Please nerf bicolor gemstone requirements.

[Jojoya]

Can't trade or sell the rewards, though. That alone makes a huge difference.

I made tens of millions of gil selling things I purchased with skybuilder scrip while working on the mount achievement not to mention all the items I gifted to friends so I'm not sure where you're getting the idea that Firmament rewards can't be traded or sold. There are a couple that can't be (the Pegasus mount the main example) but most are very profitable for bots.

Right, I think you'll find that there is a slight difference between a 500k gil mount and a 90M gil one.

Sure. One has more players (or bots) that were working on farming it to sell than the other so the market value is reduced.

It sounds like most of your problem is you're trying to push through the FATE farming all at once instead of working on it gradually over time. The voucher rewards aren't intended to be earned in a couple of weeks. They're intended to be earned over several months.

I make an effort to complete everything in the game except bicolored gemstones because it's a waste of time and not fun.

That's subjective to you. I like going out FATE farming with a group of friends occasionally. We have a good time. Those that are trying to level up alt jobs will usually get 3-4 levels in 2 hours of farming (depending on where we're doing the farming compared to their current job level). I use my gemstones to buy vouchers to sell on the MB. Others use theirs to buy the unique rewards they want but don't have yet or crafting materials.

[SchwarzwaelderTorte]

I think my point regarding Firmament got completely misunderstood.

I started writing an explanation in detail but it's late at night here and I don't think it's worth the effort, so to make it simple:

Firmament:
End goal: Pteranodon (unsellable, untradable)
When can you start working on it: Immediately after reaching lvl 80 on every crafter and gatherer
What you get while working on it: EXP, scrip rewards (sellable, tradable), kupo voucher rewards (sellable, tradable), titles, minions (untradable, unsellable)
Does someone else botting hinder your progress towards the end goal or can the end goal itself be turned into profit?: No.

Bicolor Gemstone grind:
End goal: Wivre mount (sellable, tradable) + Fallen Angel Wings (sellable, tradable)
When can you start working on it: After maxxing out the rank in each EW area (at this point you've already capped your gemstones a few times, but can't spend them on vouchers)
What you get while working on it: 7142 FATEs worth of EXP (which, if you're doing MSQ, Trusts, PvP, roulettes, Khloe, Side quests, etc, is very quickly wasted because all your jobs are at 90 already... and then the tribe quests get released). That's it, you just get EXP and the smallest amount of gil.
Does someone else botting hinder your progress towards the end goal or can the end goal itself be turned into profit?: Yes. Bots will kill FATEs before you have the chance to get there, the rewards and the vouchers are tradable and sellable, and are being sold at exorbitant prices.

Now, which content will be more enjoyable for players who want to reach the end goal the legit way?

[Jojoya]

I think my point regarding Firmament got completely misunderstood.

I started writing an explanation in detail but it's late at night here and I don't think it's worth the effort, so to make it simple:

Firmament:
End goal: Pteranodon (unsellable, untradable)
When can you start working on it: Immediately after reaching lvl 80 on every crafter and gatherer
What you get while working on it: EXP, scrip rewards (sellable, tradable), kupo voucher rewards (sellable, tradable), titles, minions (untradable, unsellable)
Does someone else botting hinder your progress towards the end goal or can the end goal itself be turned into profit?: No.

Bicolor Gemstone grind:
End goal: Wivre mount (sellable, tradable) + Fallen Angel Wings (sellable, tradable)
When can you start working on it: After maxxing out the rank in each EW area (at this point you've already capped your gemstones a few times, but can't spend them on vouchers)
What you get while working on it: 7142 FATEs worth of EXP (which, if you're doing MSQ, Trusts, PvP, roulettes, Khloe, Side quests, etc, is very quickly wasted because all your jobs are at 90 already... and then the tribe quests get released). That's it, you just get EXP and the smallest amount of gil.
Does someone else botting hinder your progress towards the end goal or can the end goal itself be turned into profit?: Yes. Bots will kill FATEs before you have the chance to get there, the rewards and the vouchers are tradable and sellable, and are being sold at exorbitant prices.

