Crafting in this game is infuriating

[JowyAtreides]

Zero explanation given for specialist actions, overpriced materials, obfuscated paths for equipment upgrades, even the currency used is named after an obvious and blatant abuse of worker's rights (scrip), I should have known this was for suckers and not bothered.

Where is the fun in gambling that the money or time you invest in a craft will actually finish? Where is the fun in throwing materials at a badly explained system? Where is the fun?

Zero explanation given for specialist actions - Doesn't the game explain in the tooltips? Also you can get some cheap ore from an npc and test them out. As others have said, pretty much no endgame rotation uses them, only cross class skills. The only benefit right now to specialism is being able to craft a small handful of items earlier than non-specialists because the recipe is simply locked behind the requirement.

overpriced materials - Materials are free if you choose to farm or gather them. Also let's face it, what do we need gil for in this game?

obfuscated paths for equipment upgrades - Yes, they could streamline the levels that gear is needed at for levels <50, but to do that, they would need to also streamline the recipes. I kind of like the steady progression of improvement rather than the single bursts every 5 levels. Also if you don't glamour, you get to see some weird combinations!

even the currency used is named after an obvious and blatant abuse of worker's rights (scrip) - Never came to my mind and I can see why some might be a bit uneasy, but be happy in the knowledge you actually have zero requirement to use scrips to get to endgame. You can do it all by being self sufficient.

Where is the fun? - For me, crafting is fun. It's a time consuming minigame in the game where I am still actively playing the game as opposed to other games that merely say, get the materials, get instant craft.

It all boils down to the fact that not everything has to be fun for everyone. I don't find the stress of savage raids fun, but I'm not going to dump all over it because I don't like it.

[GenBroadaxe]

The worst speed bump for the crafting/gathering I hit in the game was that initial 50-52 point for the gatherers. I didn't really have to spend any actual gil on crafting gear since you can get good stuff with Grand Company seals (I wore that stuff for so long), Beast Tribe currency, scrips, and through the job quests. Certain things I think could be initially explained better, but taking some time to sit down and read through all the tool tips should solve that and I don't think I've ever used specialist actions on my level 70s (although to be fair, I've been leveling crafters more so I can make housing stuff and non HQ glamour).

It definitely isn't for everyone, especially if you want to gather everything yourself as well, but generally there's always a way to keep costs down if you know all the resources open to you.

[TurtlesAWD]

It all boils down to the fact that not everything has to be fun for everyone. I don't find the stress of savage raids fun, but I'm not going to dump all over it because I don't like it.

Do savage raids try to trick you into wasting your resources you could be using on better content?

Do other players try to trick you with this "spend money to make money" pyramid-scheme nonsense to deceive you into buying their overpriced garbage on the market boards?

I'll be honest, the reason I got into crafting was self sufficiency under the premise that if I can make my own stuff I never have to interact with e-capitalism, which is easily the most obnoxious part of almost every MMO.

Probably better to just not buy, make, or use items at all.

[HyoMinPark]

Do savage raids try to trick you into wasting your resources you could be using on better content?

Do other players try to trick you with this "spend money to make money" puramid-scheme nonsense to deceive you into buying their overpriced garbage on the market boards?

I'll be honest, the reason I got into crafting was self sufficiency under the premise that if I can make my own stuff I never have to interact with e-capitalism, which is easily the most obnoxious part of almost every MMO.

Probably better to just not buy, make, or use items at all.

How are you being tricked? I don’t understand how a lack of understanding with regards to how crafting works equates to you being schemed. It’s just ignorance, which is not inherently bad. Plenty of people don’t understand the innermost workings of every system in this game—I had to have a lot of the crafting stuff explained to me by crafter friends when I started. But I never thought I was being “tricked”.

The ‘spend money to make money’ is true for any sort of business endeavor in the real world. In order to be profitable, you have to make investments first. That’s just the way it is. It’s similar in this game—you don’t become a billionaire or trillionaire overnight.

