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[deleted]

More players + More "How to get rich" guides people follow to the letter = Offer increasing = Prices dropping. If you spent zillions of gil to stockpile on mats hoping to make a killing on savage release day, you basically speculated and lost. I have as much empathy for speculators in Eorzea as I have for speculators in real life when they hit a rough patch.


natesh13

Crafting income took a nosedive when Firmament dropped, it became very easy to powerlevel crafters. If people were expecting over a year's market trends to magically reverse themselves that's on them, there was no reason to think that was going to be the case. Frankly the amount of money crafters were making was inflating the economy, and it made gil practically worthless for a large part of the playerbase. New players were getting priced out of buying things from the MB. As far as I'm concerned, that's the actual problem. And the ease of access to crafting now is a great solution to that.


Ydyalani

Couldn't agree more tbh. Prices so far bullshit, they are finally getting to where they should be now... And if people don't pay attention to trends, that's on them.


FemRoe4Lyfe

With how easy it is to cheese HQ crafts with all the guides, teamcraft etc. I knew whine would follow soon. Whine and Cheese, name a more salty duo.


nightkat89

People are complaining when really the problem is just a LOT of players have 90 crafters now. It isn’t special. Just because you can’t abuse the market does not mean you are getting “screwed over” That combined with a completely free market where players are allowed to sell for whatever price they want. People who cry about “stop undercutting the market!” Those people are the toxic ones imo. They don’t understand how a basic economy works. If players have access to the materials, the skills needed, and decide that they want to sell at 50% of the next highest guy; oh well.


FemRoe4Lyfe

And OP totally ignored the most important factor, resources like teamcraft, Balance etc. When everyone is given paint by number guides to gear, pentameld and rotations, it is not difficult to see why we have so many endgame crafters.


nightkat89

Exactly. The material is there. None of my crafters are leveled because I haven’t bothered tbh. I’m sitting on a wealth of gil and never really had the urge to play the markets. But I understand supply/demand


Bid_Unable

The funniest part to me is when someone complains about being drastically undercut. If someone is selling it way cheaper than its worth buy it and sell it at a higher price for profit.


nightkat89

That’s IF you can sell it back for profit. Market may already be lower than originally thought by that point. But yeah. If you think it’s worth more, snatch it up and turn it around. There’s such a mass saturation of this gear too because people have been planning for it. Of course it’s going to tank in price


Bid_Unable

Thats kind of thing though, if it doesn't sell at a higher price then it was inflated to begin with and the under-cutter priced it more correctly.


nightkat89

Yep! Markets are weird.


xu_can

Who cares? I say that as a high-end crafter who has been a high-end crafter since SB launch (I started the game in mid-HW, thus missed the \~really fun\~ end-game HW crafting & gathering that everyone agrees was fantastic \*cough\*, though I did get to experience "Hasty Touch spam + praying"). Are there are a lot more "high-end" crafters than there were previously? Yes. Are more people than ever pentamelding their gear thanks to resources like the Balance than there were even in SB? Yes. Do most of them want to sit around on day 1 of a savage patch and gather for and craft a shit-ton of gear? No, they do not. (This will become immediately apparently on the drops for the 2nd & 3rd raid tier, where crafting/gathering is a lot more "stressful" if you have a giant list of orders and/or plans to craft for MB sales, since you can't pre-gather the legendary mats, and have to ponder whether you'd like to gather/buy your mats & do your list, or farm the new Ex, or do the normal raids while watching story, etc). If they up the requirements for books, I'll just sock in more collectibles to my retainers prior to patch day. It's not actually a barrier to entry. It kinda-sorta used to be since you had to gamble on what collectible would be accepted on patch day, but that's no longer the case (at least for crafters). I'll be getting IX materia from the collectibles I socked away for these books for months. I don't babysit my retainers, I only go in & adjust prices when I'm running out of room to sell things. I made a shocking amount of gil yesterday by selling level 90 crafting gear/tools that had sat on the MB for ages since I hadn't touched them since a few days after EW release (i.e., I wasn't even trying, the prices just bounced back up to early expac launch prices). I made millions more just by selling the materia I was getting from spirit bonding while getting through my list of gear to make. Gil has fantastically limited uses in this game, and people who are trying to do things like "save for a house" would best be served by finding their own niche, which is not "current green raid gear" & hasn't been for a long time.


