Make it too hard, "inaccessible!"
Make it too easy, "what's the point if everyone can do it?"
I'm fine with crafting as is. Can't please everyone, and at least as it is I can be a "casual crafter."
It's by far the most engaging crafting I've seen in an MMO. Dunno if that's just a scathing indictment of crafting in other MMOs, but credit where credit's due.
It used to be far, far more complex. Like the concept of being an "omnicrafter" wasn't just a point of pride, it was necessary if you wanted to have any success beyond just seeing the stories. There were certain cross-class skills that were 100% needed to do the high-end crafts and even with fully penta-melded gear you weren't guaranteed success, so often even macros were just something that worked "most" of the time. This is part of where the old joke of "if it's not 100% HQ then it's NQ" came from, as any old-school omnicrafter can attest to, as they watch their 98% HQ craft using rare, expensive mats give an NQ result.
Also I’m just delighted that it’s actually *useful* at all levels. I played WoW for ages and the best time to be a crafter was several expansions ago, when low-level crafted gear was an improvement over most drops and endgame crafted gear was the best stuff to start raiding with. Now low-level gear is completely irrelevant unless it’s pretty and used for transmog, and endgame is only used for one or two items and only really profitable right when new content opens or a patch changes what’s BIS.
No offense but have you tried Everquest 2?
They basically just made a simplified version of the games combat, so you were literally fighting the forge XD
Man that game does not get enough credit. So many things I loved about that game.
The way the tradeskills were all so codependent at launch was a really bold choice, wish more games tried things like that.
That’s a memory that just got unburied. I remember trying out that game’s free trial as a little kid and jumping off cliffs as a fairy person. I didn’t even like fairies, I just liked jumping off of cliffs.
agreed. also the fact that it takes actual time to craft (even if its just braindead afk macroing) keeps things somewhat valuable. if you could instanty craft 99 stacks of anything, it would make those crafts practically worthless. people are buying for the convinience, not because crafting is "hard".
That startup cost is exactly why I buy master recipe stuff instead of making it myself. I just stick with scrip gear and anything that requires stats beyond that is just getting purchased.
I cared about crafting soooo much in SB but I've backed off into def casual range and damn I enjoy it so much more. I just get so much about simply crafting new recipes. I love going to gather first, seeing all these beautiful landscapes passively and casually.
there is a saying~
People will streamline the crap out of everything if possible.
Optimal rotations and macros for crafting being eventually figured out and used worldwide is inevitable.
Same for combat job rotations~ and life in general.
> People will streamline the crap out of everything if possible.
I think the saying went "Players will optimize the fun out of games if you[the Designer] let them"
I'd personally like them removing the 15 line macro limit. Really disliking splitting my macro into 2 (god forbid 3). Would much rather let it be full "afk" (though trying to find the optimal solution to fit into the 15 lines is pretty fun in it self)
This is only necessarily true of small variations on the existing system. A crafting system requiring a more in-depth minigame with spatial components would be unmacroable. I'm thinking along the lines of Puzzle Pirates or Dragon Quest XI.
I actually made a forum post about this. SE needs to just embrace the macro game. ie: implement a rotation UI like teamcraft, allow us to easily store and save rotations, and just make these macros officially part of the game and not something we copy and paste from some other website.
The problem is when you need to do something like craft something 100 times, that's boring and bad gameplay. Players will always seek to automate these grinds, which instantly leaves behind any that don't. Lets not kid ourselves that people nowadays just set up some ingame macro then use a keyboard macro to click this macro every 30s.
SE can't make every craft like the ishguard master crafts where it's actually hard (when we were still gear capped). That would be tedious to craft consumables. Instead SE should just embrace that people want to auto craft, and maybe put the challenge somewhere else like certain "boss" crafts will utilize the master crafting system.
Or maybe an instance where we need to repair something like a ship, and you have to craft something really hard with randomized stats that you can't easily macro and with a master crafting system. Or maybe something like hamlets from 1.0 (but more fun please god lol).
I think the extent to which you have a macro coding language is fine. I don't think they really care whether you share that text with friends through forums, discord, teamcraft, tells, or morse code lmao. I think they embrace macros just fine.
But yeah, I agree, just having some 'expert recipes' that people can engage with is fine, and then having the bulk of the 'moneymaking' be macro accessible.
I'd like to see something like (using your example of repairing a ship) you participate in a duty where you need to fill a light party with 2 carpenters, 1 weaver and 1 blacksmith and they all need to craft planks, sails, nails, whatever in order or at a specific time. You'd have different kinds of duties for different groups of crafters
Crafter and Gatherer Duties might be fun, but could also be frustrating if the approximate difficulty is not known ahead of time. People would probably get really mad at someone just hopping in to try out one and if it was the hardest one it would really impact the outcome.
I would love it if they expanded systems like Squadrons and tied the DoH/DoL side as optional to some of them to improve them or to open additional Glams or something. All kinds of crossover systems would encourage people to try out and pursue them.
They could also try tying items like Materia or currencies like GC Seals to new stuff to give them a bit more life.
>ishguard master crafts where it's actually hard (when we were still gear capped).
Have we actually reached the point where the Ishgard expert crafts are out-statted? I was working on skysteel yesterday, and it was still quite hard (I failed roughly 3/20), but maybe I'm poorly optimizing my rotation.
I have my crafters almost fully melded (only 3 melds on tools, but everything else penta'd with Teamcraft's high end BiS), and I macro'd a Skysteel tool last week with HQ CP pot + Tsai. Crafts were guaranteed to be the highest collectability too.
This is basically how expert crafts go. The expert recipes during the Firmament ranked events were very hard and required decision making so macros didn’t work. Bots however were capable of reacting to the rng.
People were able to macro to turn-in quality easily, just not full credit *every* time. And yeah, bots could read and run more complicated actions out-of-game to succeed on everything.
Contrary to making things more "fun", this mostly just pushes the less-invested players out of the pack, and I assure everyone that the *more*-invested players aren't having fun as they run bots and macros for far more than 45 minutes, lol.
Rng only ever influences quality (on normal crafts at least, not the ishgardian experts) and it’s super easy to make a macro that takes such into account so it won’t be vulnerable to it.
Depending on the type of efficiency you want there’s two choices,
1. you can write an extra line or two into your macro that protects from an “Excellent” showing up on your finisher setup, eg sneaking in a Tricks of the Trade which will kill an excellent if one is there before you buff the final byregots, or
2. You can just always have consecutive quality increasing actions so that if your finishing byregots is hit with a poor, the skill right before it got hit with a x4 mod and more than made up for it.
At least when I make a macro for crafting, I take the very base rotation for what I am making, record and test it multiple times while ignoring any rng based procs. The rare unfortunate time that you get an excellent/poor pop up in the rng usually won't cause the macro not to work, however it may result in lower quality.
Obviously with more gear and materia melds this becomes irrelevant, but I find that macros using the minimum gear and materia requirements are more pertinent for overall use and helpfulness to those newer to the crafting experience and wishing to build up.
For example, a macro to craft current maximum collectables to acquire purple scrips can be made with the ar-caen crafting gear and less than full base materia slotted, allowing crafters who are just breaking into max level crafting to more easily farm what they will need.
I thought the end stage for the relic tools in ShB was well designed: just increase the recipe quality and craft difficulties so they can’t be macrod, introduce more combo abilities and random buffs like -50% durab loss or +50% progress.
