final products to be safely HQ'd so long that a few of the 4* materials were HQ.

[LineageRazor]

It's really lazy, and at the end of the day if this is what crafting is going to be like I just assume have WoW crafting.

Admittedly, I don't have a lot of MMO experience outside of FFXIV. The only other MMO I've played is FFXI, and the crafting in that was PURE RNG, with very little a player could do to affect the odds. You clicked Synthesis, loaded the ingredients, and then hit the "OK" button. No matter how high your level, you had a chance to fail (something around 5%, I think), which could cause you to lose none, some, or all of your ingredients (chosen randomly). If you were above the level of the craft, you had a chance to HQ, with the best odds being if you were 51 levels above the craft, netting you roughly 50/50 odds of HQ. Of course, it's not possible to be 51 levels above the highest crafts, so you were stuck with the basic HQ chance, around 1%. You didn't see a lot of HQ endgame gear, and the pieces that folks managed to produce (purely by chance, no skill involved whatsoever) were some of the most expensive items in the game.

Compared against that, the crafting system in FFXIV is amazingly fun. You have real control over how things turn out. Admittedly, it's a system that favors mathematicians; leveraging probabilities to produce the best results over the long term is what crafting is all about. Some folks, though, just can't seem to wrap their head around the idea that just because a CAN go catastrophically wrong doesn't mean that it WILL. Murphy's Law is a big, fat lie. And, even if that odd failure crops up, you have plenty of successes to balance it out.

What was WoW crafting like? Just drop in the ingredients, and out comes a finished product? No HQ chance or failure risk?

Edit: Also, you mentioned this would never fly in Raid mechanics... except that they DO. Critical hits. Unless there's some limitation on how critical hits work in raids that I'm unaware of, every hit has a chance to crit and do extra damage. A crit or two here and there isn't likely to cause problems - but what if every hit is a crit? Not likely, of course, but it could theoretically happen. Hasty Touch is much the same way; a couple of Hasty Failures and you'll still be fine, but if all or most of them fail, you're screwed. It's the same deal.

[Alahra]

I understand coding is always tricky and requires a lot of debugging, but continuing to build on a flawed foundation only makes it harder to change later down the line.

I certainly agree--however, the problem is that this entire game is built on a flawed foundation. It's kind of too late, and they have to avoid mucking with things as much as they can because the whole architecture sitting on top of the code from 1.0. The fact that they rescued the game at all is nothing short of a miracle, but to do so, they had to cut a *lot* of corners. Even the game's netcode is still from 1.0 (which probably has a lot to do with all the disconnect issues in the first place). Sadly, they're just not in a position where they can really do major restructurings at this time.

What was WoW crafting like? Just drop in the ingredients, and out comes a finished product? No HQ chance or failure risk?

This is exactly how WoW crafting worked, yes. There was no failure chance. Either your skill was high enough to create an item or it wasn't. If it was, you clicked a button in your recipe list, the materials were subtracted from your inventory, and you got the new thing.

[MN_14]

Compared against that, the crafting system in FFXIV is amazingly fun. You have real control over how things turn out. Admittedly, it's a system that favors mathematicians; leveraging probabilities to produce the best results over the long term is what crafting is all about. Some folks, though, just can't seem to wrap their head around the idea that just because a CAN go catastrophically wrong doesn't mean that it WILL. Murphy's Law is a big, fat lie. And, even if that odd failure crops up, you have plenty of successes to balance it out.

.....and you just gave away the secret to crafting successfully. Aside from planning out a rotation that gives you the best expected results, the better you are at manipulating the odds during a craft, the better your HQ yields will be. The key is to actively assess the situation on a constant basis and look for opportunities to improve your probabilities of success.

[Sibyll]

Compared against that, the crafting system in FFXIV is amazingly fun. You have real control over how things turn out. Admittedly, it's a system that favors mathematicians; leveraging probabilities to produce the best results over the long term is what crafting is all about. Some folks, though, just can't seem to wrap their head around the idea that just because a CAN go catastrophically wrong doesn't mean that it WILL. Murphy's Law is a big, fat lie. And, even if that odd failure crops up, you have plenty of successes to balance it out.

