Spiritbinding = Ex?

[mbncd]

[Snip]For 1-cap crafting to not feel like a waste of time:

1) Gear upgrades have to feel like they're doing some good. If they don't make any real difference, there is no fun or point in upgrading. 1.x had this problem.

2) Similarly, leveling of all jobs has to be paced (including monster difficulty) to make gear upgrades worth stopping your leveling to obtain.

3) Crafting must remain a, if not the, primary means of getting useful gear at any level to make crafters feel needed. Having quests get you started with gear is great, but having quests supply you with gear from 1-cap deeply undermines the need for crafting at all. This, not the BoE/BoU concept itself, is why crafting in games like TERA and WoW is so uninteresting and largely treated as a chore to be completed to get access to one or two good recipes.

For level cap crafting to remain relevant:

1) The rate with which equipment and materia can leave circulation must be not too far from the rate at which they can be produced.

2) Multi-melds must remain competitive with non-crafted gear such as dungeon drops.

3) Materia need to be less permanent to balance out the fact that fewer trash materia will be brought into circulation. Also, crafters must obviously be able to multi-meld gear for another player without trading the item to them (which couldn't be done in 1.x).

4) Encounter design needs to be balanced to not require perfect gear but to be challenging enough to make players feel like a gear upgrade would help, and subsequently that effor needs to be rewarded eventually but not immediately.

5) Playerbase needs to stop thinking of melded gear as a monetary investment and see it for what it is: an expense of character progression. You can't always have your cake and eat it, too. What next, are you going to ask SE to build a time-machine into the game so that once you get your new dungeon drops you can go back in time and get back the time you spent on the dungeon gear you were wearing before? Time is money, friend.

If even one piece of this puzzle is left out or not fit in properly, the whole system may fall apart.[Snip]

I'm still personally against the BoU system because it is personally inconvenient to me, but that doesn't mean it can't be good for the game. You raise a lot of good points, particularly the concept of exponential increase in combat/crafting/gathering difficulty, making corresponding gear upgrades relevant before cap. If the issues you mention here are remedied in 2.0, I'll be much more supportive of the BoU system as a whole.

For now, I'll lament the inability to do secondary (and beyond) melds on friends' used gear and the inability to give away multi meld hand me downs (without rolling the dice a number of times before I can make that friend the new piece instead of the used item I was planning on giving them), but I feel that these are also systems that could be fixed with the more flexible server structure and other big changes we're expecting.

I'm still not about to cheer BoU on, but I'm willing to get used to it if the problems surrounding it are fixed.

[Mishaela]

For now, I'll lament the inability to do secondary (and beyond) melds on friends' used gear

Why do so many people keep indicating this is going to be the case in ARR and focusing on it like it's the end of the world just because the meld request system was limited in 1.x? Did I miss a memo? I mean, yeah, it's possible they go this route because it would keep the materia turnover rate even higher (helping create more constant demand) and if useful materia are more plentiful then all the more reason for SE to take this route (in pursuit of a less spikey [cheaper] and more consistent circulation of assets in the overall market), but it could also be extremely frustrating for players without appropriate crafting classes leveled who would then feel forced to spend days leveling their own crafts that they didn't care about to begin with. I think this is a molehill being made into a mountain, but I guess we'll see.

[mbncd]

Why do so many people keep indicating this is going to be the case in ARR and focusing on it like it's the end of the world just because the meld request system was limited in 1.x? Did I miss a memo? I mean, yeah, it's possible they go this route because it would keep the materia turnover rate even higher (helping create more constant demand) and if useful materia are more plentiful then all the more reason for SE to take this route (in pursuit of a less spikey [cheaper] and more consistent circulation of assets in the overall market), but it could also be extremely frustrating for players without appropriate crafting classes leveled who would then feel forced to spend days leveling their own crafts that they didn't care about to begin with. I think this is a molehill being made into a mountain, but I guess we'll see.

If you read the end of that paragraph, you should have also seen I said "but I feel that these are also systems that could be fixed with the more flexible server structure and other big changes we're expecting." I'm not saying that just because something was an issue in 1.xx that it will automatically be an issue in 2.0. I do however think that, until it has been stated as a planned change in the future, it should not be assumed that it will be any different either. Assumptions get us and SE into big trouble.

We have to wait and see and deal with what information we can get when we get it. From the information we have, we know that BoU is planned but we don't know that extended melding requests are planned (unless I've missed that somewhere but I don't think so) so I can really only work with weaving the BoU news into my old melding request information (again, until we receive new information).

There's no need to jump on me for it and no mountain was made. I expressed personal opinions on what little information has been given and I believe that entire post was perfectly reasonable. I personally don't like BoU but I'm willing to accept it, more so if they fix the problems around it as were previously listed. What is wrong with that?

Sheesh, people are so eager to call everything a huge deal when it's just a personal opinion, which we all have the right to have and share...

[Mishaela]

There's no need to jump on me for it and no mountain was made. I expressed personal opinions on what little information has been given and I believe that entire post was perfectly reasonable. I personally don't like BoU but I'm willing to accept it, more so if they fix the problems around it as were previously listed. What is wrong with that?

Sheesh, people are so eager to call everything a huge deal when it's just a personal opinion, which we all have the right to have and share...

I didn't intend to jump on you about it, sorry. I was talking more in general because this thread and the others about this topic have had multiple posts flailing irrationally about this particular issue, in contrast to your much more measured approach.

[mbncd]

I didn't intend to jump on you about it, sorry. I was talking more in general because this thread and the others about this topic have had multiple posts flailing irrationally about this particular issue, in contrast to your much more measured approach.

I'm sorry too, for kind of jumping on you. It's been a long sleepless night so I wasn't in the best of moods when I wrote that.


Edit: Just to be clear, that isn't an excuse, just an explanation. Again, I'm sorry.