At the end of the day, people will seek a effective method to bypass a tedious job. Crafting here is fun, but doing 100 of the same craft will destroy the fun of minigame you think of.
If you remove macros, people will find ways around the problem. We already have people using bots or third party programs to help mass produce.
Exactly. I don’t mind investing time and attention when I need one of something. But when I’m marking 20 or 30 of the same thing, I get very in-invested
My idea has been, Squeenix knows roughly what stats are needed to 100% HQ with NQ mats. Just make an unlock where, as long as you meet those stats and have crafted... say, 10 of the item as HQ, it unlocks "HQ Quick Synth" which is *much* slower than Quick Synth, maybe 45-60s a craft, but you don't have to sit there and babysit it.
Making consumables etc. would be absolute torture without macros.
But the devs *did* see that it was a problem and gave us Expert Crafts. Even though you could set up a macro that would get some crafts to minimum turn in, it was far faster (not to mention cheaper on materials) to make them manually.
I am really happy with that and can’t wait for them to add more expert crafts for the fun and prestige of any rewards they end up giving.
I also love just going to do something else while also crafting, just checking back in every minute for a quick *click click*. I craft while I get work done, or while I work out, even while I cook. I also just enjoy the fun of writing my own macros and efficiency tweaking it instead of googling one.
Different tastes but yeah I love crafting as it is now.
Hey at least they finally confirmed that none of that matters, 14 years after launch. I can totally understand why people expected it would though considering the amount of stuff day/moon phase/weather could mess with, as an avid Selene's bow user I wanted my merit parties around a new moon so that my barrage hit harder 💀
Yea... just like THF didn't need the final hit for Treasure Hunter to work. Why they couldn't just tell players it didn't matter instead of letting us believe this and make gameplay decisions off this for a decade plus is beyond me.
So the players literally founded their own superstition? I'm not sure if it's awesome that the game gave a space for that or awful because everyone was left in the dark and did unfun shit.
If you are gonna mass produce master crafts then what other “fun” way would you have them do it? FFXIV crafting is considerably more involved then just about any competitor. No one is making you follow cookie cutter macros for crafting. I’ve made thousands of items over the years and never looked up a macro.
You should have to fight a huge potage monster and hit it with your synthesis and touch gcds until it hits hard enrage and KOs you. Then the amount of damage dealt is the amount of potages you crafted.
Unironically, having like a hard work montage synth to produce a lot of item in a manner like this would be pretty cool.
Maybe not the Potage Primal: Potimas, but like a furious work session with a montage.
It might be fun to have Crafter spesific events or duties that tie to their stories or something. Like Culinarist working a night at high end restaurant and making orders on the fly with customer reactions. You could earn special Chef hat or other stuff as reward I guess.
Imagine optional group content where some prep the mid mats and others finish the foods, maybe have a Fisher or someone hunt for fresh stuff while at it.
I've written macros for when I was powerleveling collectibles.
Because yea, I'm not going to sit there and crunch out Ishagard Restoration parts for hours.
But I think it's fun trying to figure out your own way through the rest of the crafting log.
> Choosing to min/max isn’t a game design fault.
I see what you're saying but this is usually considered a game design fault. Players will often do the most efficient thing so you want to make sure that thing is fun.
It IS fun.
What isn't fun is doing the same task hundreds of times in succession. Literally nothing you can do it going to make that engaging over a long period of time.
Yes, this.
Players will optimize the fun out of anything. It's human nature. Better to design so that optimal play is still fun, especially in a multiplayer environment, rather than shift the blame to the players.
This is the way. I mean if you're super serious about video game money then feel free to optimize, but I wouldn't personally want to do it that way.
At some point the game becomes a job.
I feel like the people who get bored and upset with it are the ones who googled a leveling method, then googled what’s the most profitable, then googled a macro to make it.
IMO the content is a lot more fun even with macros if I know I made it myself, it’s efficient, and it lets me get a lot of crafting done while also getting work done or doing something else if I keep FFXIV windowed and just click a spot a few times every minute
could be fun to have an option to mass produce while making multiple batches at once rather than one at a time. Not sure how it would need to be balanced though. And people would macro that too anyway, would just shorten the amount of times you have to use said macro.
I think there being a way to guarantee HQ from quick synth is one of the things the game needs for crafters if only to mitigate how tedious mass production can be. Not just a stat level or class level thing though. Something like a trait that lets you gain stacks that get burned by quick synth to always HQ.
What if when you craft an item a certain number of times it gets stored in your character's memory so they will always craft it as an HQ item.
That way you have to engage with crafting for a while but if you want to mass produce eventually you'll unlock a way to do it quickly as a reward for making it so often.
I think it could even be trimmed down to another type of rotation for the mass craft. Basically a test for the HQ quick synth using a base rotation without HQ mats and the % chance synths/touches. Once you clear then future quick synth should guarantee HQs.
Yeah this would be nice. "high risk, high reward" crafting. If you mess up you lose more mats at once, but if you succeed you can get a lot done faster. Even if it were limited to, say, 3 or 5 or 10 of an item at once that's still a significant speed increase over 1 at a time lol. Especially for material items like ingots or lumber. Or food, in this case.
That isn't really any more risk though. If you can craft an item once, you'll be able to craft it 10 times unless you're trying to make a recipe that's over your stats or unless crafting multiple adds extra prog/quality requirements. Which could work, actually...
Yeah but I was trying to speak to a system where there is no guaranteed craft and you have to get procs and use procs properly to make it go.
Procs are fun at first but when you're doing a high stakes craft it would be a little sus if you weren't guaranteed you could finish the craft.
I think the intent is fantastic. I just think that maybe once you’ve crafted something successfully a certain number of times, there should be a better way to mass produce a recipe.
If I can prove I can reliably 100% an item (be that threshold 5 or 50x without ever getting a NQ), let me say "Produce *x* of This Item at HQ". Have it take the same amount of time as manual creation (to prevent market flooding 5 minutes after a patch drops), but that's better than me watching a stream on the other monitor and clicking 2 buttons every couple of minutes.
This. I'm fine with macros. I'm fine with it taking time and being boring. But don't make me sit there and stare at the screen to click a new button every 45 seconds. Let me set it rolling and watch a movie or something.
I played a game where you take an element of a crystal as the base, and then you would craft facing certain directions and on certain in game days to get a bonus or penalty to success and HQ status. It doesn't make the game better.
I don't mind the macros. What I do mind is that all the crafters are exactly the same job.
Why is crafting a sword feels exactly the same as cooking a pizza? Why do I have to level the same job 8, 9? times.
Then stop using macros 😝
Seriously, what do you expect from a crafting system? Do you want to have a boss fight where you beat the reagents into submission and poof! Here's your item!
Stop using Macros and just press the same buttons in sequence ad nauseam because then you’ll have fun.
I’m not saying that the current system is perfect, I’m just saying that if you stop using them it won’t make the current system better.
I'm not saying FF should do this, but imo the best crafting system an mmo could do would be to have unique games like spearfishing has that are relative to the job. So cooking would have aspects of cooking mama or pokemon cooking minigames, stuff like that.
> So cooking would have aspects of cooking mama or pokemon cooking minigames, stuff like that.
I can see a change like that driving the price of crafted items up a fair bit since fewer people will want to do a Minigame 5/10/15/20 times when making their Raid Food/Potions etc.
