Is it me or is the Crafting market going to die?

[TwistedTea]

When everyone and their aldgoat is a pentamelded omnicrafter, no one is.

Crafting/gathering are still consistent ways of making gil. However, the gil income from many crafted/gathered items has dropped drastically.

The most valuable/profitable items are the ones which are difficult to obtain,time-consuming or both.

Also what is wrong with accumulating gil?

It's just something else to grind out.

The most obvious appeal derives from the elements of achievement in these environments. They cater to players who enjoy accumulating wealth, rare items and tangible power. The other main appeal derives from the ability to chat, make friends and affiliate with larger social groups such as guilds. Many players also find appeal in becoming immersed in a fantasy world and becoming part of a story that is being told. Also, certain players enjoy competing with other players or even annoying and manipulating them through devious means. And finally, some players are fascinated with the mechanics and geography of the world. For them, the satisfaction comes from unraveling the game.

MMORPGs are seductive because they have hooks for many different kinds of people and appeal to them through different means. To a certain extent, we can understand MMORPGs as environments where people are playing a different game side by side. But MMORPGs are dynamic worlds because of this diversity of motivations and because players are ultimately playing the same game. Adventures, alliances and betrayals emerge as players collaborate to achieve very different goals.

[Jojoya]

When everyone and their aldgoat is a pentamelded omnicrafter, no one is.

They're all still pentamelded omnicrafters. You can't take that away from them.

They're just no longer special snowflakes by having a relatively unique status.

Crafting/gathering are still consistent ways of making gil. However, the gil income from many crafted/gathered items has dropped drastically.

Prices might have dropped but there's still plenty of profit to be gained. If I only costs me 5k to make an item, I'm still profiting whether I sell it for 10k or 100k.

Also what is wrong with accumulating gil?

It's just something else to grind out.

There's nothing wrong with accumulating gil. There are always players in MMOs that base their game play around wealth accumulation.

But that's a mini-game that's subject to change just like any other game content. Those playing it need to be prepared for competition and for market values to change instead of expecting things to remain static. When there's a change to the market, you need to be ready to adjust.

[TwistedTea]

They're all still pentamelded omnicrafters. You can't take that away from them.

They're just no longer special snowflakes by having a relatively unique status.

The thing is that there were fewer pentamelded omnicrafters around. By making crafting/gathering more accessible, there's an oversupply of crafted/gathered goods.

For the buyer, it's a good thing, since prices have fallen. For the seller, not so much.

Prices might have dropped but there's still plenty of profit to be gained. If I only costs me 5k to make an item, I'm still profiting whether I sell it for 10k or 100k.

Opportunity cost in two ways.

One whether you're crafting an item which will sell for a profit of 100k and above or an item of 5k profit, you have to set aside time assuming they both sell often. I rather craft items with the 100k profit margin and above.

Second opportunity cost, is the limited number of retainer listings (20). I only have 2 retainers. So I try to make it a point that each item that I list must be giving me a profit of 75k and above.

There's nothing wrong with accumulating gil. There are always players in MMOs that base their game play around wealth accumulation.

But that's a mini-game that's subject to change just like any other game content. Those playing it need to be prepared for competition and for market values to change instead of expecting things to remain static. When there's a change to the market, you need to be ready to adjust.

I agree and that was the point, I was trying to make with the initial sentence. I no longer consider myself a crafter main and have moved to other market segments which are more profitable.

[Gemina]

When everyone and their aldgoat is a pentamelded omnicrafter, no one is.

Why are some hardcore crafters hell bent on having this content exclusive to them? To this day, I continue to get the impression that greed is the main reason for the flux of crafters and gatherers being a problem, and the desire for difficult recipes is to monopolize those goods on the marketboard, and prevent casuals from being able to craft them. It's load of selfish rubbish. Convince me I am wrong.

You don't create a mmo, and then figure out ways to reduce accessibility to its content for the playerbase. Crafting market won't die as a result of increased accessibility. It's still a continuous game of supply vs demand and prices will fluctuate and adjust as they always have. This should not be an issue when it comes to being able to easily budget your expenses while still making a profit. If you're FFXIV epeen however, is measured by how much gil you own then yeah, big problem for you.

[Commander_Justitia]

You don't create a mmo, and then figure out ways to reduce accessibility to its content for the playerbase.

Accessibility and casual/hardcore disparity is at least for me a bit different because some hardcore games can still be very accessible.
In the past Crafting and stuff like PvP wasn't very accessible. Now you can craft and pvp with any drawbacks in terms of Bis gear and in terms of unlocked skills. You just have them all immediately; you are set and ready the moment you have the level, you dont need to waste hours just to unlock another crossskill for example.

All this is nice in concept, it makes sense I give you that - but the thing is now - ff14 likes to make these things casual aswell. It is almost impossible to be really good at something, because everyone will be somewhat good anyway. There is no ceiling. Crafting and PvP need a bit of depth to be fun. It should be rewarding to be good at it. And this is lacking a lot.

