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

[Ryaz]

They seem plenty hard to me. I made three attempts at one and didn't even come close to getting enough collectability to return them, let alone reaching the max tier. I have somewhat conservative overmelds because I didn't want to spend hours farming scrips to buy VII and VIII materia, but I can trivially craft HQ three-star items starting from NQ materials. I'll just stick to farming scrips with the normal Lv80 items for now and consider attempting the expert ones again when the rewards are known.

Even people in Discord who succeeded in making one said it was down to them just getting extremely lucky. Its coming down to abusing Hasty Touch and Tricks of the Trade again.

[tdb]

Even people in Discord who succeeded in making one said it was down to them just getting extremely lucky. Its coming down to abusing Hasty Touch and Tricks of the Trade again.

Yeah I figured that much, given how I was running out of CP. It seems like it's necessary to use Byregot's Blessing two times to get good collecability ratings, and that's not exactly cheap on CP or durability. Possibly spamming touch actions at 11 inner quiet stacks before Byregot's could be enough to reach the first collectability threshold. It just needs finding the right balance between CP use and durability. I'm sure I can come up with a working rotation if I put my mind to it, but that (and upgrading my melds) requires time which I'm woefully short of.

[Liam_Harper]

I got a few at the base 4500 on the practice mats without food. Could have been lucky and getting max seems a fair challenge. That's good, this is our "endgame", we shouldn't be figuring this out day one, so the more challenging the better. I like the concept behind it, adjusting your rotation as you go and being rewarded for smart decisions is a step in the right direction.
The things I'm not impressed with so far:
-Rng. You rely on getting enough good procs at good times.
-The Success Rate proc is not worth it. It only applies 25% to a handful of 50-60% abilities. One miss can wreck a craft. Again, even more rng. They could replace that or buff it.
-Older abilities weren't updated for the new procs. No making smart use of Intensive Synth, Tricks, Precise. Missed opportunity there.

But there's room to tweak and improve it and it's still early days, so I'll mess around before forming a solid opinion there.

The rewards and leader-board on the other hand are unfortunately exactly what I expected.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but currently I can't even find what the rewards are for ranking top on the 10-day leaderboard or how high a "high ranking" must be to be eligible. There are accumulated score prizes or achievement rewards that we can grind out in our own time, but that's a once-off.
As far as Skybuilder Scrips go, you get 60 for the regular grade 2 turn in and 76 for a near-perfect Expert turn in. Both give a kupo Stamp. So if you're grinding scrips, regular turn-ins with 3150 collectibility are miles easier.
Leaderboards are also quantity based, no real limits. Even if you don't max collectibility, you'll probably top if you play all day and spam enough. So more a time investment than skill.

Basically if you aren't interested in spamming collectibles for 10 days all day non-stop to rank on the leaderboard, Expert recipes aren't very useful except the one-time rewards. Our "endgame" is indeed a small piece of side content and now Master Recipes have been drastically simplified, that's it. We got put aside in a corner and told to spam collectibles all day for a vague leaderboard to keep us quiet.

[Espritduo]

Looking at this I think I'm just gonna pass on it all until the next season. SE screwed me over HARD by pushing this to 5.21 when I planned on making time for it on 5.20. I'm sitting here looking at these grindy achievements (I want the pteranodon mount gimme) and the expert recipes and I am chomping at the bit to sit down, hit a red bull and go nuts on them. But I can't, cuz I have to WORK like a normal, decent human being. Only having like 4 hours a day of free time basically means all this content is off limits to me except for the lightest of playing around with it for funsies. I already went into the patch with 40,000 Skybuilder scrips so I've already bought everything there, and now its just spamming Diadem, which I have already seen everything there is to see there within half an hour of hanging around.

And you know the kicker? I bet when I take my two weeks vacation for 5.31 restoration, SE will release it with the 5.30 patch content. Really aggravating.

Oh and the rewards for ranking are a (non-class specific) achievement title for ranking 1-12th, and another one for ranking 1-100. And that's as it should be. They shouldn't be putting crazy amounts of crazy rewards behind something experimental when they have NO idea how it is all going to shake out and how it's going to be abused or received by the playerbase (I'm looking at you Ocean Fishing). They can add more rewards for expert recipes and ranking later when they have a better handle on how the players are going to do the content.

I will say that I do like how it IS something I can basically put off until I feel like doing it. Besides the ranking thing which as long as SE doesn't go back on their word, will still be there next season and presumably the season after that with the same rewards and less botting/no-lifing competition, I have all the time in the world to do this content. It is all solo, with no party-based annoyances, which means no stressful rush to get the content done before the critical mass of participation fades. Imma go back to ocean fishing for now and just keep trying to get the 5-star fish while I finish reading The Sandman series. (read it, it's really freakin good)

[KageTokage]

The expert recipes being as difficult as they are at least makes it extremely unlikely anyone will be able to make a functioning bot for them.

Though it's a pity the same can't be said for the DoL classes...

[Ryaz]

So, looking at the ranking for just crp, 3rd place is at 4926 points... 1st place is at 50212.

Something tells me 1st place is cheating. That gap is just too wide to not be and its basically what I was afraid of when they introduced this.

[Rath]

The 5k is like 4 synths. The 50k is 40. It is just time.

[Jojoya]

So, looking at the ranking for just crp, 3rd place is at 4926 points... 1st place is at 50212.

Something tells me 1st place is cheating. That gap is just too wide to not be and its basically what I was afraid of when they introduced this.

If you play with the math, that 50k+ score ends up perfectly reasonable if the player was spending many hours crafting yesterday. At the mid tier reward, that's only about 140 turn ins and getting a decent percentage of 6k items reduces the number needed even more.

[MN_14]

These crafts aren't particularly difficult. I got over 60k while just messing around with them for a few hours yesterday.

Somebody doing them over many hours throughout the week will easily score upwards of a million points.

[Ryaz]

Hit my first max quality... Followed by 55k and another max quality. I'm getting there.