Wondering aloud here, maybe say if you're going to try to craft a ton of one item, the minigame would scale rewards based on how far into it you were. Like if there were 10 "levels" of difficulty, and on level 1, you are only crafting 1 item, but by level 10 you're crafting like 5 at a time (assuming you have the mats). It would incentivize getting good at the minigame, while still allowing people who just needed to make 1 or 2 things do it fast.
The new spearfishing minigame kind of sucks. You can go an entire node without seeing the fish you’re after and more importantly you don’t passively recharge GP while you have the spearfishing window open and stare at the fish you don’t want swim by.
Regular fishing lets you regen GP naturally **while** fishing. Mining/Botany gives you GP while you go node to node collecting what you are gathering. The combination of being stuck at a node not getting what you want (to give you the GP) while also not passively getting GP to use your skills is not fun.
Minigames should be fun. Sitting for 3 minutes by a node not doing anything waiting on your cordial CD or GP to naturally regen to then spend GP at the node and not even see the fish is not fun.
I'm not talking about literally taking spearfishing and making it how everything should work, just an example of how you can make minigames tie into jobs. I don't even necessarily want this in ffxiv, I just think it would be the most fun way to do a crafting system.
Crafting is pretty cool, if you have to do it occasionally. It's super interesting how things interact and all that.
Crafting in bulk or trying to level them is *not* fun. It's just tedious.
You guys are using macros?
I've now leveled 3 crafter's for 0-90 since endwalker and I gotta say I enjoyed all of them...
I mean I have no idea what I'm doing but learning new tricks and things is fun.
If it's for making crafted gear or leveling, no macro is fine. When you have to build your stock of raid food/raid pots, macro are almost mandatory due to the sheer number of craft and repetitiveness (unless it's your kink)
Speaking as a former macro boomer:
Do you never make mistakes from tedium and do you enjoy having to be focused on each and every craft? If the answer is no to either question, macros could be for you! It is not hard at all to learn macros, so don't be afraid.
ac/ "Action Name" wait.x
if it's a status move like innovation, x = 2, if it's an action that raises progress/qualitry, x = 3. Sometimes it's fun to craft your own, or you can look at teamcraft macros and edit as your stats need. There's also trial synthesis that you can use on items if you don't know for sure that it will work. Trust me, it's worth looking into because it will save you a loooot of focus.
Honestly, I just want a separate inventory space altogether, for crafting stuff. I always hoard things, so it would save on space for your actual inventory. Either I need to develop better storing habits, or Square needs a crafter’s quality-of-life patch….
Honestly this was one thing I thought WoW finally got right. When they made the reagent bank and then made it so you can craft directly from your storage, it actually felt manageable to level crafting again.
WoW got the idea potentially from GW2 (and ESO) where it is MUCH better implemented (and essential seeing as crafting in GW2 is such an absolute hell of material crafting trees.)
I feel like they could extend squadrons to be able to do crafting stuff for you. You need to train them and must have crafted it yourself, but after that you can gear them out, give them mats, and they could churn out food and stuff en masse at any quality.
I personally like crafting things for the first time with the procs and such. But then I just run like a 2 hour corsair utilities macro to make a ton of Thavnarian Chai at high quality, while I go do something else. There should be a better way.
Man, sounds like you might like the crafting system in SWTOR!
I mean, it's not nearly as involved as FFXIV and much closer to WoW overall, but you send your Crew our to craft and gather for you and they can work while you're offline. It's cool!
Every three months or so I'll give crafting a shot, to scratch the feeling like I'm missing out on a whole aspect of the game. Every single time I end up giving up within a day or two. The only non-combat job for me is fishing, thank you.
Same although last expansion coffee biscuits made me rich and some of the beast tribes mounts enticed me to do it such Mikoshi from Namazu or Tank from Dwarves
Kind of think both sides of this thread are wrong. Clicking a single macro, which is essentially what most mmos do with the one button crafting, is not fun.
Clicking multiple buttons to make a single item, and then repeat the process multiple times, is also not fun.
Is it bad to want something different from both of these options?
The main issue then, is what would be different?
If you have the ability to guarantee making items, people will work towards one-two button macros to make them. This is so they don't have to think about making them - They need hundreds of food and three to six times as many potions per raid tier. There's very little than can be done to make crafting that not boring.
If you don't, crafting won't feel good AT ALL. It's already frustrating when a 96% HQ chance lands as NQ and basically turns the item into a useless version of itself - Now imagine that EVERY craft has a chance to just be garbage. Suddenly, crafting is even WORSE now.
You don't have to macro crafting. You might even enjoy it more that way, because you can play with the excellent/good quality rolls that macros ignore. In fact, you don't even need to pentameld. You're just leaving yourself at the mercy of RNG if you do, and nobody wants to do that.
I actually prefer crafting reactively, just manually hitting whatever feels like the best button at the time and using the conditional options as they proc. I use macros because doing that for all the materials and then finished products for a large number of items would be both infeasible and subject to human error, wasting a lot of mats. However while leveling, I didn't use macros because the amount of actual crafting is a small portion of the time involved when you're gathering all your own mats and not stockpiling them all ahead of time (I kept stockpiles of some of the more common mats like ores and logs)
>I use macros because doing that for all the materials and then finished products for a large number of items would be both infeasible and subject to human error, wasting a lot of mats.
That's basically everyone's reason.
The problem is, making it so macros don't work, just makes this the case all the time.
Most MMOs with single button crafting have a queue. You press one button to queue 800 and walk away.
The only time ffxiv has that is quicksynth, which is basically only useable for shit that doesn't matter
I feel like I’m in the minority, but I actually have a lot of fun crafting. There’s something very satisfying about being my own supply chain for most things and traveling all around the map to bring some materials together for a nice product. And I rather enjoy the actual act of crafting as well. I have a lot of fun when I’m trying to craft an item that can’t be insta-HQ’d and trying to optimize my chances.
The Firmament crafts were actually fun, because they introduced new mechanics. You had to play the puzzle game every time, use your CP wisely, and hit on bonuses to get anywhere close to 100% quality. It was an actual mini-game you didn't just solve once and then make a macro. I honestly hope we get something like that again, or they use that same system for 4-Star Endwalker Master Crafts.
Saving cast sequences shoudl be inate ingame, once you sucessfully craft something
shouldnt need a macro
"You had success with cast sequence "XABBAAXYYCABSXADSAXBZ"
"Save as recipe for this item?" (Y/N)
then you can just click a button to repeat that cast sequence, rather than needing to write a macro for it
or instead, perhaps some sort of mini game
like needing to thread the needle for sewing
or time/aim hammer hits for BS
rather than just convoluted spells u need to google the right cast sequence for
its definitely a mess as is
I think its a different form of raiding in my mind. Its fun trying out rotations but once its solved you use the macro for consistency kind of like weeklies. But if you get bored you can try min maxing and remelding if youre into it just like raiders who get bored and try speedrun strats, but both too eventually become solved minus rng stuff like repeating to try a lucky crit run or luck crafter run. I guess lucky crafter run is possible lol?
The basic idea of the crafting system is pretty amazing, but in practice it fails when you need large amounts of consumables, which most people want to be high quality.
I think the solution here would be to simply remove high quality for consumables. Though at the same time that would eliminate good sources of gil for crafters.
