I'm not one to enjoy needless formalities, so I'll just get to the point.

The current Materia Melding system is flawed because it relies to heavily on other players. That's all fine and well in a perfect world, but if you don't have a trusted friend with a high craft level, you can be sure you're not getting any materia melded.

First off, to get a crafter to put materia into your gear you have to shout to get one, a simple enough solution. However more often than not, unless you put an overly extravagant reward up for a meager task, no crafter will want to aid you. I have seen many a person shout in Ul'dah for several hours offering rewards of 50k per item or greater to no avail.

Secondly, once you find a crafter you have to put your trust in the person with your items, there really is nothing stopping them from taking it if they so choose. Even if a GM is able to return your items to you, that should not be a risk nor hassle one has to go through to get materia melded. Prices of ATK IV materia on my server are above 2m each, would you trust some random crafter that's helping you only because you're paying him with something like that AND whatever item you're putting it in? Thus far I havn't had any problems with this, but I'd really love there to not be a risk of it.

My suggestion to fixing this problem, at least in a slight way, is to be able to put things in your bazaar just as you would to have them repaired. One would have to put a catalyst and materia into a slot on the armor but it wouldn't be counted as melded and a special icon like the repair hammer would be added to signify that they need a crafter.

On a related sidenote, fix the repair system as well so that the reward for repair and the item up for repair take up only a single slot. The materia system I suggested should also take up but a single slot.

Thanks for taking the time to read this and continue the good work on making this game a real game.