Possible melding NPC.. .what do you think?

[AzraelX]

During the live letter it seemed Yoshi P seems ambivalent about adding an NPC that melds materia (advanced melding excluded). His reasons against is that it means less player interaction in an MMO.

Personally I am on the fence on this since I have no problem shouting at the FC wards and/or Iddlyshire for anyone to meld my materia for free; therefore a melding PC would not make such a great difference for me- perhaps some added convenience.
So what do you think? Just add it for convenience and for players that just don’t want to interact at all?

[Canadane]

I want to see more reasons for people to level crafting classes, not less.

[AskaRay]

Lazy...
mean opinion? Yes, but that's okay.

If I, the epitome of "I don't want to talk to you" can /sh to friends or strangers (since late at night my friends are asleep) for a few quick melds, then so can you.

[Luxea]

Redundant feature.

You already can get away with minimal interaction via DF. Melding too? Come on, the whole point of a MMORPG is to interact with each other so you can't do everything without depending on others PLAYERS. It's not hard to make friends, really, start by greeting people in your FC/LS/dungeons/pf, if things are well, add to friendlist, if they ask for help, offer, or if you need help, ask. People on the internet aren't out to bite you.

[Yallaid]

I can commiserate - I never melded any of my leveling equipment both because i knew it wasn't worthwhile to deal with materia until end-game and because it meant shouting and tracking down other players which is always going to be something of a barrier.

An NPC that can do basic melding would definitely have players like me getting a lot more use of grade 1-3 materias and it'd make it a lot easier to just throw some Vit or main stat onto a piece of leveling gear for the hell of it. BUT, I would NOT like to see this hypothetical npc in my opinion. There has to be a better way to encourage participation in the Materia system that doesn't remove the player/player interaction element of the whole thing. Losing that would be too big of a cost.


I'd like to see a system where you can request melds from players and fulfill requests for melds - much like the current market board. Something where you might have to leave an item on the 'Materia Board' for a few hours while you wait for a player to fulfill the request, and maybe post an attached donation to anyone that does. This kind of system would encourage participation more than what we have now (shouting in a populated area) but it would retain Crafters/other players as the sole participants.

tldr: removing player/player interaction from an MMO is not the way to handle this issue.

[Kaurie]

Personally, I think the player interaction doesn't need to be forcibly enhanced via the current melding system. Further, I think that my interactions with melding have been pretty meh. I have received melds from numerous people on my server, and if you asked, I'd be able to regurgitate only one of their names.

[Welsper59]

Redundant feature.

You already can get away with minimal interaction via DF. Melding too? Come on, the whole point of a MMORPG is to interact with each other so you can't do everything without depending on others PLAYERS. It's not hard to make friends, really, start by greeting people in your FC/LS/dungeons/pf, if things are well, add to friendlist, if they ask for help, offer, or if you need help, ask. People on the internet aren't out to bite you.

I think it needs to be stressed that the "interact" portion of this is in the sense that you're actively seeking real people to do something for you. For anyone who may look at that as not being a form of interaction to build lasting relationships, it isn't supposed to be lol. It's just a tool to interact between each other, no matter how minimal said interaction may be. It's your typical craft request sort of thing. Hello's/request > action > goodbye's/reward. The same sort of interaction that might happen with IRL stores or services... which is literally how it traditionally was designed to be in MMORPGs.

Having said that though, I don't see the NPC addition to be of any detriment to the game. This does practically nothing on the scale of reducing interaction. Again, going back to the IRL stores reference, how meaningful is that to someones daily social life? If you're a typical socially healthy human being, not much. Keep in mind that it also removes the uncontrollable burden on both parties of present.

Starts with the player wanting someone to meld, where the variables are 1) finding someone capable of melding, 2) finding someone with those capabilities that is willing to do it, and 3) said person is willing to do it for an acceptable price (ranging from free to X). If any of those are not there, the seeking player is out of luck... and socializing does literally nothing to help it. In fact, if such a streak continued, it'd be possibly detrimental to socialism in general, due to an outlook that said server is unhelpful/dead/etc, not to mention an overall distaste for the game. Of course, the option to level crafts is there too, but that's another matter.

If they want to add in a limitation of basic melds only to NPCs, that's fine. That's probably the preferred approach to this, given the new means of materia use. Personally, I'm one of those crafters who don't actively heed the requests, unless it's someone I know... even then, I may not lol. As selfish as it sounds, I didn't level crafting with the sole purpose to help others or be at their beck and call. Having crafting as a large reason to why I played MMORPGs for over a decade, I've dealt with more than enough situations where people request crafters for something, which in turn made me wait around for 30-60min or more for them.

[Silica-chan]

I don't see the problem with it. With the new gear having Materia slots I'm not surprised something like this would come up sometime plus overmelding stuff would still require a crafter therfore I don't see much of a loss in player interactions.

[Colorful]

I don't think player interaction should be forced in this manner, especially when it feels I'd just be pestering friends to meld my gear so I support it. Overmelding will be kept to crafters, as it is now.

[Kaisha]

If they're going to spend any time on the melding system I'd rather it be them adding a retry option to the Request Meld feature (like they did for personal melds in 3.2) so I'm not stuck waiting 10 seconds between attempts on someone's 8% overmeld.