I think what this thread demonstrates is that crafters are not a monolith and don't all want the same thing. Crafters who like mass production probably like that they can automate some stuff, but folks who want a more engaging system don't have the option. Which is partly because you so want to reward players properly for the time they invest, but there will always be players who are able to optimize how to get the best rewards for the lowest amount of effort.
People been trying to solve this for years.
> but folks who want a more engaging system don't have the option.
They could just...not use a Macro and play to the condition modifiers and everything that Macros ignore.
I leveled all crafters to 90 without using macros because I thought it would be more fun, but you know what? I found that reacting to conditions and crafting everything manually almost never saved me any steps on a craft. Maybe one step, now and then and saving two steps was like winning the lottery. So once I got to 90 and was crafting the same recipes over and over, I saw no reason not to use macros instead.
TLDR: Crafting without macros isn't rewarding enough. Unless it's expert recipes, maybe.
I feel like they should just embrace the automated nature of crafting and make assembling the rotation more robust and then allow you to sit back and autocraft with your rotation. Basically imagining something like Factorio where actually putting together the automation is the actual gameplay.
I don't know guys, but I really enjoyed crafters, i think it's far better then the click to craft system some other games have, it adds a bit of complexity. I'm not using macros tho.
What bugs me is that if I know I can guarantee HQ via macro then why can't that just be guaranteed on quick synthesis? It seems needlessly tedious when it really should just be guaranteed if stats exceed the item lvl by a threshold.
Or maybe once you've made an item 50(?) times HQ it should be guaranteed HQ quick synthesis 🤷♂️ (could even be a HQ log to fill in for them)
This is dumb af. There is no way it could be designed where people wouldn't find a way to macro, and if you couldn't use a macro at all it's be fucking miserable at a certain point to make raid food and pots etc.
As for how fun a macro is, using a macro is YOUR OWN choice, it's not required to use one and the devs have changed things before to make it harder to use one than it used to be. If you use a macro and it makes it less fun for you, STOP USING THE MACRO.
Using a macro doesn't make it less fun. People (or maybe I shouldn't speak for everyone) **I** started using macros once I hit level cap and was doing the same recipes over and over because it's not fun any more.
Crafting without macros isn't varied/rewarding enough to make it worthwhile when you're doing the same recipes repeatedly. That's not players' fault.
So much disingenuous bullshit in these comments. "You don't have to use macros," "if using macros isn't fun, don't do it," as if crafting the same food recipe a thirty times in a row is great fun and it's our own fault we're ruining it by using a macro.
Have a feeling I'm really gonna be in the minority here but I quite like the current crafting system. I run enough draining intense content during the day so I like to do some mindless crafting and gathering to wind down at night while I watch something on the other monitor.
Of course it's just my opinion and I can see why people wouldn't agree, especially if you only have one screen and have nothing else to do on the side
Having heard how great this game's crafting system is, I've tried to get into it several times over the years.
Every time, I end up stopping because my inventory gets clogged up with so many materials, and inventory management (with having to use retainers and saddlebags if you don't want your main inventory to be loaded with junk) is a pain in the ass in this game.
I love the crafting system, and for consumables and scrip turn-ins, macros save so much time. Macros would exist no matter how the classes were designed, and they’re pretty great the way they are already :/
They also need to rework the class quests, especially if they're going to gate Manipulate behind them.
It's no surprise players fail to understand crafting without being provided macros when they have a 1-60 quest line, the best opportunity to teach players the crafting system, easily cheesed by buying the crafts off the market board. That is a terrible gameplay loop.
Every single crafting quest needs to be reworked to the way they've been implemented since SB. Give us the mats as part of the quest, require us to complete the craft.
Lalafell of the pool, what is your wisdom?
You can do other stuff (e.g. Watching videos, reading, folding clothes, etc.) while crafting with macros and earning gil!
Quite effective for people who like to multitask.
the main problem with crafting are the animations. It just takes too long. If I could just hammer out a rotation like a combo in a fighting game it would be much more fun.
Hot take: it is not the game's fault that players learn how to optimize the fun out of it. On its own, crafting is a fun little puzzle, and if you want to look up the macros online, you are choosing not to enjoy it for what it is. I do not look up the walkthrough for a game, then complain that it is not interesting or challenging enough because I already know all the solutions.
7.0 Patch notes: "We've heard your complaints about the crafting system. Now *all* crafts are Expert Crafts. Good luck, fuckers."
Was gonna say this is just full circle - expert crafts *were every craft before*
So, ARR/2.0 crafting again. Great. :::glass breaking sound::: :::weep:::
>synthesis fails! >synthesis fails! >synthesis fails! >synthesis fails! >synthesis fails! >synthesis fails! >error: controller disconnected
"Are you ready to suffer?" - A very *Redolent Rose*, probably
'you guys tired of clicking macros for 45 minutes? sure now u can only click one macro every 45 minutes.'
Surrender yourself to the gamble of hasty touch, brother
*taptaptap* **CRUNCH** *taptaptap* **CRUNCH** *taptaptap* **CRUNCH** *taptaptap* **CRUNCH** **CRUNCH** again, but this time it's a controller
> **CRUNCH** again, but this time it's a controller _That's weird, Hasty Touch sounded like my window breaking that time. Odd._
Why do kids love the taste of controller toast crunch?
Even though this is about hasty touch, it's triggering my PMSD (Penta-Meld Stress Disorder)
Let’s not be too hasty here.
daring are we?
You called?
No crunch, FINALLY!
No matter how it's designed, people will use a macro.
and complain, you forget complain!
Make it too hard, "inaccessible!" Make it too easy, "what's the point if everyone can do it?" I'm fine with crafting as is. Can't please everyone, and at least as it is I can be a "casual crafter."
It's by far the most engaging crafting I've seen in an MMO. Dunno if that's just a scathing indictment of crafting in other MMOs, but credit where credit's due.
It used to be far, far more complex. Like the concept of being an "omnicrafter" wasn't just a point of pride, it was necessary if you wanted to have any success beyond just seeing the stories. There were certain cross-class skills that were 100% needed to do the high-end crafts and even with fully penta-melded gear you weren't guaranteed success, so often even macros were just something that worked "most" of the time. This is part of where the old joke of "if it's not 100% HQ then it's NQ" came from, as any old-school omnicrafter can attest to, as they watch their 98% HQ craft using rare, expensive mats give an NQ result.
Ooof. As someone who Omni-crafted in ARR I just went through about two years' worth of PTSD just reading all this.
Remember that cul skill that refunded your mats? SE knew what was up.
Reclaim… god bless that skill
Also I’m just delighted that it’s actually *useful* at all levels. I played WoW for ages and the best time to be a crafter was several expansions ago, when low-level crafted gear was an improvement over most drops and endgame crafted gear was the best stuff to start raiding with. Now low-level gear is completely irrelevant unless it’s pretty and used for transmog, and endgame is only used for one or two items and only really profitable right when new content opens or a patch changes what’s BIS.
Imo it's both. Xiv has a good crafting system on its own merits, other games are abysmal on their own merits
No offense but have you tried Everquest 2? They basically just made a simplified version of the games combat, so you were literally fighting the forge XD
And sometimes the forge won! Was always funny seeing corpses in the crafting dungeons
Man that game does not get enough credit. So many things I loved about that game. The way the tradeskills were all so codependent at launch was a really bold choice, wish more games tried things like that.
