Synthesis/Crafting Is a Pain

[kyuubi]

Seems like challenges in the game to a lot of forum posters are considered "problems", and everyone wants these "problems" fixed. I don't agree, I like challenging gameplay

[Smokie23]

Seems like challenges in the game to a lot of forum posters are considered "problems", and everyone wants these "problems" fixed. I don't agree, I like challenging gameplay

I'm with you on this one. How easy to you want this game? Every patch released is making this game easier and is seriously making me turn my interests towards other games...and this would be the second time, leaving XIV. They don't fix XIV soon...I feel it will die a slow death. Might just go back to XI and play that again.
I don't know why players want everything handed to them. Lazy I guess. What fun is anything when its so simple and easy. I would go play WoW if I wanted a easy, cheesy game.

[SuzakuCMX]

I'm with you on this one. How easy to you want this game? Every patch released is making this game easier and is seriously making me turn my interests towards other games...and this would be the second time, leaving XIV. They don't fix XIV soon...I feel it will die a slow death. Might just go back to XI and play that again.
I don't know why players want everything handed to them. Lazy I guess. What fun is anything when its so simple and easy. I would go play WoW if I wanted a easy, cheesy game.

It's fun when skill is involved, but not when A: Recipes are randomly handed out, B: You can't view recipes you discover after a while, C: It takes 30 minutes or longer to craft a basic item, D: You have to go through multiple professions or through the Wards to do it, and E: You have to start from the beginning if you fail a single synthesis process.

It isn't challenging gameplay I dislike...it's challenging gameplay with high risk-low reward, numerous unexplained factors that can't all be tested by players, and arbitrary costs put into it (Shards). I appreciate shards because they sell easily, are easy to obtain, and help you start out...but you could remove them from the game because they do nothing but add another material to crafting.

SE also needs to branch out towards casual players...that was the whole reason they implemented the fatigue system. The only way they're going to financially recover from the September release flop and bad press is by making the game easy to get into, innovative, and appealing to the casual market. With WoW, Guild Wars, Rift, etc. they can't really compete unless they appeal to the casual market...when FFXI was released, there wasn't much competition for the MMORPG market, but now there's an overabundance of MMOs and most of them are crap (but there are some good ones).

TLDR; Just because you like "hardcore" gameplay does not mean it's healthy for the game to keep arbitrarily complex systems in the game as they are with no tweaks.

[Burn]

Seems like challenges in the game to a lot of forum posters are considered "problems", and everyone wants these "problems" fixed. I don't agree, I like challenging gameplay

Time invested is not challenging, there is a lot of ways the game can be sped up to provide fun gameplay that is both exciting and innovative. What is so challenging about making 3 pieces to an armor and synthing it? all that did was take 5x longer.

Challenging is when you struggle to win at something because its hard due to either not having the correct strategy, execution is lacking from the entire team to get the job done, not something that is completely controlled by a random number generator. I fail to see what is challenging about this game other than needing an extreme amount of patience to accomplish even the most mundane tasks the game currently has to offer.

I don't buy it, if anything this game is "challenging" for the wrong reasons and is the reason why the dev team is clawing through cement trying to get the game up to "satisfactory levels where we feel appropriate to charge for the service"

Everything about crafting could be sped up, the synthesis materials are so unbalanced that they have already talked about streamlining the materials down.