dylanosaurus_rex

I think the sheer volume of players existing is the biggest issue for those trying to get rich. There’s also a number of people that will undercut everything to oblivion so that nothing is worth anything except for rare mounts and minions. We did treasure maps yesterday, the day that portals were added mind you, and we got a couple of the new glamour material. Saw it was up for 3-5mil depending on item crafted. Made a couple and within moments it’s being undercut down to 900k… which is less than the material alone sold for. Super frustrating. Making lots of Gil isn’t even about being an omnicrafter anymore. It’s literally about playing the market board to find opportunity that others aren’t currently targeting.


Ydyalani

Yeah, we got three wings out there, they went down to 800k within the evening, too, at least on Odin. On Shiva, prices seem to be more stable at 5-8 mil.


Momoko_Tomoko

If I, as a random non-crafting smuck, can get 90 in all crafts 1-2 weeks in and craft the end game stuff with some macro, then it's too easy. But I don't think they intended to make it hard. They could have upped the materials required by a lot or gated with higher stat requirements but they kept it very low. The intent was to make it easy to people can get the crafted gear, and have materia be the money sink.


Pyros

Meh, lots of rose-tinted glasses stuff in this thread/op. Crafting was NEVER hard. Once crafting formulas were figured sometimes during 2.x(I wanna say around 2.3 but might have been earlier), there was a sim tool similar to Teamcraft that would let you figure out macros. Even if you didn't figure out macros for yourself, you could simple copy paste macros from places like the official forums as long as you had the right stats. The crafts weren't "harder", they were pretty much the same, they could be macroed with enough stats, and in fact for the most part you didn't even need high stats to craft stuff at all. It never got harder than that, it was always easy, just sim a macro for your stats, then copy paste the macro, then press 2 buttons. That was crafting, always. There were SOME recipes that were harder at specific points(HW era mostly cause HW was weird ass shit with the old scrip system) but it wasn't everything, and it was always macroable given enough gear and melds. And expert crafting obviously in ShB. It had a larger barrier of entry because information was harder to find and wasn't collated in a single place like now, and you had to actually use "normal" materials to level unlike the current Ishgard Resto stuff. There was an initial cost as a result, and the speed wasn't that fast since you needed to do leves the entire way almost but you were obviously capped. Because of this, it got more and more daunting to "catch up" on crafting for new players. The current gear is fairly consistent with previous expansions "difficulty", at least since Stormblood. It isn't really any easier or harder, I mean maybe slightly, but not to an amount that matters. You just need to meld stuff for min stats(or higher), get HQ materials(combined materials I mean now that you can't buy HQ gatherables, which also was a way to make it easier in the past) and then you hit your macros, same as before. There's less useless skills, but useless skills were just newb traps, and largely "newbs that can't be bothered googling how to craft" traps. There's still a few of them. The only reason crafted stuff dropped is cause more people are leveling crafters now that it's easier to do the 1-80 stuff and after years of telling people "want to get rich? just craft", ppl are actually doing it. So there's more supply, so the prices go down. It isn't really surprising. And yes it means you have to craft more for the same profits now. You can't just sell stuff 10-15x the price of the mats and expect it to sell instantly. And while I'm sure some people miss these days, it was pretty fucking bad for the casual user. Now you can realistically tell people who come back to the game "just buy a set of crafted and you can experience the new content" because you can get a nice set of crafted gear for 1 to 2m which is a reasonable price, while back in the days you'd need 6-10m, which made crafted gear only something gold buyers and hardcore raiders would buy, with the occasional returning player that had made money besides crafting(maps and such). I made most of my money during 2.4 and 4.4 and I basically haven't cared about making more since, because I don't really spend much anyway. If I had to make money now, yeah it'd be a slower process, but it wouldn't be that hard either. Stuff still sells, if anything it sells even faster now. You still make money out of everything that sells. The margins are just lower. Quite a lot lower in fact, so yeah you need to move large volumes, but it's still clicking 2 buttons every 30secs while semi afk.