It is not about gil, it is not about making things hard for casual players - it can still stay easy for them for the majority of items and let them one click macro stuff idc. But there have to be items that are rare. Rarity can be because it drops rarely, because the reward is limited or because it is simply difficult. An MMO without rarity doesn't feel rewarding, if you get the rewards for free it will not be special, I always like to achieve something in RPG after hours of investement. It is why ultimates have nice weapon models, high investment, hightier reward even if its only a skin.
So ye people just wanna be good at something and casualization mainly benefits the new players and destroys longterm interest. Its a slap in the face for veterans who invested to git gud at something.

Just look at the recent live letter, a big chunk of the "new" updates is catered to new players again. ARR flying, ARR story quests are shorter, ishgard restoration is the experience heaven for new crafters/gatherer, the new feature to play old primals on min ilvl but at lvl80 is also interesting to new players but not to old ones who beaten those fights legit anyway at that time. The 24 raid is outsourced. What we really get is one dungeon and hopefully a resistence weapon upgrade step that lasts longer than 30min. While in the background they start looking at their xbox launch to get even more new players.
This game had the most potential, the story and areas are super nice, the gameplay starts sucking more and more sadly imo.

[Gemina]

Accessibility and casual/hardcore disparity is at least for me a bit different because some hardcore games can still be very accessible.
In the past Crafting and stuff like PvP wasn't very accessible. Now you can craft and pvp with any drawbacks in terms of Bis gear and in terms of unlocked skills. You just have them all immediately; you are set and ready the moment you have the level, you dont need to waste hours just to unlock another crossskill for example.

All this is nice in concept, it makes sense I give you that - but the thing is now - ff14 likes to make these things casual aswell. It is almost impossible to be really good at something, because everyone will be somewhat good anyway. There is no ceiling. Crafting and PvP need a bit of depth to be fun. It should be rewarding to be good at it. And this is lacking a lot.

Ah yes. If everyone is special, then no one is. Don't get me wrong, I know it can be very fulfilling to obtain rewards through an arduous journey through the game's content. I know how deflating it can feel if the devs turn around and give others an easier path to the same reward. When it comes to crafting though, being 'good' in terms of proficiency is a very tough argument for me to swallow. If we want to talk about ease of access, it has always been easy to go online to one of the many guides, simulators, advice of others and so forth to either get past a learning curve, or completely eliminate all the guess work that goes into figuring out how to HQ something entirely on your own. Over the course of time, most players have failed to convince me that they actually want to craft, but have done a great job giving me the impression that they want the benefits.

You don't have to pentameld to the nines to meet the requirements for starred recipes. Players however, choose to bout it out with RNG until they bleed out of their eyes to get maximum stats on their gear so they can use macros that they didn't even come up with themselves. This to me, is not crafting. It is also the furthest from any kind of enjoyable experience I find in this game.

It is not about gil, it is not about making things hard for casual players - it can still stay easy for them for the majority of items and let them one click macro stuff idc. But there have to be items that are rare. Rarity can be because it drops rarely, because the reward is limited or because it is simply difficult. An MMO without rarity doesn't feel rewarding, if you get the rewards for free it will not be special, I always like to achieve something in RPG after hours of investement. It is why ultimates have nice weapon models, high investment, hightier reward even if its only a skin.
So ye people just wanna be good at something and casualization mainly benefits the new players and destroys longterm interest. Its a slap in the face for veterans who invested to git gud at something.

Of course it's about gil. Unless you don't market any of your wares and you craft simply for sustainability. Greed doesn't necessarily imply gil hoarding. Greed is taking more than what you need, and in terms of exclusivity in the world of crafting it had to be asked if too much of this content was inaccessible to the general playerbase. It was. So the decision comes at a loss to those who previously had those exclusive rights. It stings. I am well aware.

Just look at the recent live letter, a big chunk of the "new" updates is catered to new players again. ARR flying, ARR story quests are shorter, ishgard restoration is the experience heaven for new crafters/gatherer, the new feature to play old primals on min ilvl but at lvl80 is also interesting to new players but not to old ones who beaten those fights legit anyway at that time. The 24 raid is outsourced. What we really get is one dungeon and hopefully a resistence weapon upgrade step that lasts longer than 30min. While in the background they start looking at their xbox launch to get even more new players.
This game had the most potential, the story and areas are super nice, the gameplay starts sucking more and more sadly imo.

Trust me my friend, hearing about the flying in ARR, and their continued rework of this expansion pissed me off to no end. But not because I feel like they are catering to the newer players, but because of all the resources and time that was used. If this is what they can accomplish in their "free time", then they must have an abundance of it. That is time that could have gone into more headgear/hairstyles for the Viera and Hrothgar, additional fresh content, a new deep dungeon, etc. It's a damn shame what they chose to use their free time on, and I totally get why Yoshi wasn't pleased.

[Jojoya]

Why are some hardcore crafters hell bent on having this content exclusive to them? To this day, I continue to get the impression that greed is the main reason for the flux of crafters and gatherers being a problem, and the desire for difficult recipes is to monopolize those goods on the marketboard, and prevent casuals from being able to craft them. It's load of selfish rubbish. Convince me I am wrong.