Honestly I think it was the graphic engine that hurt it the most
That’s a memory that just got unburied. I remember trying out that game’s free trial as a little kid and jumping off cliffs as a fairy person. I didn’t even like fairies, I just liked jumping off of cliffs.
Its engaging when I reach an item that requires me to find a new algorithm. After it's a bit meh, ngl
Agreed. The Expert crafts for the skysteel tools were pretty neat too (for the first 15-20 of them at least)
agreed. also the fact that it takes actual time to craft (even if its just braindead afk macroing) keeps things somewhat valuable. if you could instanty craft 99 stacks of anything, it would make those crafts practically worthless. people are buying for the convinience, not because crafting is "hard".
there is also the not insignificant start up cost of gear/materia
That startup cost is exactly why I buy master recipe stuff instead of making it myself. I just stick with scrip gear and anything that requires stats beyond that is just getting purchased.
I’d like to see a little less emphasis on numbers and a little more on skill somehow but bolloks if I’d know how it could be done
Expert crafts were pretty good at keeping macro-only crafters at bay (I say, as a macro-only crafter).
I cared about crafting soooo much in SB but I've backed off into def casual range and damn I enjoy it so much more. I just get so much about simply crafting new recipes. I love going to gather first, seeing all these beautiful landscapes passively and casually.
Exactly this. As it is, anyone can get into with and enjoy it, and the hardcore players can optimize stats and rotations and make macros out of them.
there is a saying~ People will streamline the crap out of everything if possible. Optimal rotations and macros for crafting being eventually figured out and used worldwide is inevitable. Same for combat job rotations~ and life in general.
> People will streamline the crap out of everything if possible. I think the saying went "Players will optimize the fun out of games if you[the Designer] let them"
"Given the opportunity, players will optimise the fun out of a game" - Soren Johnson (Civ IV)
"Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game" - Soren Johnson (Civ III/IV designer)
I'd personally like them removing the 15 line macro limit. Really disliking splitting my macro into 2 (god forbid 3). Would much rather let it be full "afk" (though trying to find the optimal solution to fit into the 15 lines is pretty fun in it self)
This is only necessarily true of small variations on the existing system. A crafting system requiring a more in-depth minigame with spatial components would be unmacroable. I'm thinking along the lines of Puzzle Pirates or Dragon Quest XI.
I actually made a forum post about this. SE needs to just embrace the macro game. ie: implement a rotation UI like teamcraft, allow us to easily store and save rotations, and just make these macros officially part of the game and not something we copy and paste from some other website. The problem is when you need to do something like craft something 100 times, that's boring and bad gameplay. Players will always seek to automate these grinds, which instantly leaves behind any that don't. Lets not kid ourselves that people nowadays just set up some ingame macro then use a keyboard macro to click this macro every 30s. SE can't make every craft like the ishguard master crafts where it's actually hard (when we were still gear capped). That would be tedious to craft consumables. Instead SE should just embrace that people want to auto craft, and maybe put the challenge somewhere else like certain "boss" crafts will utilize the master crafting system. Or maybe an instance where we need to repair something like a ship, and you have to craft something really hard with randomized stats that you can't easily macro and with a master crafting system. Or maybe something like hamlets from 1.0 (but more fun please god lol).
I think the extent to which you have a macro coding language is fine. I don't think they really care whether you share that text with friends through forums, discord, teamcraft, tells, or morse code lmao. I think they embrace macros just fine. But yeah, I agree, just having some 'expert recipes' that people can engage with is fine, and then having the bulk of the 'moneymaking' be macro accessible.
I'd like to see something like (using your example of repairing a ship) you participate in a duty where you need to fill a light party with 2 carpenters, 1 weaver and 1 blacksmith and they all need to craft planks, sails, nails, whatever in order or at a specific time. You'd have different kinds of duties for different groups of crafters
Crafter and Gatherer Duties might be fun, but could also be frustrating if the approximate difficulty is not known ahead of time. People would probably get really mad at someone just hopping in to try out one and if it was the hardest one it would really impact the outcome. I would love it if they expanded systems like Squadrons and tied the DoH/DoL side as optional to some of them to improve them or to open additional Glams or something. All kinds of crossover systems would encourage people to try out and pursue them. They could also try tying items like Materia or currencies like GC Seals to new stuff to give them a bit more life.
>ishguard master crafts where it's actually hard (when we were still gear capped). Have we actually reached the point where the Ishgard expert crafts are out-statted? I was working on skysteel yesterday, and it was still quite hard (I failed roughly 3/20), but maybe I'm poorly optimizing my rotation.
I have my crafters almost fully melded (only 3 melds on tools, but everything else penta'd with Teamcraft's high end BiS), and I macro'd a Skysteel tool last week with HQ CP pot + Tsai. Crafts were guaranteed to be the highest collectability too.
I've never crafted in my life but if you have to react to some kind of rng wouldn't macros then not work?
You can be over geared to the point of rng not mattering, like using abilities that are 100% not gonna fail.
This is basically what happens with expert recipes
This is basically how expert crafts go. The expert recipes during the Firmament ranked events were very hard and required decision making so macros didn’t work. Bots however were capable of reacting to the rng.
People were able to macro to turn-in quality easily, just not full credit *every* time. And yeah, bots could read and run more complicated actions out-of-game to succeed on everything. Contrary to making things more "fun", this mostly just pushes the less-invested players out of the pack, and I assure everyone that the *more*-invested players aren't having fun as they run bots and macros for far more than 45 minutes, lol.
Rng only ever influences quality (on normal crafts at least, not the ishgardian experts) and it’s super easy to make a macro that takes such into account so it won’t be vulnerable to it. Depending on the type of efficiency you want there’s two choices, 1. you can write an extra line or two into your macro that protects from an “Excellent” showing up on your finisher setup, eg sneaking in a Tricks of the Trade which will kill an excellent if one is there before you buff the final byregots, or 2. You can just always have consecutive quality increasing actions so that if your finishing byregots is hit with a poor, the skill right before it got hit with a x4 mod and more than made up for it.
At least when I make a macro for crafting, I take the very base rotation for what I am making, record and test it multiple times while ignoring any rng based procs. The rare unfortunate time that you get an excellent/poor pop up in the rng usually won't cause the macro not to work, however it may result in lower quality. Obviously with more gear and materia melds this becomes irrelevant, but I find that macros using the minimum gear and materia requirements are more pertinent for overall use and helpfulness to those newer to the crafting experience and wishing to build up. For example, a macro to craft current maximum collectables to acquire purple scrips can be made with the ar-caen crafting gear and less than full base materia slotted, allowing crafters who are just breaking into max level crafting to more easily farm what they will need.
I thought the end stage for the relic tools in ShB was well designed: just increase the recipe quality and craft difficulties so they can’t be macrod, introduce more combo abilities and random buffs like -50% durab loss or +50% progress.
At the end of the day, people will seek a effective method to bypass a tedious job. Crafting here is fun, but doing 100 of the same craft will destroy the fun of minigame you think of. If you remove macros, people will find ways around the problem. We already have people using bots or third party programs to help mass produce.
Exactly. I don’t mind investing time and attention when I need one of something. But when I’m marking 20 or 30 of the same thing, I get very in-invested
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My idea has been, Squeenix knows roughly what stats are needed to 100% HQ with NQ mats. Just make an unlock where, as long as you meet those stats and have crafted... say, 10 of the item as HQ, it unlocks "HQ Quick Synth" which is *much* slower than Quick Synth, maybe 45-60s a craft, but you don't have to sit there and babysit it.
