Crafting UI Quality of Life

[Faustabor]

When churning out large amounts of crafting items, it's irksome that there is a full second before starting an item and after completing the item where the crafting interface and crafting log swap.

What I mean is: when you click Synthesize you then have to wait for an entire second before the creation interface pops up and you can start working on an item, there is no technical reason why there should be this long of a pause and in regards to the suggestion that its purposefully exists to create a "preparation moment" before starting, this is one of those ideas that is cute in theory and horrible in real life, no one wants to be artificially slowed down by UI elements, its simply bad design to make the game not able to be interacted with for a full second before and after crafting an item, it takes control away from the player for literally no reason. It would be wonderful if this artificial break was fully removed.

[Faustabor]

In addition it would be lovely to allow the player to specify that they want to create X items and then allow them to create those items one after the other. For instance, set the number in the crafting log, click synthesize, crafting creation starts, create your first item, happy flash of light, CP resets and you're immediately able to begin working on your second item, complete that item, happy completion light, continue work, et cetera, without needing to keep telling the system that, yes, you do in fact want to keep making this item.

[Faustabor]

An alternative improvement would be to allow multiple items to be instead created in parallel, the purpose of this would be to allow you to quickly process a large number of items below your level. For instance you could specify that you want to create 100 leather, then you enter the crafting creation interface and now you have a creation bar that is 100 times more in its Progress and Quality than normal, and now should you successfully create all 100 you will get 100 of the exact same parameters, meaning if you manage to max out the quality bar you could, in one go, get 100 HQ leather pieces, alternatively you might fail the progress check and lose everything.

[Faustabor]

Inevitably people will tell me that I clearly don't understand that this is the reason why Quick Synthesis exists, but Quick Synthesis is a rather lackluster response to players wanting to be able to create large number of items quickly and has been since its implementation, especially since it was purposefully designed to penalize players for using it, hence why they should work to augment not subvert their crafting system.

[Rongway]

Normally, I'd suggest you edit everything into your original post to bypass the 1kchar limit, but in this case I'm actually glad you posted separate posts so I can like the first two but not the others.

Inevitably people will tell me that I clearly don't understand that this is the reason why Quick Synthesis exists, but Quick Synthesis is a rather lackluster[sensible] response to players wanting to be able to create large number of items quickly and has been since its implementation, especially since it was purposefully designed to penalize players for using it, hence why they should work to augment not subvert their crafting system.

But...that is what Quick Synthesis is for. You can do it right, or you can do it fast; and if you're a great craftsperson, you can do it fast to get a lot of normal quality intermediates, then do it right to turn those normal quality ingredients into a high quality final product.

You're not asking for a UI/UX change here. You're asking for a crafting system overhaul (for which there's another forum where people can discuss the pros and cons of this sort of change).


Your first two posts are UI/UX suggestions, and good suggestions at that, because we really could do without the break before starting and the breaks between synths, and it would change nothing about the difficulty of crafting or the quality of the end product.

[Dzian]

Quick synth churns out quite a few hqs these days as well. I did a few stacks of stuff for a friend to use for collectibles and experience and ended up with 27/99 chimerical felts hq. And 14/35 crawler silks.

[Faustabor]

Normally, I'd suggest you edit everything into your original post to bypass the 1kchar limit, but in this case I'm actually glad you posted separate posts so I can like the first two but not the others.


But...that is what Quick Synthesis is for. You can do it right, or you can do it fast; and if you're a great craftsperson, you can do it fast to get a lot of normal quality intermediates, then do it right to turn those normal quality ingredients into a high quality final product.

You're not asking for a UI/UX change here. You're asking for a crafting system overhaul (for which there's another forum where people can discuss the pros and cons of this sort of change).


Your first two posts are UI/UX suggestions, and good suggestions at that, because we really could do without the break before starting and the breaks between synths, and it would change nothing about the difficulty of crafting or the quality of the end product.

@Rongway
Didn't know that I could bypass the system in that manner, thanks for the tip.

I agree with you that the third and fourth posts don't belong in this section, they are changes to the game rather than the UI.

However, as I began in the third post they were intended as an alternative proposal, you called Quick Synthesis sensible, but to me it seems silly to purposely design the game to require many, many transformation steps, refining base materials into intermediate materials, which can then be used for the final recipe but not provide a way to work more seamlessly in bulk. I called Quick Synthesis lackluster because it takes control away from the player, I LIKE that FFXIV has you actually performing the crafting steps while making an item, versus systems where you click an item and a cast bar chugs along, which is what Quick Synthesis is. It frustrates me that they had choose not to push their crafting system's design more, but instead give into player's demands for a rote thoughtless "make stuff" button, where players just go AFK rather than engage with the game. Yet, I agree this isn't the forum for that particular discussion, and Quick Synthesis has been here for many years, so it's unlikely to change any time soon, maybe in the next expansion well get some larger improvements to crafting and gathering (can you imagine if gathering was as fully developed as crafting is?).

I'm glad you liked the first two posts though, I too think that it would be a very nice quality of life change for crafting if they went through and tried to, across the board, remove those character lockouts.

@Dzain
I agree that when you greatly out-skill an item you can get very, very large numbers of HQ items in Quick Synthesis, my annoyance comes from the fact that its not me creating those items, I know that I can do better, even if the difference between quick synthesis and normal crafting were only a 5% difference in HQ items obtained it seems like such a cop-out to suddenly throw my crafting into auto-pilot. Its not efficiency that annoys me, its principles, which isn't a great argument albeit.