Specialist Compromise

[magnanimousCynic]

You forgot "lazy" crafters that simply find it faster to buy off the MB then gather the mats and hit the macro button, I see that all the time.

You have to consider Opportunity Cost, which is the time spent gathering and making the crafting materials which may need to be made into more crafting materials against the money spent buying the materials and making the item.

Sure I can make Aurum Regis Nuggets for basically free if I spend the time to gather everything, but I'd rather spend the 2-4k for the HQ Nugget instead of spending however long it takes to gather and create the item. The Opportunity Cost is further increased if I need to make multiple items or an item needs many items to make.

I fight Opportunity Cost often when doing my weekly Red Scrip items. Sometimes I buy the materials if I think they're cheap enough, and sometimes if I feel that the market is overpricing something I'll either buy the materials that makes that item for cheaper or manually gather it and buy any items from vendors if possible.

The example I'll use is 10 Noble's Codexes (when starred) to get my 450 Red Scrips. Here's the list of materials to make ten books if you bought the items that make the book itself from the MB or vendors.

• 10x Lightning Clusters
• 20x Water Clusters
• 20x Aurum Regis Nuggets (can be bought from the Vath)
• 20x Hardsilver Ingots
• 10x Chrysolite
• 10x Dragon Leathers
• 10x Enchanted Aurum Regis Ink

Crafting the 10 books will take about 10-12 minutes if you craft all 10 in one go and whatever amount of Gil it would take on your server to buy the items.

Now here's the list of ingredients to make the same ten books, but this time you want to gathering everything yourself and make the materials that makes the items that make the book.

• 10x Lightning Clusters
• 20x Water Clusters
• 310x Wind Crystals
• 50x Earth Crystals
• 50x Water Crystals
• 20x Hardsilver Nuggets (bought from Vath Beast Tribe)
• 80x Hardsilver Ores
• 20x Gold Ores
• 140x Aurum Regis Sands
• 30x Raw Chrysolite
• 30x Cloud Mica
• 30x Dragon Skins
• 10x Dark Chestnut Logs
• 20x Dragon Blood
• 10x Abalathian Spring Water

Depending on how much time you have to wait to mine the Gold Ore and Lightning/Water Clusters, gathering all of this will easily take up to an hour or possibly more. After you've gathered all of this, you then have to spend another hour+ to make the items which become the 10 books. Even then you're still buying Hardsilver Nuggets from the Vath.

The Opportunity Cost here is the ~2 hours spent gathering and crafting the materials and then crafting THOSE into the 10 books VS about 10-12 minutes + how much Gil you need to buy the materials to make into the books. Another aspect of the Opportunity Cost is that the two hours you spent gathering and crafting those materials could've been spent doing other things, like beast tribe dailies for G4 Materia or grinding tomestone for Lore mats/Anima Step.

TL;DR: We're not lazy buying materials off the Market Board to save X amount of gil, we're making the most of our time we're saving by buying items and using that time saved to do other things.