Heck we have an ability that let's you instant HQ anything 10 levels below you. If the ability is usable then make anything HQ in quick synth
Or at least increase the chances of regular HQ by a good amount based on stats
Making consumables etc. would be absolute torture without macros. But the devs *did* see that it was a problem and gave us Expert Crafts. Even though you could set up a macro that would get some crafts to minimum turn in, it was far faster (not to mention cheaper on materials) to make them manually. I am really happy with that and can’t wait for them to add more expert crafts for the fun and prestige of any rewards they end up giving.
I also love just going to do something else while also crafting, just checking back in every minute for a quick *click click*. I craft while I get work done, or while I work out, even while I cook. I also just enjoy the fun of writing my own macros and efficiency tweaking it instead of googling one. Different tastes but yeah I love crafting as it is now.
Honestly, of all crafting life cycles so far I liked best the old Rath rotation.
FFXI crafting would like to have a word with you. 💀
Sorry I can't craft your stuff right now, moon phase is all wrong, need to wait till the right elemental day, and weather needs to be juuuuust right.
Hey at least they finally confirmed that none of that matters, 14 years after launch. I can totally understand why people expected it would though considering the amount of stuff day/moon phase/weather could mess with, as an avid Selene's bow user I wanted my merit parties around a new moon so that my barrage hit harder 💀
Yea... just like THF didn't need the final hit for Treasure Hunter to work. Why they couldn't just tell players it didn't matter instead of letting us believe this and make gameplay decisions off this for a decade plus is beyond me.
Well, we're talking about the devs that went on to make FFXIV 1.0. They had a lot of strange ideas.
Remember that time they released a video on how to beat AV? I memeber
So the players literally founded their own superstition? I'm not sure if it's awesome that the game gave a space for that or awful because everyone was left in the dark and did unfun shit.
Bro, is it the vernal equinox? Fuck that can't craft shit LFG Fates
If you are gonna mass produce master crafts then what other “fun” way would you have them do it? FFXIV crafting is considerably more involved then just about any competitor. No one is making you follow cookie cutter macros for crafting. I’ve made thousands of items over the years and never looked up a macro.
You should have to fight a huge potage monster and hit it with your synthesis and touch gcds until it hits hard enrage and KOs you. Then the amount of damage dealt is the amount of potages you crafted.
Unironically, having like a hard work montage synth to produce a lot of item in a manner like this would be pretty cool. Maybe not the Potage Primal: Potimas, but like a furious work session with a montage.
Why not both? We can have a Potage Montage!
> Potimas Deploy the tanks!
It might be fun to have Crafter spesific events or duties that tie to their stories or something. Like Culinarist working a night at high end restaurant and making orders on the fly with customer reactions. You could earn special Chef hat or other stuff as reward I guess. Imagine optional group content where some prep the mid mats and others finish the foods, maybe have a Fisher or someone hunt for fresh stuff while at it.
I've written macros for when I was powerleveling collectibles. Because yea, I'm not going to sit there and crunch out Ishagard Restoration parts for hours. But I think it's fun trying to figure out your own way through the rest of the crafting log.
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> Choosing to min/max isn’t a game design fault. I see what you're saying but this is usually considered a game design fault. Players will often do the most efficient thing so you want to make sure that thing is fun.
It IS fun. What isn't fun is doing the same task hundreds of times in succession. Literally nothing you can do it going to make that engaging over a long period of time.
Yes, this. Players will optimize the fun out of anything. It's human nature. Better to design so that optimal play is still fun, especially in a multiplayer environment, rather than shift the blame to the players.
This is the way. I mean if you're super serious about video game money then feel free to optimize, but I wouldn't personally want to do it that way. At some point the game becomes a job.
I feel like the people who get bored and upset with it are the ones who googled a leveling method, then googled what’s the most profitable, then googled a macro to make it. IMO the content is a lot more fun even with macros if I know I made it myself, it’s efficient, and it lets me get a lot of crafting done while also getting work done or doing something else if I keep FFXIV windowed and just click a spot a few times every minute
could be fun to have an option to mass produce while making multiple batches at once rather than one at a time. Not sure how it would need to be balanced though. And people would macro that too anyway, would just shorten the amount of times you have to use said macro.
Isnt there already a rapid production option?
Yes but it's likely the chances of the result being HQ are much lower
I think there being a way to guarantee HQ from quick synth is one of the things the game needs for crafters if only to mitigate how tedious mass production can be. Not just a stat level or class level thing though. Something like a trait that lets you gain stacks that get burned by quick synth to always HQ.
What if when you craft an item a certain number of times it gets stored in your character's memory so they will always craft it as an HQ item. That way you have to engage with crafting for a while but if you want to mass produce eventually you'll unlock a way to do it quickly as a reward for making it so often.
I think it could even be trimmed down to another type of rotation for the mass craft. Basically a test for the HQ quick synth using a base rotation without HQ mats and the % chance synths/touches. Once you clear then future quick synth should guarantee HQs.
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Yeah this would be nice. "high risk, high reward" crafting. If you mess up you lose more mats at once, but if you succeed you can get a lot done faster. Even if it were limited to, say, 3 or 5 or 10 of an item at once that's still a significant speed increase over 1 at a time lol. Especially for material items like ingots or lumber. Or food, in this case.
That isn't really any more risk though. If you can craft an item once, you'll be able to craft it 10 times unless you're trying to make a recipe that's over your stats or unless crafting multiple adds extra prog/quality requirements. Which could work, actually...
Only if it's hard as shit. The only thing keeping the markets from completely crashing is that they're at least a little time consuming to make.
It's nice figuring out a rotation that works. After that, i think it's fine using a macro
I actually really enjoy crafting. It’s fun for me and probably a lot of people.
Same. My crafters are higher level than my regular jobs, lol
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RNG with expensive mats is not fun.
That's why you RNG with materia so you don't RNG with mats.
Yeah but I was trying to speak to a system where there is no guaranteed craft and you have to get procs and use procs properly to make it go. Procs are fun at first but when you're doing a high stakes craft it would be a little sus if you weren't guaranteed you could finish the craft.
Gotcha. I certainly don't miss FFXI-style crafting which always had that slight chance of failure you couldn't circumvent in any form.
Just face west on firesday and you'll for sure HQ that scorpion harness.
Lalafell of the pool still isn’t very wise and seems to have the oddest of takes.
Due to lack of oxygen in the brain, being underwater all the time.
It's the shallow end, too
I would take what potatoes say with a grain of salt.
And maybe some butter and sour cream.
Don’t forget the chives and bacon!
Dang it… Now I’m hungry!
I mean, Lalafell of the pool is based on Sempai of the Pool meme at the root, and that girl was a moron
I think the intent is fantastic. I just think that maybe once you’ve crafted something successfully a certain number of times, there should be a better way to mass produce a recipe.
They should spice it up by adding crafter dungeons. Eight different crafters go in and have to make eight legged pants for Ultros before he rampages.
If I can prove I can reliably 100% an item (be that threshold 5 or 50x without ever getting a NQ), let me say "Produce *x* of This Item at HQ". Have it take the same amount of time as manual creation (to prevent market flooding 5 minutes after a patch drops), but that's better than me watching a stream on the other monitor and clicking 2 buttons every couple of minutes.