Now, which content will be more enjoyable for players who want to reach the end goal the legit way?

Still going to be the FATEs.

Expert crafting is not popular within the general crafting community and useless to non-crafters. Even now that the Restoration Artisan recipes can be macro'd with an excellent rate of success, few players are interested in spending 150+ hours on the crafting and even more time on the gathering requirements.

Gathering is far more boring than FATE farming is. The gathering is what almost broke my resolve to get Castle in the Sky when I was working on it in Shadowbringers. It was about 3 months after I completed the gathering requirements before I could get myself to finish up the crafting requirements I still had left. The gathering had burned me out hard while the crafting was always fun to me.

If you go to the achievement tracking websites, they show about 30% of players have Far Trade (Rank 3 Shared FATEs in every Endwalker zone) compared to only 11% with Crafting in the Air (earn 50k Skybuilder points as a Disciple of the Hand) and 13% with Gathering in the Air (earn 50k Skyward points as a Disciple of the Land) even though the latter two combined take less time to complete than Far Trade.

FATE farming bots are rarely a hindrance to players trying to farm FATEs. Have a legit issue with them in one zone? Move to a different zone, there are 12 zones to choose from (or more if there are zones that are instanced). Profits being affected is irrelevant when the goal is to earn the voucher rewards for yourself and not to sell the vouchers for gil.

Bot themselves are a good reason not to lower the gemstone requirements. Lowering the gemstone requirements for players also lowers it for the bots, increasing their profits since more players would take an interest in purchasing vouchers over farming the gemstones as total cost of the gemstone rewards began to drop.

If you want the voucher rewards but don't want to spend the time need to earn them through gemstone farming yourself, then buy the vouchers off the marketboard (which should cost you less than buying the wings outright). SE gave players the option to buy/sell the vouchers if they didn't want to do the gemstone farming themselves, after all.

[SchwarzwaelderTorte]

If you go to the achievement tracking websites, they show about 30% of players have Far Trade (Rank 3 Shared FATEs in every Endwalker zone) compared to only 11% with Crafting in the Air (earn 50k Skybuilder points as a Disciple of the Hand) and 13% with Gathering in the Air (earn 50k Skyward points as a Disciple of the Land) even though the latter two combined take less time to complete than Far Trade.

You're comparing completely different objectives with different goals. Of course more people have Far Trade, since there are bicolor gemstone rewards locked behind it (Orchestrions, glamour, furnishing items, Triple Triad cards, minions, and oh, by the way, you can't trade or sell any of these, how curious). People who are going for 50k points in gathering/crafting are obviously working towards the end goal grind already (with the exception of some people who only did this for the minions, or while servers were rebuilding Firmament), which is very certainly not going to be the case for the majority of people who have Far Trade.

A more accurate way to know who went through the grind would be to look at Date with Destiny V (5k FATEs), which is at 9.9%, but since the grind requires more than 7k FATEs (even if you farm special FATEs on the side), unless you've skipped on ShB max ranks and pretty much haven't played the rest of the game, you're more likely to reach Date with Destiny VI (10k FATEs), which is at 1.4%. In comparison, Castle in the Sky is at 1.8% and Landking of the World at 1.9%.

Or you could compare mounts: Pteranodon is at 1.1% and Wivre at 1.3%. Wivre also "only" requires a little bit more than 3.5k FATEs if you want to skip on the wings, so only half the full grind. And yet it's not so far behind Pteranodon, even if it can be bought and is being bought, according to marketboard history! How strange!

Have a legit issue with them in one zone? Move to a different zone, there are 12 zones to choose from (or more if there are zones that are instanced)

Except Ultima Thule and Elpis are the fastest/least annoying ones to deal with, since there is no syncing required (so you don't lose tank stance/dance partner/gauge resources etc between FATEs), and I think ilvl is also not affected as as result, but I'm not 100% sure about that. There's a reason why bots farm there.

