What am I missing?

[Jirianna]

A known fact - FF is subject to DDoS attacks resulting in service failures and disconnects
A less known fact - if you are mid-crafting when DC happens, you lose your crafting materials

When trying to file a bug for this I keep getting a reply of "use the one-time restoration service and we'll get them back for you". Really? Or am I missing something?

[Enkidoh]

I wouldn't use that 'One Time Item Restoration Service' for crafting materials though, as that is a last-resort for if you lose rare gear or something that cannot otherwise be replaced by normal in-game means due to a bug. What is happening in your case though I assume is the server/client is registering a connection loss while crafting as a failed synth (probably as a protection against player exploits), and so consumes the materials. It sucks, but that's all I can think of what is happening here.

All you can do is just accept the lost materials and try again (and hope you are not DC'd) - unfortunately SE, or any company, cannot prevent DDoS attacks due to their nature, and under the User Agreement, they are not liable for in-game loss due to it either.

[Jirianna]

Ah, so worse customer support than anet does indeed exist....

thanks for your reply!

[Zaiaku]

I have had this problem myself while crafting and I can agree with you that it is infuriating. There is nothing worse than losing the materials of a high craft item that takes a fair amount of time to gather.

You could try macro commands to make the item so that if you are disconnected the macro has already sent the information to the server. I'm not sure if it will work though, but at best it can speed up your crafts so that the time window is smaller. There are a few websites that will lift your character data and give you the most effective macro to craft, giving you the greatest chance of getting High Quality too.

[Niwashi]

I wish the servers would remember people's crafting progress, so that if you were disconnected mid-craft, you'd still be mid-craft in the same state you left off when you log back in.

You could try macro commands to make the item so that if you are disconnected the macro has already sent the information to the server. I'm not sure if it will work though, but at best it can speed up your crafts so that the time window is smaller.

I believe macros are executed client-side, with the commands sent to the server one by one as they come up, so a disconnect would interrupt that as much as it would a manual craft. And they don't actually speed up crafting, just make it easier. You need to round up the time in each of the macro's /wait commands to ensure the next command is ready by the time it's used, so they're actually a bit slower. Provided you know the rotation and don't need to spend time figuring out what action to use next, you can do the same rotation faster manually than a macro can do it.

[Yui_Tenshi]

I wish the servers would remember people's crafting progress, so that if you were disconnected mid-craft, you'd still be mid-craft in the same state you left off when you log back in.

Personally, I'd want this as well. Though I wonder if it'd be good for servers to store every crafting progress since that could be a lot of data going to the servers with so many people crafting. Then it'd be us crafting up the attacks. :P

[Niwashi]

Though I wonder if it'd be good for servers to store every crafting progress since that could be a lot of data going to the servers with so many people crafting.

While we're online and crafting, it's already doing that, as it's the servers that keep track of everything and determine how much progress we're making. The only difference would be including it in what's remembered when we disconnect.

I'm assuming there would be few enough people disconnecting mid-craft to keep the extra stored info pretty minimal. And there are only a few things it would need to store: item being crafted, turn, progress, quality, durability, CP, and several status buffs (along with their time remaining, turns remaining, or number of stacks as applicable). That's a relatively small record, and would only need to be stored with our character info when someone disconnects mid-craft.