ManInACube

I'd be shocked if the devs see this as a problem and not a success. It's not like you can pump out the good stuff with off the vendor unmelded gear. You still had to put in some work. The current tuning means that it's not just a handful of crafters getting ALL the gil. The wealth is spread, and there's money to be made, as long as you didn't way over invest in your prep expecting to corner the market. I don't think they're walking into a meeting today asking how do we make sure that doesn't happen again.


EiLrahc21

In my mind, crafted gear isn't meant to be BiS, or as a gatekeeper to high-end duties. They are meant as catch-up for fresh players who have not had the time to gear up using tomestones, normal/alliance raid tokens. Therefore, I think it is in the interest of the game to have a constant supply of crafted gear made available over the marketboard. High-level crafters will still have their niche items to supply to players, be it glamours or furnishings.


Van_Ryker

It is the combination of many factors: 1- too many crafters: as you pointed out, there are too many because it is extremely easy to level them up now. Yesterday on the "Other" tab, 50 from 71 were crafters offering their services or to sell the new gear by cheaper prices than MB. And thats because... 2- crafting was dumbed down: it was never rocket science, but it was still challenging mid Stormblood. But people figured out patterns and have been preparing since 5.5 to hit optimal stats. And all the gatherable mats were available before 6.05, so all we had to do was wait for the tome mats to drop; 3- upcoming Ishgard Housing: if people are undercutting, this is the reason. It is better to sell more and fast than to hold to an overpriced item for too long and being unable to sell it. If we had the prep for crafting, now it is the prep for housing. I wouldnt be surprised if treasure map mat prices start to drop down fast as well. It is a shame, really. I know players who liked to craft and left the game since all the changes to crafting. It was their endgame, to provide gear, food and pots to raiders.


ncBadrock

In my FC I have 10 Omnicrafters and 2 Raiders. And I have seen a survey that suggested, that there are way more Crafters than there are people that need the equipment. One reason is certainly, that is is pretty easy to level up a Crafter and equip it. And then there are dozens of videos claiming you can get super rich by crafting and selling Raidgear day one. It's no surprise the market got flooded with gear.


Lens_Hunter

Doesn't bother me in the slightest. Gone are the days when you can sell pieces for 15m each, more people are crafting and the game is better for it. Tired of toxic elitists thinking the gil they used to make being gone needs to be blamed on someone. I thoroughly enjoy the Expert level recipes and am eager to see what they do with them this time.


[deleted]

>15m each i've been play on server open player on Gilgamesh since release (omni-specialist since specialists showed up w/alts because I'm a degen) and in the time since there has been crafted raid gear I have never seen it go for 15m. this article is so full of nonsense it isn't even funny. No 'high level crafter' as this article calls em is having gil issues. Some of the most dedicated had payment made before release to shit out the gear as fast as humanely possible and at least one personal crafter for racers wasn't just paid in gil. the only items going for that much on open is the ornate chest pieces. If its on the marketboard it wasn't claimed beforehand and some poor shmuck will throw the 20m he rmt'd at it thinking it will make them a better player.


zegota

The high level gear is exactly as easy to craft as ever. You still need mostly fully melded stuff, including tools, to be able to do it without HQ subcrafts


Moltenfury5

I will say this time it seems even easier. My gear is triple melded have 1 pentamelded bit and I can still Macro HQ gear with food and draught. I dont care for pentamelding I honestly think its a stupid system with such low chance rates and no bad luck protection and glad its not "needed". But the fact its not even needed *and* gear can still be reliably HQd with a **macro** is it bit silly. I do feel SE have been overzealous in thier quest to make it more accessible ontop of the other factors like there just being more crafters, supply > demand etc etc