ShB zones also give less bicolor gemstones, which might not make a huge difference on its own, but if you multiply it by 7k it does.

Bot themselves are a good reason not to lower the gemstone requirements. Lowering the gemstone requirements for players also lowers it for the bots, increasing their profits since more players would take an interest in purchasing vouchers over farming the gemstones as total cost of the gemstone rewards began to drop.

The high gemstone requirement is only an issue for me regarding how much strain it puts on my hands, and how little you get as you work towards it (compared to the Firmament grind). Bots are only making the experience more frustrating because they don't have to go through the same trouble, and they're only working on this to make profit, and nothing else. The problem is not the gemstone requirement, it's that the rewards and vouchers are tradable and sellable in the first place (especially when all other bicolor gemstone rewards are not). It would not completely get rid of botting, because botting will always exist in any form, but it would not encourage it either.

Can you imagine the state of PvP if Wolf Collars or other rewards were sellable? Can you imagine the state of hunts if the mounts were sellable?

If you want the voucher rewards but don't want to spend the time need to earn them through gemstone farming yourself, then buy the vouchers off the marketboard (which should cost you less than buying the wings outright).

It doesn't : ) Welcome to the free market!

[Jojoya]

Again, you started emphasizing pushing through the FATEs as fast as possible instead treating the rewards as goals to work towards over the long term. That's the wrong way to do it.

Even your hands are telling you that. When your hands are feeling strained, that's a clear sign you need to stop what you're doing. Never neglect your health over something in a game. That isn't the game's fault - that's your fault for continuing when your hands are telling you "no".

Yep, welcome to the free market. Here the cost of the vouchers will add up to be less than the cost of the wings (approximately 10 million less based on my look at Universalis just now). Strange that EU has the opposite trend.

But it works out in your favor if that's the case. If you still wanted to farm all the gemstones, you could sell the vouchers you would need for more than the cost of the items you want, leaving you ahead on gil. If the price difference increases enough, you could farm fewer vouchers instead.

Arguing this is all a moot point, of course. SE isn't going to change the cost of the vouchers or the voucher rewards. The prices are set that high intentionally so players have long term goals to work toward. Next expansion, if FATEs continue to reward bicolor gemstones, we'll probably be getting 16 per normal FATE instead of 14 and the number of new FATEs you would need to farm would decrease accordingly. Of course you'd then be stuck deciding between this expansion's rewards and next expansions rewards.

Want an honest suggestion? You feel like completing Castle in the Sky was more enjoyable than the FATE farming. Go back to farming Skybuilder scrip, buy the better selling scrip items to toss on the marketboard then pay for your wings and mount that way. From your perspective that should be the best of both worlds. Or you could consider any of your favorite methods for making gil quick. Dawntrail is only a couple of months away and there will be all those new items to sell for big profit as crafter and/or gatherer.

Oh, almost forgot:

Or you could compare mounts: Pteranodon is at 1.1% and Wivre at 1.3%. Wivre also "only" requires a little bit more than 3.5k FATEs if you want to skip on the wings, so only half the full grind. And yet it's not so far behind Pteranodon, even if it can be bought and is being bought, according to marketboard history! How strange!

The main problem with the mount comparison is that one can be purchased by anyone with enough gil that wants to buy it and if the player doesn't want to buy it they will never get it. The player won't have the Wivre unless they intentionally chose to get it.

The other one can't be purchased with gil but will be obtained by players who were actually seeking different rewards (the Hand of Creation/Divine Provider titles). Many players with the Pteranodon didn't choose to get it but were given it regardless (at the time Castle in the Sky was added, achievement mount rewards were still auto-added to inventory instead of needing to be claimed and many players are going to claim their earned but unwanted rewards if they just get added to a collection instead of taking up inventory space).

What would be a better comparison to make your point is how many players wanted either reward but did not get them because they did not feel they were worth the effort or gil required. Yet even that comparison would still be flawed because the Pteranodon has additional barriers to entry that the Wivre doesn't.

