How would you change Specialization?

[Solarra]

I started the game in HW and for me, the option to specialise came far too late in the game to be attractive.
I started out only intending to level 2 or 3 crafting classes, quickly realised it wouldn't work due to needing the cross-class skills and went down the omni-crafter route. By the time I'd levelled everything to 50, the option to concentrate on just 3 classes for the last 10 levels seemed pointless. Specialisation always felt like it was taking something away from me rather than offering something extra.

How would I change it?
-I'd offer specialisation much earlier, say around level 15. Put the quest in with the Guildmasters and let the Soulstone give the same boost to craftsmanship and control as you get now.
-I'd scrap the specialist abilities (I've never used them and I don't know anyone who does). Instead I'd do as Roth suggests above, let your specialist classes get access to all the cross-class skills as you level them. This would eliminate the need to level everything to 50.
-Annoying as the recipe locks can be at times, I'd keep them as it really does encourage you to make friends and cooperate.

[Roth_Trailfinder]

-Annoying as the recipe locks can be at times, I'd keep them as it really does encourage you to make friends and cooperate.

To be perfectly honest, all it has encouraged me to do is get and keep a small stack (10-ish) of the blank Soul of the Crafter, and then plan out what I want to craft so I do not need to return to a Specialist once I've left it. Plenty of time later on to rebuild that small stack. Right now, in anticipation of T4 materia needs for crafting, I've got 136 RCT. That would have been 14 more Souls of the Crafter had I wanted them. It is not hard to change specializations, merely somewhat time consuming to get the RCS.

The effectiveness of specialist abilities can be fixed, but I don't really see an easy solution for the competition aspect. Even if specializations have abilities that mirror cross class (quick and easy fix that is better than messing around with and balancing 2 different sets of abilities that can be used simultanously), there would still be complaints of omni-crafters dominating every market though more competitve pricing.

You can never fix that competition aspect, not with the current recipe design; with the exception of CUL, which has no materials refined by other classes, anyway. The simple reason is that an omnicrafter will always be able to make those refined materials more cheaply than someone who does not have the right class leveled to produce it, Specialist or no.

Locking recipes behind Specializations does two things. First, it stifles competition. Rather than having everyone able to produce it, you have less than 50% of people able to produce it (depending on exact Specialist breakdown). Second, it increases the cost of the goods to the board buyer. When you have fifteen people producing something and trying to get it to sell, you get into an undercut war. When you only have two people with the right Specialization trying to produce somehting and sell, your undercut war is far less likely to happen, meaning simultaneously a greater profit margin for the crafter, and a deeper gouge into the buyer's wallet.

[MN_14]

You can never fix that competition aspect, not with the current recipe design; with the exception of CUL, which has no materials refined by other classes, anyway. The simple reason is that an omnicrafter will always be able to make those refined materials more cheaply than someone who does not have the right class leveled to produce it, Specialist or no.

Oh I agree. In the idealized case, the locked recipes are supposed to force "omni-crafters" to buy materials/final products from single class crafters and vice versa. However, in practice, players can get around it through alts (uncommon) or by swapping specializations and then mass producing materials or even final crafts. Also, due to the unpopularity of endgame crafting in general, certain markets will invariably be controlled by one or two players (could in theory be a single class crafter which does solve the omni-crafter competition problem at the expense of all buyers). I don't think the developers considered the buyer angle or they only used the largest servers as some kind of benchmark in estimating market activity.

It's more or less impossible to design recipe locks in such a way without severely affecting one party (buyer) as they're intentionally designed to help a single-class crafter by removing their omni-crafter rivals from the equation. At most, you could solve the single crafter complaints about omni-crafter competition but you'd open the door to a flood of monopoly complaints.