You don't create a mmo, and then figure out ways to reduce accessibility to its content for the playerbase. Crafting market won't die as a result of increased accessibility. It's still a continuous game of supply vs demand and prices will fluctuate and adjust as they always have. This should not be an issue when it comes to being able to easily budget your expenses while still making a profit. If you're FFXIV epeen however, is measured by how much gil you own then yeah, big problem for you.

The crafting market was always accessible. No one was being stopped from entering it if they wanted to be part of it.

People didn't do it because they didn't want to go to the effort, not because it wasn't accessible.

That's their problem, not the problem of those who were willing to go to the effort and profit it from it.

It's never a good thing to cater to the people who want more for doing less. I'm not one that argues for exclusivity but I do believe that reward should be commensurate with effort, and that those putting in the most effort should be rewarded more than those who put in minimal effort.

Right now crafting is drifting more and more toward giving max reward to those who put in minimal effort. That is not healthy in any situation.

[Gemina]

The crafting market was always accessible. No one was being stopped from entering it if they wanted to be part of it.

People didn't do it because they didn't want to go to the effort, not because it wasn't accessible.

That's their problem, not the problem of those who were willing to go to the effort and profit it from it.

It's never a good thing to cater to the people who want more for doing less. I'm not one that argues for exclusivity but I do believe that reward should be commensurate with effort, and that those putting in the most effort should be rewarded more than those who put in minimal effort.

Right now crafting is drifting more and more toward giving max reward to those who put in minimal effort. That is not healthy in any situation.

Then people need to stop using 'accessibility' in their arguments. I in turn, will stop using it against them.

Effort is an interesting take, because I can understand this angle when something players worked hard for is matched or invalidated quickly after its inception. Kind of like the current i490 tome weapon when the Resistance Weapon quest came very shortly after. But this expansion, the same amount of effort is required from everyone. Some might have an easier time getting to max level if they are behind, but if we want to look at just endgame crafting, everyone started at square A.

Also last I checked, it isn't the players unwilling to go through long grinds that are complaining about the status quo; quite the opposite. They're the ones with the problem. There's an air of smugness and disdain from these players towards newer players. Kind of like when you bring home a second cat. It's almost like you welcome that cobweb of ridiculousness that was the previous crafting system in order to keep the casuals at bay. Because it was such a convoluted mess that most just didn't care to deal.

Right now, crafting is geared towards giving the same rewards for players putting in the same effort. I have absolutely no clue where this min/max is even coming from.

[Mikki]

Also last I checked, it isn't the players unwilling to go through long grinds that are complaining about the status quo; quite the opposite. They're the ones with the problem. There's an air of smugness and disdain from these players towards newer players. Kind of like when you bring home a second cat. It's almost like you welcome that cobweb of ridiculousness that was the previous crafting system in order to keep the casuals at bay. Because it was such a convoluted mess that most just didn't care to deal.

If they simply cleaned up the crafting system, I'd be fine with that. Personally, I don't mind that they got rid of cross class skills - if anything, this almost made it REQUIRED to be an omnicrafter if you wanted to craft at all...which is why there ARE so many omnicrafters. I think the line up would be more diverse if they didn't do this in the first place so I'm glad they scrapped it. I don't mind that they made crafting easier - all you had to do was a little bit of google-fu anyway and you'd be on track just as much as the best crafters out there if we're completely honest.

But what I personally DO mind is how easy they've made it to level up with nothing to gate people from capping in pretty much a single day. If they had made every change that they did but people still had to rely on leves, beast tribes, GC turn-ins, etc.... so at LEAST there is a real sense of investment if you want to get into crafting....then I'd be fine. But no. They can, at virtually any level, saunter over to Ishgard, buy mats for pennies a piece on the market board and proceed to spam their crafters to max level with no effort or really even time required. All I would wish for is that they'd have to actually put in some determination and take the time like the rest of us have, even if it's a bit more pleasant than what we dealt with thanks to the crafting system clean up.

Heck, since I just did the trek from 0 to 70 last expansion, I KNOW the requirements and barrier to entry was really daunting. I wouldn't even mind if they upped the exp gained so at least it didn't take ages. But it SHOULD still take time. It should be an investment and I feel like I've been slapped across the face for all the time I've put into leveling mine when if I had just waited an expansion, it would have been handed to me on a silver platter with minimal effort. Feels bad. ((Although, if I had waited until this expansion, I think I'd still be sad because it cheapens the feeling of accomplishment if I barely had to work for it imo)).

But this is just my perspective. I'm sure newcomers are happy about it and if it draws new players, then SE must be happy too. Like I said before, this is all subjective. Just sharing my frustrations and PoV.

[Kuroka]

But what I personally DO mind is how easy they've made it to level up with nothing to gate people from capping in pretty much a single day. If they had made every change that they did but people still had to rely on leves, beast tribes, GC turn-ins, etc.... so at LEAST there is a real sense of investment if you want to get into crafting....then I'd be fine. But no.

Yes this so much... It kinda makes me cry whenever im at my GC and see ppl hand in stuff for insta 3 full level ups lol

So many ppl suddenly level them now, just because its basically 0 effort... its frustrating.