Lalachievements has ownership of the Wings at 4.9% of players and XIVCollect shows the ownership as 3.5%. That's noticeably higher than the 1.3% that both sites show for the Wivre. How does that fit into your argument?

[SchwarzwaelderTorte]

I think I made it clear in my first post that I am experienced with long term grind and why this one differs from all the other ones in terms of physical and mental strain, and the opportunities it offers to exploit it for profit, and therefore encourage prohibited activities.

Next expansion, if FATEs continue to reward bicolor gemstones, we'll probably be getting 16 per normal FATE instead of 14 and the number of new FATEs you would need to farm would decrease accordingly. Of course you'd then be stuck deciding between this expansion's rewards and next expansions rewards.

And that here is exactly the problem. We don't know if Dawntrail will give us bicolor gemstones or a new type of currency (hunt currencies seem to change every 2 expansions, we could be set for the same thing with FATEs). We don't know if Dawntrail will give us a new set of rewards locked behind another 7k FATEs-long grind, or if it will use the same vouchers. Frankly I'd rather spend 2-3 months working on this and be done with it than 2-3 years, especially when new long term grind content is about to be added.

Want an honest suggestion? You feel like completing Castle in the Sky was more enjoyable than the FATE farming. Go back to farming Skybuilder scrip, buy the better selling scrip items to toss on the marketboard then pay for your wings and mount that way.

You completely missed my point once again on why progressing towards the end goal of Firmament was overall a better experience than this is, and at this point I don't know how to phrase it to make it any clearer, so please read my posts again.

What you're suggesting for me is to go back in Firmament when I have nothing left to do here, to grind endlessly without a tangible goal, with the purpose of making hopefully enough gil to buy what I'm after. That's... like asking me to become a bot, with uncertain odds on how efficiently I will be able to progress (again, the joys of the free market, and I'm pretty sure we'll see prices crash with the release of Materiel Container 5.0 in Dawntrail). How is this more "enjoyable" exactly?

Lalachievements has ownership of the Wings at 4.9% of players and XIVCollect shows the ownership as 3.5%. That's noticeably higher than the 1.3% that both sites show for the Wivre. How does that fit into your argument?

The reason I picked the mounts is because the data for mounts on Lalachievements and FFXIVCollect is automatically taken from Lodestone, meaning it compares it against the biggest pool of character data available (afaik only achievement data can be hidden, minions and mounts are always visible). That data is not 100% of all players, but in the case of Lalachievements, any character can be added to it without needing to link an account to it, so you still get a pretty decent pool of characters (about 500k, it's listed at the top of the rankings).

That makes it the most reliable statistic. It's not perfect, because, as you said, not everyone wants to use the mount for themselves, and there's probably a lot more people who'd rather get the wings, but it is the most reliable one.

Fashion accessories, on the other hand, have to be added manually by the owner of each Lalachievements or FFXIVCollect account. First, this means that the % is not of all characters registered in the data pool, but only of those who have a registered account on these websites, making the statistics already inaccurate enough, but also there's no way to verify if someone has or hasn't actually acquired the item. For example, can you explain to me how, according to FFXIVCollect, 0.2% (39 characters) already own an Armoire set that hasn't even been released yet?

Lalachievements also specifies it at the top of the rankings you looked at.



11k characters is a little bit lower than 500k, don't you think? It's not 30 million players (or how many we are at now), sure, but 500k is certainly more accurate.

What would be a better comparison to make your point is how many players wanted either reward but did not get them because they did not feel they were worth the effort or gil required. Yet even that comparison would still be flawed because the Pteranodon has additional barriers to entry that the Wivre doesn't.

... Well the real flaw is that you can't ever hope to quantify this in any way so I don't see why you're bringing it up?

