Dev Tracker: Discussion

[Xantavia]

Explain broken stynths where you dont lose everything

You got distracted and forget to add everything, duh.

[NynJa]

Does Chef Ramsay cook "average" chicken 50% of the time? Does Chef Ramsay fuck up his chicken 5% of the time?!?

I'm not saying this to argue with any of the above ideas, I'm just saying that a 5% break rate when you're a fkn boss at making shit, and a capped 50% hq rate is pretty weak sauce.

[Sechs]

XIV's crafting system is extremely addictive and fun, the only thing I hate about it is how they designed it in a way so that everything in the game is worth jack shit so its just a complete waste

That's because the game used to be a somewhat close to sandbox MMO model, whereas the current one clearly is 101% theme park model MMO, a strange one with some remainders from the close-to-sandbox era.
Crafting is one of those.

Atm gear gets bound to you so you cannot resell it once you've used it.
You don't need low level gear or to cycle through levels (like old lv75 capped FFXI) because the game is so fast in levelling, doesn't have as many classes, doesn't require party play to levelup and many other reasons.
Also you don't have equipswap like in FFXI. Gear progression follows mostly a linear, clear progression where there is a generic indicator of the "power" of the item and where every new more powerful item is usually a better all-time item for that slot.
No situational pieces, no sidegrades, no Job specific macro pieces.
Of the stuff you can craft, only a very small % of gear aimed for the cap is useful, and only as filler or placeholder until you get something serious, to get you started into end-game content or to close the gap after you return to the game after a long break.
After all, just like all other games with this model, FFXIV follows a linear, tiered progression system where the best gear is almost always the one dropped by the hardest, latest added "raid" content.

It's pretty clear how in this scenario crafting cannot have a big importance.
The only aspect left for it to have a relevance are maybe the materia melding system and the fact you need more gear (usually crafted one?) to spiritbind and transform into materia.
And that's it.
In a game where the economy relies so much on instanced content instead on stuff you can put/sell/buy on the market, of course parts of the game which would normally rely on that feel the consequences of a non-existant market economy.


In the previous model you used to have repairs (the NPC ones were just "temporary" stuff) and many other things I won't list, but just thing about the fact you could start as a crafting profession and stay that way all your game life.
It was clearly more towards sandbox.
And yeah, in nowadays' FFXIV it feels a bit strange and crafting system still seems a bit "off place", and that's exactly why I called it a remainder of the past.
It doesn't perfectly fit with the modern model and that's why people are whining about having to swap to a crafting class to be able to do melding, repairs and everything else (whereas in other games "professions" are just in the background and you use them on whichever class you may be at that moment).
I'm confident we're gonna see more changes in the future concerning crafting. Hopefully some of those will make it more relevant because it's a shame how little importance it has atm, for such a wonderful game system



Edit:
Yes the previous crafting system was different, way less user friendly, less addictive and more "obscure", but it was still a very deep and interesting crafting system. I feel its main issue at the time was the lack of detailed and confirmed data on how it worked exactely, most of the things we knew were based on player tests and finding and weren't particularly conclusive...

[urat]

Does Chef Ramsay cook "average" chicken 50% of the time? Does Chef Ramsay fuck up his chicken 5% of the time?!?

I'm not saying this to argue with any of the above ideas, I'm just saying that a 5% break rate when you're a fkn boss at making shit, and a capped 50% hq rate is pretty weak sauce.

The 5% can be explained away easily as towards things like shitty starting materials. You cant see how the quality of you're starting mats are, so yeah sometimes chef ramsay goes to cook a chicken and rarely he throws it out before he really gets into it because the chicken wasn't going to turn out due to being shitty ahead of time (bad cut, maybe started expiring, etc)

[NynJa]

so you go to the store, buy 40 food articles, and 2 of them are already bad...
once again, 5% is fucking ridiculously high.

[Spira]

FDA moogle does not approve.

this conversation is highly entertaining btw.
considering all the other things that are totally realistic in the game, i wonder why this one sticks out the most.

[dasva]

The 5% can be explained away easily as towards things like shitty starting materials. You cant see how the quality of you're starting mats are, so yeah sometimes chef ramsay goes to cook a chicken and rarely he throws it out before he really gets into it because the chicken wasn't going to turn out due to being shitty ahead of time (bad cut, maybe started expiring, etc)

Psh Chef Ramsey not only would see it right away he'd go up to the store manager and tell him that chicken is so old it knows which came first!

[Kyte]

I mean, I've seen Ramsey critical fail a piece of toast before



2:18- Shit happens!

[dasva]

Well in his defense he is cooking several things at once... maybe they should get rid of breaks but introduce multi crafting where you do several different things at once but a chance to mess them up!!! Spend too much time on those eggs and bam there goes the toast!

[Anomie]

I just think if there's a 5% autofail chance, there should be a 5% HQ rate regardless of tier, which is CLEARLY not the case.

So much for balance, right.

If a 120 cook can fail a level 1 synth, then a level 1 cook should be able to hq a level 1 synth (which is possible but its in the .05% not 5%)

[dasva]

Not to mention multiple crafts increase your chances to fail but not to HQ!!!

