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

[Liam_Harper]

seems like whatever 5.2 brings will make or break the "hardcore" crafters and see them exit the game forever. to which i say "byeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee"!

Ah yes, then the remaining playerbase will be the sensible, mature players like yourself?

Ultimate was cleared in 4-5 days. I think a few weeks of Ishgarde (which probably had more players participating than Ultimate) is a good chunk of content.

Instead of being upset that Ishgarde didn't meet our individual expectations, we should be brainstorming ideas. Reading your post gave me an idea, weekly challenges.

I'm not an expert on Ultimate, so hard to judge, but was that 4-5 days by the majority of high end raiders? I know there was a fair bit of data-mining (which led to bans) and World First is typically a race.
Ishgard didn't really last even a week. There were 7 mounts on sale on my server day 2 and a fair few around. You just bought a few stacks of mats, set your 1 button macro to work and got every reward in 2 hours or so along with an extra or two to re-sell and cover mat costs. It also didn't seem to be content, just a glorified Rowena's Scrip grind.

I'm all for brainstorming ideas though, I don't want everything I post to come across as negative. Weekly challenges sound great and I'm all for it. However I feel the overall direction of crafting is more the issue for me than Ishgard. The high-exp-turbo-leveling easy crafting seems to have resulted in less interest from the casual player-base than more. It's throw-away content with no real goals to strive for. Very similar to BLU Mage. Also similar to BLU is funneling the "challenge" into a single piece of sub-content instead of the class itself. (Carnival for BLU, Ishgard leaderboard for DoH). Leaderboards are worse in a way because they have limited spots.

But that's just how I feel. How are you guys finding the new crafting so far and feel you will long term? Fun? Bored?