And I'm not sure I agree with your definition of "additional barriers to entry" either, you can unlock Firmament as early as post Heavensward MSQ (so DoW/DoM lvl 60 at least), level your crafters and gatherers through tons of different means (crafting/gathering logs, ocean fishing, levequests, GC deliveries, custom deliveries, crystarium/studium deliveries, Firmament itself, challenge log, job quests give HUGE EXP boost scrolls), same with your gear and materias (with the recent addition of Island Sanctuary), and well you use the crafting materials you gather in Diadem so you progress on both fronts at the same time, so not much loss there either. With the right gear Firmament crafting is all macroable now, so no real knowledge barrier either. And you end up with all crafters and gatherers between 80 and 90, opening new avenues for you to use them in the future (making gil, saving gil, housing, helping friends, etc).

In comparison for bicolor gemstone vouchers you need to reach Ultima Thule (so DoW/DoM lvl 89 at least) and farm for days before you can unlock the vendor. Or find 90-100M gil (twice) somewhere somehow before that. And you get a mount and wings for it, and that's it. Idk, seems a little less accessible and appealing to me.

[Jojoya]

Idk, seems a little less accessible and appealing to me.

Which is absolutely fine. Not everything is intended to be appealing to every player.

In this case, you've got the option to participate in other content you do enjoy to earn the gil that you will need to buy the items you want from the marketboard. Win-win. That wasn't the case with Castle in the Sky. You had to grind out all those Skybuilder points meeting a specific set of individual class goals to get your rewards.

Strange how you find a forced path more appealing than multiple paths but how you feel is yours to decide. Maybe you'll get lucky and SE will decrease the amount of gemstones needed per voucher but I highly doubt it. They didn't adjust the items for the meta achievement for Shadowbringers, they only reduced the rank required to get some of the individual zone rewards.

[Post]

I just want to say regarding bots, they get banned eventually if you keep reporting them. I only had to report the bots on Excalibur and Lamia for like 30 consecutive days until they were gone for about a week.

In all seriousness, I recommend copying your report to a notepad document so it's ready resend with a new date when you inevitably see the same player's bot running around day after day. That way reporting isn't such a hassle, which it kinda is due to the interface.

That, and if the GMs do take action, bots grinding Bicolor Gemstones to sell as vouchers SHOULD be extremely easy to thwart if they're reported, because they have to grind the MSQ almost fully and 66 Fates in every EW zone before they can even exchange for them.

Doesn't really help that the grind itself is awful. I know I wouldn't have minded if the Forlorn at least buffed Gem drops so folks at max level aren't at odds with those doing FATEs for EXP.

[SchwarzwaelderTorte]

Oh, I finished farming my 1000 vouchers (I think I did buy some a while ago, so not all of it was pure farming), so now I can give my complete experience on this:

My opinion remains the same as before, making the rewards (wings and wivre) tradable and buyable is not helping with the botting and RMTing situation, and progression is heavily affected by the people you farm with, and the people you "compete" against, which, depending on when you're doing your grind, can really be annoying.

I've met people who were farming vouchers to make gil, some people who were farming vouchers for themselves, mostly people who were just unlocking their vendors and quitting immediately after. A few very suspicious players here and there, but not as many as I expected (although we are at the end of an expansion, so this impression might not be accurate, and it doesn't take away from the one retainer selling 9 pairs of wings I mentioned in my first post).
Most people were already max lvl on everything, very few were here for leveling.

Overall, even if chatting with random people was a nice distraction, it wasn't fun.
... Can't wait to go through the whole thing again in a few weeks, I guess. Woohoo.

Although, it's still unclear if we're keeping bicolor gemstones or getting a new curency like hunts, and/or if new rewards will be purchasable with the same vouchers or new ones.
So there's definitely a possibility that, contrary to the experience of farming 1000 vouchers from 6.0 to 6.58 that I described in my previous posts, unlocking FATE ranks and vendors in 7.0 and beyond will feel a little more productive, because you might be able to spend the bicolor gemstones you get in 7.0 areas on 6.0 rewards, instead of having to spend them on crafting materials and regional rewards until you've unlocked all vendors.
But that's all speculation, it could very well be that with a new currency, the experience will be exactly the same as 6.0 to 6.58. Who knows!