[urat]

Implying the money loss of 1 crit break is generally the same as the value gained from an HQ?

If HQing rates were balanced, all your HQs would sell for significantly less. And then the market would be significantly less worthwhile to invest in. Maybe balanced Hq rates for "material" synths (cloth/threads/ingots/lumber) but the principle of HQ armor is it is supposed to be a risky thing to invest in trying to make, requiring many many synths to get your money back.

If it was easy to get HQ armor, as easy as break rates, then there wouldn't be much risk and every crafter and their mule would flood the market with the armor. As long as a risk is involved, the average crafter shies away, creating a risk fueled market that rewards long term investment.

Result: A moderately healthy free market, with little to know flooding. Even the highest demanded of items are rarely flooded. A perfect example of what happens when risk is taken out of the system is fishing. The price of fish always has been incredibly volatile. When matsya was first added to the zaldon quest it's price fluctuated up and down by as much as 50% every 2-3 days.

There is no risk in fishing, as it is essentially free to invest in. The only cost is time, a commodity many MMO players have more than enough of to spare. Fish bots ransacked the market and flooded the AH with matsyas, people were bazaaring them by the dozens at zaldon, prices were all over the place, etc etc.

Optimally you want maybe 3-5 competitors in a market. To little and you get price fixing. To many and the market crashes. In terms of crafting, the requirement of high investment into a particular market to turn a profit is the limiter here, so you rarely see more than single digit amounts of a particular HQ gear, even super high demand ones.

On the other hand, if any fish ever develops any kind of demand that ever matches the profit rate of hakuryu, I gaurentee the market will explode, flood, and crash within weeks due to the lack of any kind of limiting factor.

tl;dr: Imbalanced HQ rates deters people from flooding markets. Fishing has no such balancing factor and any time a fish becomes super high demand (Eg; Matsyas back in the day) the market goes crazy)

[Anomie]

I'll probably catch some flak for this one but yeah;

See, in a "market" where people are stupid enough to pay 120,000,000 gil for Crit damage +1 (sighting Cfeet-1)or 240,000,000g for Weaponskill Damage +1 (sighting Tbody-1) , maybe having a more realistic HQ rate isn't such a bad thing.

But I've always had problems believing that 8-9 figures was worth 1% gains.

[Bukadan]

those gains are what will get you into those "first on server" wins, VD fights, and being hand selected (/t'd directly, and often) for the most relevant content with the best rewards. (that said, skill is also a factor of just as high of value.) the hardest content should be looked at like spinning plates on sticks,thus while doing battle and a plate falls, and should your group know how to think on their feet and put the plate back on the stick again, to get it spinning and stay there youre probably gonna need that 1% gain to be successful. this is also true when it comes to pioneering new content. so how is it not worth it?

[Anomie]

You kinda missed the point, the point was the money, not the gear.

I was saying MORE people should have it, by it being easier to get, not incredibly rare with the imbalanced Hq/Fail ratio.

Things -should not- be worth hundreds of millions of gil simply because RNJesus shines down on you this day, and shits on you tomorrow.

I think that if I'm 100 levels over the skill required to make something, I should be proficient enough (aside from distraction) to succeed 100% of the time, 1% per skill level over the cap doesn't sound unreasonable at all.
Even if it were to be 10 levels = 1% success making 5% mandatory fails a lot less infuriating.

The same is true for the 5% rule in everything in the game... an i119 with the equivalent of 1000 accuracy misses a level 0 rabbit, *rolls eyes* come the fuck on, seriously.
The breeze from the missed swing should be enough to kill the damn thing.
The mere fact that something 119 levels higher than the rabbit attacking it should cause it to have a heart attack and fall over dead.

[Vathris]

Loved ramsay burning the toast lol
Bloody brilliant Kyte... bloody brilliant...

[dasva]

Matsya crashed because a combination of the high volume that could be obtained by idiots and the end prize being of unknown or low value in comparision. Though I mostly blame the idiots that couldn't so much as figure out the average gil per hour they were making was much less than Hak's. Hell people were so eager to unload and undercut that after awhile they dropped enough where you could've made money faster off of moat carp lol. Upside people who wanted cape got it much cheaper than they should've fishers who weren't complete morons had less competetion for Hak's

[dasva]

Yay new dev posts. Both look kinda pointless though

[Damane]

Matsya crashed because a combination of the high volume that could be obtained by idiots and the end prize being of unknown or low value in comparision. Though I mostly blame the idiots that couldn't so much as figure out the average gil per hour they were making was much less than Hak's. Hell people were so eager to unload and undercut that after awhile they dropped enough where you could've made money faster off of moat carp lol. Upside people who wanted cape got it much cheaper than they should've fishers who weren't complete morons had less competetion for Hak's

matsyas and shaper shawl were horrible horrible horrible thing, never shall SE introduce somethign like that ever again ¬.¬. I wanted to go shoot myself when I went to farm my own shaper shawl via matsya fishing.

[Tarage]

Yay new dev posts. Both look kinda pointless though

Where? I'm not seeing them.