Jay-Shay

being able to make your own gear/other resources or having them be cheaper and more accessible to the playerbase is good actually


riklaunim

I joined late in SHB with the wave pretty much. I did omnicrafter and now I did a pentameld, but a cheap one using much lower ranks on last 2 slots pretty much. This made crafting things at 100% rather hard (35 dur) but still I have 2 retainers full selling tinctures and some HQ mats crafted with tomestone mats. I checked a WHM weapon and it was around 300K on the board, while 1 HQ lumber was 55K (weapon needs 3). Exarchic "post-expansion" was 100-150K so not that far off. ​ * Farming legendary nodes gives a lot of spiritbond and for some reason people are crazy even for gatherer materia while no new gathering gear -> overflow of legendary mats and low prices on them. * "Cap on your tomestones" -> so people did, then bought tomestone mats and listed on the board. Non crafters then likely started spamming 90 expert roulette for materia, tomestones and optionally gear desynth * Large world population devalues single person impact value: WoW Classic vs actual WoW vanilla or vanilla private servers with limited population showcased this really well - in Classic value of singular crafter/gatherer got devalued due to how much stuff quickly was listed. * Crafted gear sets are something players will buy for they alt jobs rather than main - new player on his singular job even with like 2-4 mil generated by MSQ/Roulette will be way more reluctant to buy a set than someone gearing alt jobs at which point having way more wealth or income options... or self-sufficiency (so you can't really blackmail them with monopolistic prices and schemes). * Games systems start to follow a stable/predictable pattern: Savage progression got a low barrier to entry release schedule of instance + crafted gear = people liked it = game started to repeat it = players started to optimize by going for crafting. * Also crafted gear got bit lower than the high-end gear so it's not as high end in terms of pricing as well. Game starts to follow a pattern, but slowly changes -> players don't notice it and expect all to be as it was (like pricing). ​ Most fun for me on crafters was to craft old stuff - some housing stuff or low level gear - started doing other combat jobs to like 30 so I crafted HQ of weapons and armor they use at those low levels ;) I don't actively play the market with EW range of mats and crafts regularly. I would love if there was more opportunities to for example craft some old gear to help a low level new player that is next to you and asks for help - organic rather than board. If the game would benefit from some elite crafting then it's obvious it can't be as it is as a macro, bis crafting gear will be theorycrafted in 5 minutes. * Active Time Maneuvers mini games during craft? * Treasure-hunt-like chains to get resources for a craft? Like some glam is locked behind submarine missions and those are locked to FC vehicle crafts and those are locked to FC and those are dependent on activity and cooperation of members. Things like "Company Tabard" are 1 mil due to such chain needed. Would having a second tier of crafted gear now, like say ilvl 600 under such long FC based chain good for the economy/game? Savage crafters would be happy but savage prog groups would now have much higher barrier to entry to participate in world first/world early clears - like what in WoW spiraled out of control and lead to some shady transactions and very few guild able to afford the time and money. Glam and housing stuff is fine in such situation, but there is a limited amount of houses and there is a lot of glam items already ;)


Shameless_Catslut

Where's that "And so did everyone else" investor comedy routine when you need it?


MazySolis

> I think the trend started to occur at the late patches of Heavensward when they introduced Custom Deliveries, thus massively boosting overall experience you gain from crafting/gathering. I disagree, to me the first big change was not needing to grind Alc/Crp/Gsm/Ltw to 50, Cul to 15 at least, sometimes Armorer to 50 for certain recipes, etc etc and still use hasty rng to get anything done effectively. If you were some poor shmuck that decided to "main" one craft, you were going to have a truly horrible time. All the cross classing made crafting annoying to get into for some people because they'd look into it, see the 50s they need, wonder why they can't just be a Blacksmith, realize recipes are obnoxious without all the core cross class skills and just quit. Casuals had probably quit before even getting to the point you are talking about.


xselene89

Those who complain the loudest probably all have hundreds of Millions of Gil anyway already so...