Notes on how to optimize the grinding:

• Doing this solo is awful, and will take twice the amount of time it would take with a group. Even with only 2-3 people, if no one else is farming in the map, because of how FATE scaling works it will be a lot faster than on your own.
• People don't look at PF, so it's useful to have a macro to advertise your PF. Sometimes people will still ignore it, but that's their choice.
• It's worth starting a cross-world linkshell or a group chat to coordinate with other farmers. Because of how PF works, since FATE parties are local, you might not be aware that there's a farm going on on another server.
• It's better to farm in endgame areas (in the case of 6.0-6.58: Ultima Thule, Elpis, and the south of Labyrinthos), because you don't have to sync down to join the FATE, and therefore you do not lose your job resources or skills. You also get to keep the same ilvl, so if you have BiS gear it gives you a small extra boost in dps and clear time.
• It's also better to switch between areas (or instances) when there are no FATEs left where you are, instead of waiting for new ones to pop. This way you also help reset the FATE scaling, so if you teleport back after a while a FATE that took 2 min to clear will take less than 30s, because it did not expect 8 people to show up.
• Joining special FATEs is generally not worth it (the exception being when the expansion is still fresh of course), because they take too long to clear due to the lower number of players joining. It's a good way to farm your vouchers passively, but if you're in the middle of grinding it's better to ignore them, or farm other FATES in the same area at the same time and wait for the special FATE to be pulled, or to be at a certain % before joining, so you don't lose too much time.
• When you tp in a new area, FATE priority should be: whichever FATE is currently in progress (some FATES are shown as in progress but it's actually just mobs hitting each other, ignore those) > FATEs you need to trigger (timer is invisible, so you don't know for how long they might still be up) > FATEs that are about to expire > Everything else (with a priority on Defend FATEs, the ones with a tower icon, because they can fail and die quite fast if you're not here to save the NPCs)
• People will often go for the closest FATE because they're on auto pilot, so make sure to have someone linking the FATE position in chat and make sure people are actually following directions.
• Likewise, make sure only one person is in charge of the teleporting, to avoid overwriting teleport pop ups and creating unnecessary confusion.
• Regarding my concerns about wrist injuries: I already owned a wrist brace, which helped when it was becoming painful, but yeah do take breaks regularly, and stop for several days (I took a week off) if it becomes worrying. Worth mentioning that we were several regular farmers with the same wrist issues, though, both on mouse+keyboard and controller.
• To let my wrists rest a bit I also bought a very cheap USB pedal on Ebay. You can simply bind any key to it and play any green DPS this way, alleviating the strain on your hands (as long as healers remain the way they are, of course). It's also great for multitasking. I did get sore knees a few times, but nothing as bad as my wrists. (we'll see how it goes when I'm 80)
• Having a BLU player + Tank mimicry and Mighty Guard using Hydro Pull on mob FATEs is honestly a huge quality of life upgrade. Don't know how feasible this will be in 7.0 to whenever they update BLU, but it made a significant difference in clear speed, because you don't have to run after every mob, you can just stack on the BLU player and spam aoes. Using BLU in any other context is not worth it though, you simply don't have the gear to make any significant difference DPS wise. (BLU is definitely worth it in the areas of previous expansions though)
• Farming 1000 bicolor gemstones, or 10 vouchers, takes approximately 2h minimum. With a BLU player I think it took 20 to 30 minutes less than that.

Going forward, if they keep up with this kind of content (please don't... I already have my 10k FATEs title, I don't need another one...), I'm definitely going to do it as soon as possible, while it's still easy to find people to farm with, and vouchers are at a much lower price (regardless of if it's the same ones or new ones).
I think most regular farmers I met were all of the same opinion regarding that.

...And it sure feels good to not have to do it anymore.

[Jojoya]

Congrats on getting the items you wanted, and thank you for sharing your experience.