Quote Originally Posted by Nandrolone View Post
My suggestion would be to make it skill based somehow. My idea though, would be making touch actions only available during certain crafting conditions. For example, you can only use Delicate synthesis or prudent touch during a Good/Excellent. That’ll essentially make macros not optimal and make manual crafting a thing. It’ll also show who really enjoys crafting and who really doesn’t. But that would involve RNG.

Anything in a game that is of value or importance, usually involves RNG or putting in a ton of time and effort. For example, in resident evil 2 remake, to get infinite ammo guns, you need to beat the story on Hard Mode during a very short time frame. Any longer, and you don’t unlock it. Things that are easy in games, or involve little to no RNG, are essentially useless or not worth many people’s time to pursue. I just don’t see any way around that personally.
Certain touches and synthesis already behave that way, and it's the direction the devs want to go so players cannot rely on macros. While I am not implying that RNG should be stripped of crafting and gathering, I am still curious how to perpetuate any kind of a challenge without it.

I thought of a time frame scenario as well, wherein you only have a certain amount of time to complete a synthesis, or make a decision before a consequence such as loss to durability. I think I might have even suggested something similar to TT, where there are certain restrictions based on the region you are in, but I feel none of these are all that good to sustain engaging gameplay with crafting and gathering.

Perhaps challenge doesn't need to be perpetuated so much as it just needs to keep a player thinking. But if it's not PvE or PvP, I'm not sure how much of a skill requirement you can put in there before most players lose interest altogether. There is a large portion of the playerbase that sees crafting/gathering as a pass time, and what they do to get away from such requirements while still grinding away towards a goal. That's not to say there shouldn't be some form of challenge, otherwise we risk more "just make it one button" arguments.