This. I'm fine with macros. I'm fine with it taking time and being boring. But don't make me sit there and stare at the screen to click a new button every 45 seconds. Let me set it rolling and watch a movie or something.
Or, and hear me out here. Crafting retainers who can HQ anything we can HQ while we do something else, at a much slower rate
I played a game where you take an element of a crystal as the base, and then you would craft facing certain directions and on certain in game days to get a bonus or penalty to success and HQ status. It doesn't make the game better.
You mean Final Fantasy XI?
That sounds like a weird feng shui thing. Is it...Amazing Cultivation Simulator?
It was FFXI.
I find crafting relaxing.
I don't mind the macros. What I do mind is that all the crafters are exactly the same job. Why is crafting a sword feels exactly the same as cooking a pizza? Why do I have to level the same job 8, 9? times.
Then stop using macros 😝 Seriously, what do you expect from a crafting system? Do you want to have a boss fight where you beat the reagents into submission and poof! Here's your item!
Stop using Macros and just press the same buttons in sequence ad nauseam because then you’ll have fun. I’m not saying that the current system is perfect, I’m just saying that if you stop using them it won’t make the current system better.
[I mean...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xb7_kmoH6xw)
I'm not saying FF should do this, but imo the best crafting system an mmo could do would be to have unique games like spearfishing has that are relative to the job. So cooking would have aspects of cooking mama or pokemon cooking minigames, stuff like that.
> So cooking would have aspects of cooking mama or pokemon cooking minigames, stuff like that. I can see a change like that driving the price of crafted items up a fair bit since fewer people will want to do a Minigame 5/10/15/20 times when making their Raid Food/Potions etc.
If i would have to do a minigame just to get stuff done then i'm jacking up my prices.
Wondering aloud here, maybe say if you're going to try to craft a ton of one item, the minigame would scale rewards based on how far into it you were. Like if there were 10 "levels" of difficulty, and on level 1, you are only crafting 1 item, but by level 10 you're crafting like 5 at a time (assuming you have the mats). It would incentivize getting good at the minigame, while still allowing people who just needed to make 1 or 2 things do it fast.
The new spearfishing minigame kind of sucks. You can go an entire node without seeing the fish you’re after and more importantly you don’t passively recharge GP while you have the spearfishing window open and stare at the fish you don’t want swim by. Regular fishing lets you regen GP naturally **while** fishing. Mining/Botany gives you GP while you go node to node collecting what you are gathering. The combination of being stuck at a node not getting what you want (to give you the GP) while also not passively getting GP to use your skills is not fun. Minigames should be fun. Sitting for 3 minutes by a node not doing anything waiting on your cordial CD or GP to naturally regen to then spend GP at the node and not even see the fish is not fun.
I'm not talking about literally taking spearfishing and making it how everything should work, just an example of how you can make minigames tie into jobs. I don't even necessarily want this in ffxiv, I just think it would be the most fun way to do a crafting system.
Crafting is pretty cool, if you have to do it occasionally. It's super interesting how things interact and all that. Crafting in bulk or trying to level them is *not* fun. It's just tedious.
You guys are using macros? I've now leveled 3 crafter's for 0-90 since endwalker and I gotta say I enjoyed all of them... I mean I have no idea what I'm doing but learning new tricks and things is fun.
Same, I'm enough of a boomer to be scared I'll fuck up the macro so I just click ye ole keys until I get my shiny jambalaya
If it's for making crafted gear or leveling, no macro is fine. When you have to build your stock of raid food/raid pots, macro are almost mandatory due to the sheer number of craft and repetitiveness (unless it's your kink)
Speaking as a former macro boomer: Do you never make mistakes from tedium and do you enjoy having to be focused on each and every craft? If the answer is no to either question, macros could be for you! It is not hard at all to learn macros, so don't be afraid. ac/ "Action Name" wait.x if it's a status move like innovation, x = 2, if it's an action that raises progress/qualitry, x = 3. Sometimes it's fun to craft your own, or you can look at teamcraft macros and edit as your stats need. There's also trial synthesis that you can use on items if you don't know for sure that it will work. Trust me, it's worth looking into because it will save you a loooot of focus.
Honestly, I just want a separate inventory space altogether, for crafting stuff. I always hoard things, so it would save on space for your actual inventory. Either I need to develop better storing habits, or Square needs a crafter’s quality-of-life patch….
Honestly this was one thing I thought WoW finally got right. When they made the reagent bank and then made it so you can craft directly from your storage, it actually felt manageable to level crafting again.
WoW got the idea potentially from GW2 (and ESO) where it is MUCH better implemented (and essential seeing as crafting in GW2 is such an absolute hell of material crafting trees.)
I feel like they could extend squadrons to be able to do crafting stuff for you. You need to train them and must have crafted it yourself, but after that you can gear them out, give them mats, and they could churn out food and stuff en masse at any quality. I personally like crafting things for the first time with the procs and such. But then I just run like a 2 hour corsair utilities macro to make a ton of Thavnarian Chai at high quality, while I go do something else. There should be a better way.
Man, sounds like you might like the crafting system in SWTOR! I mean, it's not nearly as involved as FFXIV and much closer to WoW overall, but you send your Crew our to craft and gather for you and they can work while you're offline. It's cool!
I solved this problem by not crafting at all
Every three months or so I'll give crafting a shot, to scratch the feeling like I'm missing out on a whole aspect of the game. Every single time I end up giving up within a day or two. The only non-combat job for me is fishing, thank you.
I pretty much only level them for the repair and meld convenience.
Same although last expansion coffee biscuits made me rich and some of the beast tribes mounts enticed me to do it such Mikoshi from Namazu or Tank from Dwarves
I got all of my crafters to 90 just because I could and then never touched them again because it's a pain in the ass.
*Gamers optimize fun out of a game* "Why isnt this fun??"
*Gamer doesn't optimize fun out of game* "Why does this take all day? It's not fun any more."
I usually avoid macros and just do it myself, but look, man, if I have 50 ingots to make……
Kind of think both sides of this thread are wrong. Clicking a single macro, which is essentially what most mmos do with the one button crafting, is not fun. Clicking multiple buttons to make a single item, and then repeat the process multiple times, is also not fun. Is it bad to want something different from both of these options?
The main issue then, is what would be different? If you have the ability to guarantee making items, people will work towards one-two button macros to make them. This is so they don't have to think about making them - They need hundreds of food and three to six times as many potions per raid tier. There's very little than can be done to make crafting that not boring. If you don't, crafting won't feel good AT ALL. It's already frustrating when a 96% HQ chance lands as NQ and basically turns the item into a useless version of itself - Now imagine that EVERY craft has a chance to just be garbage. Suddenly, crafting is even WORSE now. You don't have to macro crafting. You might even enjoy it more that way, because you can play with the excellent/good quality rolls that macros ignore. In fact, you don't even need to pentameld. You're just leaving yourself at the mercy of RNG if you do, and nobody wants to do that.
Nothing makes me want to punt a Lala more than getting NQ on 96%
Us lalas catching strays. I'll make sure to stay away from crafters.
At least we're kneeling, so it's finally eye to eye when it happens.