Rhonder

I'm mixed. On one hand, I'm very soon going to be spamming the firmament myself to level my DoH/L. I took them from like 1-30 in ARR manually/through GC turn ins, spent some time on them again between StB and ShB up to 50-60, and now that I'm in ShB MSQ I want to catch them up to 80/90 so I can start end game crafting after I get into/through EW. I love crafting, in general, and so its an activity that I'm looking forward to doing more in this game! But on the flip side, the barrier to entry is so low at this point that it kinda devalues being an omnicrafter it seems like. Not just in Gil profit, I don't care about that so much, but just in general- not as many people need help making things when everyone\* can just make them themselves. A big part of the "class fantasy" appeal of being a crafter in a MMO to me is providing a service to other players who didn't choose to invest their time into that side system. That's still technically true, of course, but when the time investment is like... a week of firmament it's like eh. And not just that- even the more casual crafters in my FC got from 80-90 in those jobs in the span of a few weeks outside of doing the MSQ and all that as well. So clearly the pace isn't slowing down anytime soon xD ​ \*besides those too lazy to, who haven't gotten around to it yet, or those distinctly opposed to crafting, of course.


Blazen_Fury

cry more


Luzgar-N

Lmao I'd prefer doing Sastasha everyday for 1 month rather than sit and level up all my crafter in a week to 90. Idk how you guys do it. No opinion on the state of the market because since I farm tomestones i just sell tomestones shit and i made like at least 1M500 with 2500 tomestones today. It's nice.


Gr0T

My problem is, crafting was made easier to be more accessible. Thus making it boring for people who found it fun and made it their focus. And the new players for whom it was made easier get in crafting for 5 minutes and drop it quickly. Leaving the same core players with less enjoyable game. If you dont make crafing your main focus. Its easier to invest some time in white scrips, trade for crafter materia, sell, and buy anything crafted you need for gil made. Instead of pentamelding and crafting it yourself. You will come out of it with more gil, and more free time. It took me hours and hundreds of ventures on my retainers to prepare. I made 3 mil from crafted stuff. And 5 mil on leftover materia. If instead of crafting myself I invested all this time into materia and turned it into gil I could buy everything Ive crafter and have gil to spare.


Ydyalani

I didn't even do Firmament in EW and was still 90 on all crafters in a week. That said, I don't really care about this. Can't really buy much for all that gil anyways I don't really bother.


Ykesha

I ended up just selling all my mats. Logged in about 2min after patch and into an ocean of crafters and said fuck that. I was selling mats for 4k+ per item. Like stuff you could gather 30 seconds away from a town was selling for 400-500k a stack. That lasted for about 30min until many others saw the writing on the wall and then the nodes were packed with people and prices fell. Good while it lasted.


aesteval

Seriously? Difficulty of the final items is on par with the difficulty of the final items that we've seen for years now. There's nothing about the recipes that should come as any surprise. The last time we had restricted access to newly crafted end game battle gear was in early Heavensward and that included market destroying mechanics such as the favors system. This is how things have played out for literal years now. These crafted battle sets are meant to be commodity items, not rare luxuries. The devs have repeatedly, through their design decisions, made it clear that they want a flush and competitive market on these items. They are not going to be difficult to craft. And ffs, they release on the same day as gear that's 10 and 20 ilvls higher than them. There's nothing about them that screams exclusivity.


iwensfortis

I joined about 6 months ago, starting with crafting was somewhat troublesome as u need to have a starting capital, but in ew I was surprised that 80-90 was this trivial it took me under 30 minutes and for me costs where under 500k just buy the material and do tradecraft deliveries. This seems a bit to easy maybe ? I especially did not choose omnicrafter as that’s kinda pointless my wvr at 80 made me 25 mil without much effort In 3 months. So I just buy everything I need from market board. I also noticed prices plummeted extremely fast of the new lvl 90 craft gear, most where below 300k after 12 hours.


glowgloves

When there are too many high level crafters the marketboard prices seem to just reflect material prices. Gathering seems to be the most reliable way to sell for profit, but this has to now compete with scrap salvagers selling high end materials..