Request for better challenges and better rewards (Formal Letter/Megathread)

[Nandrolone]

Ha ha, yes, time for me and my seven crafter alts with a full allotment of weekly scrips to dominate the market board because I can funnel all of it into getting big gear on my main and then selling the rest. Remember, it's not about the system being fun or in-depth, it's about keeping people out so we can dominate the market board and acquire all the profit. Really sucks that people can just... get gear and jump into it! And now they're relegating all the hard stuff to Expert recipes, which only reward stuff that DON'T help me reach the gil cap on my third alt's seventh retainer? Get real Yoshida.

Ugh, you again. Look, this thread is supposed to just start healthy discussions, and maybe so casual and hardcore crafters can finally understand one another. You, on the other hand, aren’t too interested in that. I remember your older posts in this section...I seem to remember you constantly shooting down any vet crafters that wanted substantial rewards for clearing hard recipes. Such as Gil like what Ashe suggested. You clearly are projecting some sort of hatred you have for these types of crafters in your posts, just discuss things peacefully....please?

[Asbe10]

Ha ha, yes, time for me and my seven crafter alts with a full allotment of weekly scrips to dominate the market board because I can funnel all of it into getting big gear on my main and then selling the rest. Remember, it's not about the system being fun or in-depth, it's about keeping people out so we can dominate the market board and acquire all the profit. Really sucks that people can just... get gear and jump into it! And now they're relegating all the hard stuff to Expert recipes, which only reward stuff that DON'T help me reach the gil cap on my third alt's seventh retainer? Get real Yoshida.

If I didn't want people to get into it I wouldn't make crafting guides. That is all I will comment on that

[Nezerius]

Obviously my opinion about favor mats is not popular but it really revolutionized the value of gatherers to the crafters.

I'd rather quit than go through the motions of having a 5 minute buff and crossing my fingers for the RNG gods to grant me a concealed node while rushing between nodes.

Maybe keep the craftable battle gear easy to HQ so it doesn't make it tedious for raiders as the OP suggested, but at least make the crafting and gathering gear difficult to HQ.

While this could make a difference in the amount of DoW/M gear being crafted on patch day, there's also the case of crafters/gatherers having 6 months to prepare for it.

I'd say take it a step further, even if it might not be a popular way to go about it:

• Completely remove gear bought with Yellow/White scrips (most of it isn't all that great anyway, due to the lack of CP melds). This change would put more emphasis on actually crafting DoH/L gear, instead of just spamming a good ALC/CUL recipe for scrips.
• Remove crafted mainhand tools at level cap, and make it so doing the current expansion's level cap quest awards a main hand tool. This tool will then be upgradable throughout the expansion. Basically, the system that was in place in ARR (Quest reward > Supra > Lucis). Maybe toss in a catch up tool halfway through the expansion, similar to the Artisan tools in ARR. They could do the same thing with offhand tools as well.

[Aurida]

Look, this thread is supposed to just start healthy discussions

Yes, and the original post did a brilliant job of exactly that, going into the history of 'hardcore' crafting and how it's changed for the better. The casualization of the game is its own, intertwined topic- it's not just crafting or gathering, but also the raids, which bowed to the will of 'casual' players moving on from ARR into HW with the introduction of a story mode, and further in HW moving from the brutally punishing Gordias/Midas to Creator, a tier so easy it was literally fully cleared with 8 tanks.

This is a level of mechanical difficulty the devs have explicitly stated they're aiming for both in multiple interviews, live letters, and in the design of all of the tiers since.

Ultimate stands above and beyond the Savage tiers both in terms of the gear rewards, which are practically non-existent in that they have a full one materia slot above the Savage weapons.

I bring all this up and explain it to you because it is exactly what a healthy endgame for crafting content should look like- you have a clear progression through the tiers of making your own items to using those crafted sets to go about not only doing the content you've already done with a greater degree of leeway but ALSO to attempt the hardest content in the game- Expert recipes, which are literally only for glamour rewards and a minor, borderline non-existent stat bump, if that.

Now that we've established these similarities and parallels, let's re-contextualize some of the suggestions that have been brought up. How about a weekly lockout on attempting fights? You get five attempts at a fight per week and then that's it. How about if you needed to spend some of your weekly tomestones to become eligible for chests at the end of a successful run of a Savage floor? What if you needed to clear a floor's normal mode eight times per one time you queued into the savage version? Or if you couldn't ignore item level requirements when queuing?

These things sound ridiculous but their crafting/gathering equivalents have literally been brought up in topics on this board, with the purpose of making it more inaccessible to 'casual' crafters who don't have access to the time or resource sinks necessary to participate meaningfully in 'hardcore' crafting, and then the extra establishment of gil as a primary motivator and putting 'grandmaster' recipes in a special place where they're the only things worth spending said gil on, ensuring that only those dedicated enough to it are the ones profiting from it.

In conclusion, if there's any 'hatred' to be projected, it's over the idea that endgame should return in any respect to being something with so many barriers to entry that it becomes intrinsically inaccessible to all but the most chosen few. I have no problem with 'savage' crafting. What I have a problem with is that the only crafting worth doing should not start at 'ultimate'.

[Aurida]

If I didn't want people to get into it I wouldn't make crafting guides. That is all I will comment on that

Do as you will, but at least the guide makers for Savage raids don't take two minutes in the middle of the video to complain about how easy the tier is.