If that is what you think, then you can think it. However, as someone who leveled all crafters and gatherers manually and only used levekits made by friends for one or two of them from 1 to 50, I found myself to be fairly self-sufficient and didn’t have to purchase much in terms of materials from the Market Board. Even to this day when I craft, I’m pretty self sufficient. It may take more time, but I’m not spending too much money so it evens out for me. I’m fairly frugal when it comes to spending habits. But I don’t craft for profit—I craft purely for the repair option, the overmelding, and to make things for my friends and my alts.

Worth is subjective to the individual. If you don’t find crafting worth it, then by all means: don’t do it. But plenty of others have found ways to make it profitable, so what they are saying has fairly decent merit whether you want to acknowledge it or not.

[TurtlesAWD]

The trick is when it encourages you to invest time and money into it when it knows full well it's going to roadblock you with zero guidance tens of levels later, failing to explain any of what you actually need to know within either the in-game tutorials or the quests provided - those quests being a part of the pyramid-scheme structure where each deceived crafter, after wasting their time and money, needs to justify it to themselves and thus resells items for those quests to other wannabe crafters - just as victims of a pyramid scheme must perpetuate it by finding new victims to recoup their own losses.

[HyoMinPark]

The trick is when it encourages you to invest time and money into it when it knows full well it's going to roadblock you with zero guidance tens of levels later, failing to explain any of what you actually need to know within either the in-game tutorials or the quests provided - those quests being a part of the pyramid-scheme structure where each deceived crafter, after wasting their time and money, needs to justify it to themselves and thus resells items for those quests to other wannabe crafters - just as victims of a pyramid scheme must perpetuate it by finding new victims to recoup their own losses.

Sorry, I disagree. I fail to see how any of this defines crafting as a pyramid scheme. As I said prior, in any business endeavor made in real life, one has to invest first and hope to turn profits later. That’s just simple business 101. If you are wanting to craft for profit (i.e., make a business out of it), you’re going to have to invest time and gil into it first to get it off the ground. Even so, you can still be self-sufficient if you take the time to level gatherers, and utilize your retainers when it comes to fetching you materials (seriously, the battle class retainers are really useful for this). It seems more like you don’t really want to do that, and would rather everything be instant gratification. That’s not how this works, unfortunately, so perhaps crafting isn’t for you. And that’s fine.


This game doesn’t do any sort of explaining for any of the jobs outside of reading your tooltips and attempting to piece together the information manually—which is a flaw, I will grant you that; but you can simply just ask you friends that may craft, or go online and research/ask questions. There are plenty of omnicrafters on this forum and the FFXIV subreddit who would give you the answers you seek if you just ask for them.

[Arthem]

This thread is confusing the hell of me, you're a fully leveled omnicrafter and gatherer. The hard part is behind you. I don't get why you waited until you got this far to complain about crafting being some kind of scam. I literally don't get what you're referring to exactly, but I'd assume you're not happy about having to buy master crafting books with scrips, and then also that you have to buy the mats to craft your gear or something? Or is it that the game doesn't tell you crafting rotations for HQing top tiered gear or something? Because the game does nudge you in the correct way all the way through but it doesn't hold your hand, especially not for something as competitive as crafting can be.

It's very common for invested crafters to spends severals tens of millions on new gear and melding each time they're released, and hundreds of millions on materials to craft and sell crafted goods that eventually will have you needing to store gil on retainers because you realize there's a gil cap and it's not very high by the time you've actually gotten to that point.

There's no scam here though. Crafters even make money each other, I buy tons of alchemics and food for example because I don't feel like crafting them when my time is better spent on something more lucrative for me. But everyone finds that one thing, or whatever it is, on their own. The game doesn't tell you what to make to become rich nor should it. The game also doesn't tell you the best order to use crafting skills to keep your costs down by hitting higher overall quality from your rotations which translates to needing fewer HQ mats. Some actually love that part of crafting, having to figure out the one puzzle you get every few patches that just becomes the same old sebutton sequence with near 0 vartiety. And once you've learned that you're set for months and months. The game shouldn't provide you with that sort of information if that's what you meant with not understanding specialist skills? Tool tips already take care of that. and really, it only takes like a few hours before someone posts new crafting rotations on crafter update patches, the crafting community is sort of its own community after all and they share rotations and crap.