I've had 20% Materia melds fail 30+ times before a success (yes it's happened on more than one occasion). I've failed 5 Hasty Touches with Steady Hand II in a row. I've also pentamelded using 6 materia total and gone an entire synth without failing a single Hasty/Rapid Synth. Troll the forums and you will find plenty of threads of similar stories, so if you've never experienced shit like this then more power to you for having the easiest time in the world crafting in FFXIV. Your last statement is fine if all you are doing is mass producing Wootz Ingots, but with 2* crafting you are kind of SoL if you get stellar RNG on the Ingots and Lumber but fail half of your Hasty Touches on the 2* Off hand you are trying to craft. This is where it falls short of 4* crafting. Unless you are using HQ aethersands (pure RNG time sink), you need about 9-10 IQ stacks to get 90+% meaning in a rotation where you can make 11 touch attempts you have minimal room for error. Compare this to 4* where full HQ starting mats on a final product would mean 6-7 IQ stacks would yield a 100%, but the trade off was that the ingots/lumber needed to be HQ'd from 0 initial quality. Your reward for mass producing base materials was a greater margin for error in the final product.

What was WoW crafting like? Just drop in the ingredients, and out comes a finished product? No HQ chance or failure risk?

Yes, and to clarify this is mostly aimed at things like food/potions that you need lots of and need to be HQ. NQ Draconic potions are on par with HQ X-Potions (which come in stacks of 3). In WoW/Rift there is no HQing, so you can basically craft the food and potions for an entire raid with quick synth, something that would take hours of tedious crafting to do in FFXIV.

Making potions and food in a game shouldn't feel like a chore.

Edit: Also, you mentioned this would never fly in Raid mechanics... except that they DO. Critical hits. Unless there's some limitation on how critical hits work in raids that I'm unaware of, every hit has a chance to crit and do extra damage. A crit or two here and there isn't likely to cause problems - but what if every hit is a crit? Not likely, of course, but it could theoretically happen. Hasty Touch is much the same way; a couple of Hasty Failures and you'll still be fine, but if all or most of them fail, you're screwed. It's the same deal.

To my knowledge only auto attacks can crit. The difference is as a tank/healer I can look at why I died and think of things I could've done to prevent that: 1) healer could've kept me topped off, 2) I could put on more fending accessories, 3) I could time my CDs better during heavy AoE phases etc. When I fail a synthesis because I failed an 80% chance 5 times in a row what constructive thought process can the player go through? At best: 1) get more CP to get an extra touch attempts to "lessen" the effect of RNG, 2) Rethink your rotation. CP will only take you so far as it has a hard cap and unless a rotation exists that eliminates Hasty Touch completely this really isn't changing much.

One last thing, RNG isn't bad by itself. The Good/Excellent conditions I think are fine RNG because it's something the player actively reacts to and I'd love to see more crafting mechanics where "something" happens and I need to choose how best to react to it. Success Rates are lazy RNG design and it's the equivalent of trying to DPS in a raid where you don't meet the accuracy cap. If Craftsmanship/Control raised success rate for associated skills I might actually treat these as useful stats instead of accuracy caps to reach and forget about.

[MN_14]

Your last statement is fine if all you are doing is mass producing Wootz Ingots, but with 2* crafting you are kind of SoL if you get stellar RNG on the Ingots and Lumber but fail half of your Hasty Touches on the 2* Off hand you are trying to craft. This is where it falls short of 4* crafting. Unless you are using HQ aethersands (pure RNG time sink), you need about 9-10 IQ stacks to get 90+% meaning in a rotation where you can make 11 touch attempts you have minimal room for error. Compare this to 4* where full HQ starting mats on a final product would mean 6-7 IQ stacks would yield a 100%, but the trade off was that the ingots/lumber needed to be HQ'd from 0 initial quality.

I feel that the odds are heavily balanced in your favor for level 60 1* and 2* crafts, even more so than the 3* and 4* crafts from before. Having enough CP is key, however.

So far, I've crafted around 50 2* materials starting from 1500-1900 quality. For the first 30 materials, my stats were around 721 craftsmanship, 695 control, and 440 CP (w/food). Out of the 30 materials here, I ended up with 2 NQs, with one of them being at 68% and the other at around 30% due to 5 misses during the synth.

My current stats (other than my upgraded weaver) are around 721 craftsmanship, 728 control w/food, and 455 CP w/food. I've gotten a 100% HQ yield during my most recent 20 (2* material) crafts and have noticed a sharp decline in the number of my crafts that turn out to be 80-90% due to changes I've made using the extra 15 CP. It is possible to get 5 misses like my 30% synth from before, but they're not very common. It's true that NQs are bound to happen, but your HQs should heavily outnumber them.