[Caimie_Tsukino]

Thank you everyone for your comments and kind support!

Hello, Ashe10 from Youtube here. I really miss the crafting in Heavensward, for me personally what I most enjoyed about it was getting nicely rewarded for my hard work on the market board, nowadays when you can Macro the craftable battle gear 100% HQ with NQ mats that defeats everything I loved about it in Heavensward. It's kinda sad when the prices of gear drop so low that you are not even making any profit if you were to buy the materials. Materials should also be limited like it used to in Heavensward with Weekly capped scrip and the favor mats. I really loved doing favors it really kept the market board healthy for those who wanted to put in the effort to make Gil, and it made gatherers way more important with their weekly Scrips that they could get favor mats and sell them to crafters. It might be selfish but mounts and glamour are not gonna fix it for some of us. A crafting leaderboard isn't the way to go, personally I wouldn't care about it.
Really loving the suggestions from the Original Poster here though, thank you so much!!

Hi Ashe! It's an honor to have your here!

You seem to be one of the few people who actually enjoyed favors back in HW! That content was quite controversial. It was either big love or big hate for both crafters and gatherers! I remember it took 50 Weekly Red Scrips just to get 5 of those favors to reveal the notorious concealed nodes. Before Patch 3.07, each favor was 15 min. So that took away 75 min of our precious time just to get minuscule amounts (about 10-15) of those ooids. After Patch 3.07, favors were reduced to 5 min to get about the same amount, but we had to rush like it was the end of the world! The 5 min timer for gathering gave heart attacks to many people. LOL! While some saw it as a wonderful opportunity to make good gil (the raw mat sold really well), it was nightmare for others.

I personally don't really care much about a crafting leaderboard either, and I do enjoy good gil as reward too. But as we can see that the general direction of where the crafting game is going... the developers are trying to encourage more people to craft by lowering its difficulty and increasing supply of crafted endgame raid gear on the market. It would be a difficult task to go against their will. But if we are requesting things that do not have conflict with that, then we may have a better chance of getting our wish granted.

In this letter, I tried my best to request for things that most crafters have a consensus on (of course, ultimately, no one can get everyone to agree on something). But at least, I need the majority of crafters to agree on what I have proposed. This way, we can get more support for the letter, and hopefully get the developers' attention and consideration.

[Nezerius]

Before Patch 3.07, each favor was 15 min. So that took away 75 min of our precious time just to get minuscule amounts (about 10-15) of those ooids. After Patch 3.07, favors were reduced to 5 min to get about the same amount, but we had to rush like it was the end of the world! The 5 min timer for gathering gave heart attacks to many people. LOL!

Not sure what you mean with this. Reducing the timer to 5 minutes didn't change it to be a rush, it was always a rush to get as many nodes cleared as possible. The change simply meant rushing for 5 minutes at a time, instead of 15 minutes.

[Jojoya]

Personally I believe it is too soon to comment about a need for more challenges since Expert recipes have not been released yet so all we have to go by is vague information and speculation.

The topic of better rewards is very subjective. What is desirable to one player isn't necessarily desirable to another player.

Personally I find gil to be a poor reward since it's so easily obtained from other content and there is very little to spend it on that can't be obtained through other means. If it comes from gathering or mob kills, I can farm it myself instead of spending gil at the marketboard. If it's crafted, I can make it myself instead of spending gil at the marketboard. If it's from treasure maps, I can join map parties to get it instead of spending gil at the marketboard. Hunts provide me with Aetheryte tickets to pay teleportation fees. What's left for me to spend gil on? Dark Matter to repair gear. Dyes that are purchased from vendors instead of being crafted.

If I do need more gil for some reason, how do I get it? By crafting items to sell to others. Gil is nearly useless to the self-sufficient crafter so it makes little sense as a special reward from special content.

For me a more desirable reward would be items that can only be obtained by successfully completing an Expert recipe and are bound to the crafter. When you see another player with these items, you'll know they made it themselves instead of buying it from the marketboard with gil earned from other content.

As a comment on the crafting system in general, I feel that lowering the overall difficulty of many Master recipes was a poor and unnecessary decision. They are no longer Master recipes. They are now Journeyman recipes that can be crafted by anyone with level appropriate tools/gear that took the time to look up a macro online. HQ is so easy to achieve that NQ items are totally undesirable. There's no point in having a 2 quality system if the highest quality can easily created on demand.

I feel a better approach would have been to retain the old craftsmanship requirements but raise the quality requirements so HQ was much harder to achieve on Master recipes. With HQ having a much smaller representation on the market, demand for NQ gear would have increased as a more affordable supplement to or replacement for gear obtained through other content. That would have still opened the market doors for the less skilled crafters who could produce the NQ gear without difficulty while creating a more lucrative market for the much rarer HQ items primarily produced by skilled crafters.

Regardless, I still enjoy crafting and making items for friends. It will continue to be content that occupies a significant amount of my game time.

[KageTokage]

It feels like they're intending for the Ishgard Restoration rankings to be something significant, with them claiming expert recipes would be important for getting a good score along with having exclusive rewards and what not..

Which is stupid because they're inherently going to be dominated by cheaters unless they change something with how they go about doing investigations.

[Hysterior]

Hello, Ashe10 from Youtube here

Oh! I remember all your crazy FF12 challenge videos. You got me into a 122333 playthrough