Did I miss anything? Becuase I feel like you're just extremely bitter over something you really didn't enjoy doing anyway. Did you expect it to become fun after a certain point or something? Because it's the same shit you've been doing just to level everything up lol. And yeah, crafting is a constant gilsink, but if you're investing your gil into the right things (which are 100% your responsilibity to discover) then what you get out of it can easily be order of magnitude greater than what you put in. But it comes with some stuff that sucks too, like having to deal with keeping your wares priced to sell beause every crafter knows that the undercut game is a crafter's endgame lol. If you have two stocked retainer, thats not too bad, but if you have several more it can be the most dreading thing of your day but still a necessary evil to reap the rewards of being a crafter.

In closing, I find it hard to just dismiss your complaints with what seems like a very logical answer by just suggesting that if you don't like craft then don't craft. But you already did all of the crafting to get all of the skills you need at your disposal. If you didn't llike it or didn't see any signs of how it mich benefit you in the process of getting everything to 70, I think you qould have said "F this shit" a long time ago. So I guess I don't really know what elsee I could say lol. You can look at it like the WoW south park episode and ask what you're supposed to do now that you're an omnicrafter and we could just tell you "What do you mean? Now you can finally play" lol. I mean you're already there so unless you really have a vendetta or something with crafting and the game's economy, you might as well find out how it could benefit you now that you have it. Or just write it off as a huge waste of time, but I can't seem to think of a scenario of it taking someone that long to get to that conclusioon. Either way, happy trails whichever trails you decide to follow :3

[Caimie_Tsukino]

This thread is confusing the hell of me, you're a fully leveled omnicrafter and gatherer. The hard part is behind you. I don't get why you waited until you got this far to complain about crafting being some kind of scam. I literally don't get what you're referring to exactly, but I'd assume you're not happy about having to buy master crafting books with scrips, and then also that you have to buy the mats to craft your gear or something? Or is it that the game doesn't tell you crafting rotations for HQing top tiered gear or something? Because the game does nudge you in the correct way all the way through but it doesn't hold your hand, especially not for something as competitive as crafting can be.

This is exactly it. The OP have spent 2 pages on the forum complaining on things that are not well-defined. I don't even know what he/she was referring to, so I can't put up a response, LOL!

Plus, like you said, he/she has already reached endgame before this complaint. So if he/she has been doing something wrong, it's probably too late to remedy anyway. If it's not fun, then why level everything to 70 in the first place? LOL! I guess some people just like to torture themselves?

I was going to refer him/her to my crafting guide. But the more I read, the more I think it won't be of any help to him/her at all...

[Windsun33]

I was going to refer him/her to my crafting guide. But the more I read, the more I think it won't be of any help to him/her at all...

Speaking of which, I expect you to have it fully updated by tomorrow morning!

[Caimie_Tsukino]

Speaking of which, I expect you to have it fully updated by tomorrow morning!

Bah... When I saw those changes, I was like "Damn, all those previously documented things have to change now... tough work."

Anyway, I'll be on a business trip to mainland China from 7/7/19 to 20/7/19. So I won't have access to the game anyway... which is really sad.
Seems like my time in China would be a nice time to just update the old guides. But I do wanna EXPERIENCE the changes first hand before making changes to the guides, so I know exactly what impact the changes will make. Well, I do have about 1 week to play before the trip. Sadly, I have some important events with my job during that week as well, which means I can only play at late night before bed.

I think by the time I get back, everybody will be all-80 DoH already... Luckily, I'm rather loaded, so it's ok to miss the express train of gil in the first few weeks.