Bizarre burnout

[Anodic]

Did they?

I seem to recall needing LW , ARM and other jobs to make gear back then, as well as craft quest items.

LVL 63 Carpenter Quest: The Game of Confidence. The NPCs provide you with the item "Dressing Case Materials" in order to make the "Lavish Dressing Case" item. So yes, in the expansion quests, the NPCs start to provide you with what you need already. And again, you're assuming that the new player has picked up BSM or ARM in that situation. A new Carpenter that finds out they would have to go all the way to the 2nd floor of Limsa just to pick up BSM or ARM, and then would have to level them to 13 or 16, could rather very much choose to circumvent that completely and just purchase the ingots flat out. Because even though the ores might be CHEAP to obtain, you still have to go out of your way to level another class to put them to use, and some people might just not feel like going through that at the time. And my point about not being able to purchase individual items is about the MARKET BOARD player listings, not NPC vendors. You can't buy 1 ingot from a PLAYER's stack of 99 that they have listed.

Your leveling of crafters in the past has nothing to do with how a new player might feel now. The demographic of new MMO players is different now than it was back then. People are far quicker to give up on things that frustrate them nowadays then they were before. A functional system =/= one that's automatically fun or not annoying to deal with. There's a reason why so many games change old systems when their remasters come out. Do you really think a new player wouldn't find it annoying/jarring that they're just leveling their first crafter, knowing nothing of 99% of crafting mechanics yet, and suddenly they're hit with a: "To do this next quest, you're going to have to pick up these two other classes from two other cities and level them up enough to craft this one item you need for this quest you were trying to complete like an hour or two ago"? And I don't understand why you're bringing up crafter storyline at all here? What does that have anything to do with the argument? Are you saying that because this item you're making saves an NPC from death in a cutscene you'll see once and never again, that's good enough reason to not bring the old ARR crafting quests in line with modern standards? The item you make in the same exact fashion as other items you gave to the same NPC before over and over again?

It might be easier to level now than it was back in the day, but that's not the issue here. New players aren't going to know about all these super efficient/juicy ways of getting crafting exp fast. They aren't going to know what classes they need to complete the crafting quests of what crafting job they're trying to focus on at the time. You might think it's so easy and simple and quick nowadays, but for someone that knows absolutely nothing about the game or the crafting system? I guarantee you that you'll rarely find someone that reacts to a sudden wall of "I know you're trying to complete this class's quest, but you need to pick up these two other classes first to finish it" in a positive way. No one likes having to take a detour when they're just trying to drive home. Crafting in the ARR section of the game will be someone's first impression of what crafting is like, and as levels keep getting higher and higher, that first impression will get more and more important.