Quote Originally Posted by DRAGONxKING View Post
As the title says, I think ever since the introduction to Collectables and earning bank EXP with those it might be a good time to remove leve allowances.
You misunderstand what a crafter is supposed to be doing.

In a properly designed market-economy, the crafters should be supplying 100% of the goods. The game does not let this happen. Collectables, if the materials come from the market board, it should work as a "sink", but it doesn't, as most of the materials are provided or purchased from a NPC.

The entire design of how crafting should level, should be based on a combination of creating a HQ gear, and selling it. If you make 10,000 NQ pieces, then you don't level. Only the HQ pieces and HQ 5-slot materia pieces for a profit should earn you experience.

Likewise leveling gathering, is a joke. Diadem should not exist. Collectibles should not exist. You should only be able to level it by finding AND selling HQ items for a profit.

Because otherwise people will just produce an endless amount of garbage and sell it for 1gp to level. We've seen that in most MMORPG's. Few games actually care about the crafting mechanic in a way that just doesn't make it fustrating to play a crafter.

So collectibles just exist as a way to sink time and resources as a crafter. But as a gatherer? What is even the point, you find all these items you can not sell, and have no value to anyone but the collectible appraiser. Why is this a thing at all? That just makes materials even harder for crafters to get.

People just want to level quickly. So they do it by the most laziest means possible. We've seen this with combat as well. People would rather spend 300 hours grinding in POTD than play the roulettes more than once per day. Because every 10 floors in POTD is about the same time one FATE solo.

So the existing situation is bad, and Leve's are what keeps "new" botting in check. However the collectibles are a joke, and the fact you can just easily grind all the crafters from 60 onwards on collectibles alone in a day, tells you that the collectible system should not exist.

But as to what to replace it with. Have the store NPC's "buy" mispriced (items at a loss) items off the marketboard every hour, and have overpriced items (eg anything 100x NPC sale value) unable to be listed.