Square Enix, please think about both Casual AND Hardcore crafters..

[CookiesNCreams]

ARR/HW crafting was too difficult imo.

Well, I’m glad someone finally admitted it lol. I wish people would just be honest and say “i dont like old crafting cuz its hard and i like easy crafting” so I appreciate your honesty!

I just disagree with catering to one community over the other. Such a bad business move, really. Instead of catering to only casuals, they should cater to hardcore players as well at the same time. Both casual and hardcore crafters.

Wanting one to prosper over the other is just mildly spiteful and selfish. That seems to be what 90% of the posts here seem to want. Casual mechanics to overpower any sort of hardcore mechanics/recipes/content that SE could possibly add in. Everyone should have a fair shot tbh.

[Granyala]

Well, I’m glad someone finally admitted it lol. I wish people would just be honest and say “i dont like old crafting cuz its hard and i like easy crafting” so I appreciate your honesty!

I leveled crafters in ARR.
I leveled crafters in HW.

What turned me away from highend crafting was the timesink around materia melding and desynthesis.
Crafting was NOT difficult by any stretch, yes RNG could screw you sideways but that's just that: RNG. As a player there wasn't much I could do to compensate. hell there was even a web based crafting simulator available, so you could try rotations and stuff w/o sacrificing materials in the process.
Doesn't get much easier than that.

Tedious & time consuming != difficult and most certainly != entertainment for me.

In SB I crafted the more highend stuff because melding my gear became much more feasible with a nice and easy supply via scrip. Esp cheal IV materia made a world of difference in being able to attain the necessary stats w/o grinding my heart out.

The crafting process itself didn't change that much, imho. It was just way easier to kick any RNG influence to the curb.

To reiterate, since you seem to like the truth only the way you want it: crafting was not "too hard". It was "too time consuming" and ultimately not worth the effort. My RL time is limited, I do not like when games deliberately waste it.

I disagree with the idea that (for crafting only) RNG never equals a challenge. Yes, it could. A good crafter, who understood how to use their abilities and how the entire system worked together, could either rise above bad RNG or use good RNG to their advantage.

Only in a very limited way. Reacting to condition procs and maybe switching to a backup rotation.

In practice, you would just up the ante on HQ materials if your resulting average chance was too low and oftentimes it was not possible to recover once a skill missed 3 times in a row (Dat 80% ). Then you just finished the item and prayed to RNGsus for HQ. If you knew that 100%ing was impossible for your gear, you just farmed up mats for say 5 crafts and brute forced HQ via RNG gaming (similar to how crafting worked in AION). Neither required any player skill, just time.

I mean, I craft hundreds of end game gear for all 8 servers on my data Center, have alts at all lvl80 crafts, earn roughly 800M Gil a month, (due to how absurdly easy crafting is now, more like 500 or 600M) and I do it all because it’s fun. I would classify that as “hardcore.”

Hardcore in no-lifing stuff / dumping time into a video game maybe.. well definitely.
Hardcore in the term of player skill like some ultimate raider? Nope.

Again: I would not be opposed to crafting needing actual player skill to successfully execute (no I don't have any ideas, I'm not a game DEV).
However, RNG crap and soulless grinds can go where the sun doesn't shine, as far as I am concerned.

[Jimmymagic]

Are you kidding me? Really? RNG is the worst concept in any genre of gaming and has no challenge or skill involved just "luck".

I despise Rng and drives me insane on gathering nevermind the frustration of getting leveled to do prudent touch.

Easier crafting makes me feel like the effort of gathering is rewarded IMO.