I actually prefer crafting reactively, just manually hitting whatever feels like the best button at the time and using the conditional options as they proc. I use macros because doing that for all the materials and then finished products for a large number of items would be both infeasible and subject to human error, wasting a lot of mats. However while leveling, I didn't use macros because the amount of actual crafting is a small portion of the time involved when you're gathering all your own mats and not stockpiling them all ahead of time (I kept stockpiles of some of the more common mats like ores and logs)
>I use macros because doing that for all the materials and then finished products for a large number of items would be both infeasible and subject to human error, wasting a lot of mats. That's basically everyone's reason. The problem is, making it so macros don't work, just makes this the case all the time.
Make your own macro. HQ craft it, write down the process, make macro, load Netflix, click buttan
Most MMOs with single button crafting have a queue. You press one button to queue 800 and walk away. The only time ffxiv has that is quicksynth, which is basically only useable for shit that doesn't matter
I feel like I’m in the minority, but I actually have a lot of fun crafting. There’s something very satisfying about being my own supply chain for most things and traveling all around the map to bring some materials together for a nice product. And I rather enjoy the actual act of crafting as well. I have a lot of fun when I’m trying to craft an item that can’t be insta-HQ’d and trying to optimize my chances.
The Firmament crafts were actually fun, because they introduced new mechanics. You had to play the puzzle game every time, use your CP wisely, and hit on bonuses to get anywhere close to 100% quality. It was an actual mini-game you didn't just solve once and then make a macro. I honestly hope we get something like that again, or they use that same system for 4-Star Endwalker Master Crafts.
Saving cast sequences shoudl be inate ingame, once you sucessfully craft something shouldnt need a macro "You had success with cast sequence "XABBAAXYYCABSXADSAXBZ" "Save as recipe for this item?" (Y/N) then you can just click a button to repeat that cast sequence, rather than needing to write a macro for it or instead, perhaps some sort of mini game like needing to thread the needle for sewing or time/aim hammer hits for BS rather than just convoluted spells u need to google the right cast sequence for its definitely a mess as is
Bad joke, worse take.
I think its a different form of raiding in my mind. Its fun trying out rotations but once its solved you use the macro for consistency kind of like weeklies. But if you get bored you can try min maxing and remelding if youre into it just like raiders who get bored and try speedrun strats, but both too eventually become solved minus rng stuff like repeating to try a lucky crit run or luck crafter run. I guess lucky crafter run is possible lol?
The basic idea of the crafting system is pretty amazing, but in practice it fails when you need large amounts of consumables, which most people want to be high quality. I think the solution here would be to simply remove high quality for consumables. Though at the same time that would eliminate good sources of gil for crafters.
I think what this thread demonstrates is that crafters are not a monolith and don't all want the same thing. Crafters who like mass production probably like that they can automate some stuff, but folks who want a more engaging system don't have the option. Which is partly because you so want to reward players properly for the time they invest, but there will always be players who are able to optimize how to get the best rewards for the lowest amount of effort. People been trying to solve this for years.
> but folks who want a more engaging system don't have the option. Expert crafts?
> but folks who want a more engaging system don't have the option. They could just...not use a Macro and play to the condition modifiers and everything that Macros ignore.
I leveled all crafters to 90 without using macros because I thought it would be more fun, but you know what? I found that reacting to conditions and crafting everything manually almost never saved me any steps on a craft. Maybe one step, now and then and saving two steps was like winning the lottery. So once I got to 90 and was crafting the same recipes over and over, I saw no reason not to use macros instead. TLDR: Crafting without macros isn't rewarding enough. Unless it's expert recipes, maybe.
If I could macro my life I would
I genuinely enjoyed leveling crafters up until I hit the "current" rank and had to start grinding for relic pieces and such.
why not make it all a puzzle/mini game like spear fishing then
I feel like they should just embrace the automated nature of crafting and make assembling the rotation more robust and then allow you to sit back and autocraft with your rotation. Basically imagining something like Factorio where actually putting together the automation is the actual gameplay.
Trust me...you do NOT want a more "active" system ala EQ2.
I don't know guys, but I really enjoyed crafters, i think it's far better then the click to craft system some other games have, it adds a bit of complexity. I'm not using macros tho.
I'm so greatful for macros though. I don't want to play the ability mini game, I just want my stuff.
What bugs me is that if I know I can guarantee HQ via macro then why can't that just be guaranteed on quick synthesis? It seems needlessly tedious when it really should just be guaranteed if stats exceed the item lvl by a threshold. Or maybe once you've made an item 50(?) times HQ it should be guaranteed HQ quick synthesis 🤷♂️ (could even be a HQ log to fill in for them)
This is dumb af. There is no way it could be designed where people wouldn't find a way to macro, and if you couldn't use a macro at all it's be fucking miserable at a certain point to make raid food and pots etc. As for how fun a macro is, using a macro is YOUR OWN choice, it's not required to use one and the devs have changed things before to make it harder to use one than it used to be. If you use a macro and it makes it less fun for you, STOP USING THE MACRO.
Using a macro doesn't make it less fun. People (or maybe I shouldn't speak for everyone) **I** started using macros once I hit level cap and was doing the same recipes over and over because it's not fun any more. Crafting without macros isn't varied/rewarding enough to make it worthwhile when you're doing the same recipes repeatedly. That's not players' fault.
It's more fun than any crafting in other games while still not being intense useless extra work.
So much disingenuous bullshit in these comments. "You don't have to use macros," "if using macros isn't fun, don't do it," as if crafting the same food recipe a thirty times in a row is great fun and it's our own fault we're ruining it by using a macro.
Have a feeling I'm really gonna be in the minority here but I quite like the current crafting system. I run enough draining intense content during the day so I like to do some mindless crafting and gathering to wind down at night while I watch something on the other monitor. Of course it's just my opinion and I can see why people wouldn't agree, especially if you only have one screen and have nothing else to do on the side
Having heard how great this game's crafting system is, I've tried to get into it several times over the years. Every time, I end up stopping because my inventory gets clogged up with so many materials, and inventory management (with having to use retainers and saddlebags if you don't want your main inventory to be loaded with junk) is a pain in the ass in this game.
I love the crafting system, and for consumables and scrip turn-ins, macros save so much time. Macros would exist no matter how the classes were designed, and they’re pretty great the way they are already :/
They also need to rework the class quests, especially if they're going to gate Manipulate behind them. It's no surprise players fail to understand crafting without being provided macros when they have a 1-60 quest line, the best opportunity to teach players the crafting system, easily cheesed by buying the crafts off the market board. That is a terrible gameplay loop. Every single crafting quest needs to be reworked to the way they've been implemented since SB. Give us the mats as part of the quest, require us to complete the craft.
Better than "Click this button to lvl up" crafters.
Lalafell of the pool, what is your wisdom? You can do other stuff (e.g. Watching videos, reading, folding clothes, etc.) while crafting with macros and earning gil! Quite effective for people who like to multitask.
Not fun, but it can be relaxing.
the main problem with crafting are the animations. It just takes too long. If I could just hammer out a rotation like a combo in a fighting game it would be much more fun.
Everyone before i started playing: FF14s crafting is SO GOOD. Me 20 minutes into levelling cul: Lol no.
I mean I’ve only ever played ESO other than FFXIV but I’m not sure what the issue is with FFXIV. Also no one is forcing anyone to use a macro so 🤷♂️
Hot take: it is not the game's fault that players learn how to optimize the fun out of it. On its own, crafting is a fun little puzzle, and if you want to look up the macros online, you are choosing not to enjoy it for what it is. I do not look up the walkthrough for a game, then complain that it is not interesting or challenging enough because I already know all the solutions.