I wake up and click on FFXIV logo...

[Lemuria]

well, you don't have to keep playing. Maybe go find something else to play or do. Many of us are still enjoying the content.

Oh for goodness sakes, please can people stop using this argument instead of addressing the concerns raised? It doesn't make you intelligent, or witty, it just makes you come across as someone who doesn't have a cohesive response.

Let's get the obvious out of the way first. This game has flaws. This should be a no-brainer for everyone, because there's no such thing as flawless, ever. A lot of people hate the scrip system, myself included. I feel it's an unwarranted obstacle. The rewards offered are too low, and the cap is too low. The ingredients used to make some of the higher end recipes even REQUIRE the use of scrips to make, so you get even less of a return on them.

If you've carefully constructed a masterpiece, only to miss the deadline hand-in by a few minutes, there's no telling when the next hand-in will be for that item. I had an Opal Ring in my inventory for 5 more weeks before I was able to trade it in! It's not as if you can devalue it to a HQ item, even if the quality bar was maxed, and NQ items are next to worthless.

Can we also talk about why level 140+ items are still converting into tier 3 materia? If I can convert a level 55 chestpiece into a T4 materia, shouldn't the higher level stuff be way out of the Tier 3 park by now? We should be looking at a chance to get T5 materia through conversion with the really high level stuff, but I'm pretty sure it's only available through Mutamix currently.

Anyway, enough of my ranting. The point is, the OP has a really good argument. What do you do when you hit all your caps for the week? You can't progress your crafts any further, you can't get better gear for your White Mage or your Paladin, and you basically just log off until the following week. For myself, this is why I play it in shorter bursts. I'll log in, do some crafts, do my dailies, and then log off. I do this once every day so I can reach my caps. This might mean playing for an hour or two each day, tops.

Crafting is a bit of casual fun for me, but the scrips turned it into a relentless grind (so did the earlier 3-star grind, as it required insane levels of expensive materia melding to qualify, but this is much worse) and it's taken some of the fun out of it. I'm on record as saying I was actually looking forward to the system as, on paper at least, it sounded like a great way to get high end gear without too much hassle.

I think I gave them too much credit.

If you have nothing to do, can't you craft some HQ 50+ recipes or something?

Well, sure you could. But there's a few issues. Firstly, the MSQ and sidequests give away most of the crafted gear between levels 51-59 like they were Halloween candy. And they're all HQ, so we don't even have that as an advantage. This significantly devalues them, and basically means the only ones who care to buy are themselves crafters looking to hand-in for levequests. At level 60, you do NOT have any level 60 crafts by default. They're all gated behind the scrip system, and you will need a fair number of hand-ins to get your recipe books.

Incidentally, all of the level 60 quests also require recipes hidden within these recipe books.

So, while you can HQ some recipes there's nothing truly valuable which isn't either a pain in the butt to obtain the materials for, or is otherwise gated in the first place.