Crazy Crafting Inflation and Tedoius Process -- and TOS violations

[MetrotownSimon]

Having worked on the massive crafting amount of crafting for an airship, I can totally empathize with people risking TOS violations with Real Money Transactions and Botting.

(1) The amount of shards required to craft goes up beyond all reason. The item you are crafting drains so much because of sub-steps to craft components.
This then leads to absolutely tedious and unrewarding gathering of literally hundreds of shards that provide so little XP I can't detect my XP bar moving even 1 pixel.

The alluring alternative then is to either bot gathering, or use RMT to buy shards off the market board where they are listed in vast quantities for obscene prices.

How about limiting the shard cost of crafting to ONE. No increase for higher-level recipes. Star recipes can use Crystals and Clusters, but again, ONLY ONE.

(2) If you use auto-synthesis you are losing not only High Quality items that you could crush out 100% of the time if you manually crafted or used a macro.
I have seen youtubes of a crafting bot that basically macros crafting and lets you do multiple items. This should be a standard feature of the game! Have auto-synthesis read the steps from a macro (that you can already do in the game) and time-compress the crafting.

And on the subject of macros for crafting -- I find it utterly sad that a third party internet website can write you a crafting macro more easily than making the macro in the game.

[MuseTraveller]

Have you tried gardening? You can get good amount of shards from that.

[KageTokage]

TBH, I almost never see bots gathering shards. They're usually after the latest materials for the current patch's crafts, aethersands in particular being prime targets.

Though honestly as far as the crafting goes, if they have zero intention of properly enforcing people using crafting bots they really should just allow use of looping macros.

[DelSolstice]

Retainers can bring back 60 shards in a go. I tend to keep all mine at a certain level and just send out retainers as necessary. Considering Ventures cost 200 GC seals or 4 Allied seals, I'm completely drowning in ventures anyway, so it's not a bad use of them.

As for crystals and clusters, clusters are still 30 per retainer venture, and both of those things can be gotten in large amounts from Aetherial Reduction.

Also, as has been pointed out, you can grow 50 shards per shard light seed in just 18 hours (100 if you use the right soil). Like, farm a bunch of seeds, buy some potting soil, and you can get 400 shards a day if you have a small house (or at least 100 if you have an apartment). You don't even have to water them.

The only difference I would suggest to shard use is maybe making it so FSH retainers can grab shards too, and maybe even clusters. I know it doesn't make a huge amount of sense lore-wise, but it would make the FSH retainers more useful when they're by far the least useful. Like if I had 16 retainers, I think I'd still only have 1 FSH.