How to fix this red scrip nightmare:

[Jeykama]

I did my ixali tribe religiously everyday. And I bought some from mb for around 120k-70k each.

I think his point was, you've bought time-limited materials before. You could have never done your Ixali dailies and simply bought all those sealants nonstop and kept crafting whatever you wanted to use or sell.

How does this change now, except that the "sealants" are personally gated to 7 a week? It doesn't. Nothing is gating your ability to push your crafting buttons except gil, same as before. It's just these new things are more expensive because more personal effort has to go into each item.

And fwiw, I don't really mind red scrips. Everything in this game even remotely related to progression is gated. I'm sure even the i210 gear from airship exploration will be gated, because it's >i160. All I'd want changed is to get rid of the damn mobs staring at nodes (looking at you, stupid bear and jellyfish fate in Hinterlands) and a way to convert the "rare" favor items into something useful because spending 3 tokens is not useful. Have like 40 of each of those stupid "rare" items sitting around that I can't ever use until they unlock red scrips.

[Silverbane]

Have like 40 of each of those stupid "rare" items sitting around that I can't ever use until they unlock red scrips.

My wife and I both have all crafts, MIN and BTM to 60, and my wife also has FSH to 60. As a result, my wife spent the extra three weeks getting a third DoL red scrip mainhand, and as a result has a modest stockpile of red crafting scrip built up during that time. So I give her my excess Favor tokens, including rare ones, and she uses her crafting scrips to turn them into mats. This is apparently a pretty typical method of using them, although usually some gil needs to change hands and trust is required.

I don't know the going rate per red crafting scrip is in such a transaction. The additional starting quality from one or two HQ red scrip mats is pretty substantial, so it might be high: HQ Leaf/Land-born Aethersand has a comparable effect and has a few sales at around 1,000,000 gil here on Faerie. Perhaps a split of the mats between the provider of the Favor tokens and the provider of the red scraft scrip could be worked out instead of any gil changing hands.

[Ohiuu]

"It's the economy, stupid."
There's always been a grind, there's always been some kind of a gate, we've always had to shell out big if we wanted to bypass those previous two issues. However...the gate as it stands is too severe and the lack of participation between adventurers/crafters/gatherers is the real issue at hand. We'd all be a lot more tolerant if the favor mats sold regularly. In order for that to happen, we'd need adventurers that could farm and sell something to crafters and gatherers that would be able to buy something from crafters as well (besides OH and accessories). An economy isn't a one-way street. The current issue is that not enough people are willing/able to participate to create demand. Gathering by and large saw some interesting updates in 3.0 but the broken paradigm of crafting/farming has made it irrelevant. I would recommend reducing the red scrip token cost of favors to 25 (also probably lower the HQ mat cost in crafter tokens to 1) to allow for more access and then address the issues that left adventurers broke and crafters unable to sell anything in the 2star world. Beyond that the changes proposed would be a bit extreme if they were all to be implemented simultaneously.

If you're more of a visual person, look at the amazing diagram posted by Caimie_Tsukino in this thread's first page: http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...woes-circa-3.0.