Crafting (Monopoly, Recipes, Challenge, Relevance)

[Asiaine]

Recipe Monopoly - Players could either quest for rare recipes or get them as local leve rewards (as per the olden days). These recipes would not be transferable to other players, giving players a slight monopoly. This would mean the market doesn't get saturated. (Obviously this feature would be applicable to rare high level gear).

I'm not sure a monopoly is good for a couple of reasons:
Either the item that can be monopolized will be trivial (and thus no one wants it) or good (in which case it could end up with someone who rarely is every around and would not use it).

Also the potential burden of creating hundreds/thousands of unique balanced items?

There is a way to reach 'uniqueness' by ones ability to create HQ versions of the item (since this takes some skill).

Lodestone Recipes - The fact that lodestone reveals the recipes for all newly added items kind of spoils the fun of finding out recipes for yourself. Perhaps every now and again they could leave some out so crafters actually have something to do.

I'm not entirely sure this counts as 'something to do'. It would really just be a matter of guessing a bunch of materials trying out a bunch of combos, then looking on the forums 3 days later to see who guessed correctly and what the recipe is. Given the vast number of recipes and even vaster number of ingredients, it could turn into quite a chore. Not to mention what happens if they change recipes o.o!

I think what you may be desiring here is a good idea (improved skill on figuring out a good recipe), but I do not think this approach would be all that fun/beneficial. We would need a different crafting system (with more attributes/etc per item) to influence the outcome, and thus require a bit more strategy in figuring out what ingredients to use.

Challenge - Materia was supposed to add content, but it's really just a grind. It's not content in the sense that you do anything besides pray to every heathen god you know and hope the RNG rolls in your favor. So hopefully the new recipes S.E. mentioned lately will add some kind of challenge to the game (both in getting the ingredients, and also producing the item).

Yes... I love materia.. I love the idea of materia.. i do not like its present implementation. Random on what type of materia, then random on its level. Then if you want more than one meld, its more random.... there is a LOT of room for improvment here... even if its just a mini-game on how to get your materia or how to meld it.
FYI: I converted about 50 of the same item, and have not gotten more than 3 of the same type of materia.

Relevance - Instead of excluding crafters from endgame, perhaps S.E. should think of ways to combine the idea of dungeon drops and crafting, rather than keeping them separate (which is what is happening at the moment).

Yes...yes...and more yes.... Personally I wish drops were more often than not Materials that could then be crafted into something pretty. Yes of course we should always have a nice weapon/armour that drops.. that's part of how our lore works. But lots of materials would be good (which also fits lore wise). Or even using those weapon/armours as ingredients to craft something better!