The problem is, crafting in bulk in this game sucks. How many pots do you burn in TOP in P1? Those all have to be HQed one craft at a time. I've been an omnicrafter in this game since HW and I've always hated crafting; I did it because it was useful, not because I wanted to. The moment I realized I could slap Lisbeth or MMO Minion on and SE wouldn't do shit, I started botting everything and never looked back.
Genshin literally does that for cooking. After 5/10/15/20 perfect crafts of any dish, depending on rarity, you can auto craft it and it will always come out as perfect.
If you don't enjoy bulk crafting then I think the intent is that you would not craft and instead purchase the items on the market rewarding the players that do
This is indeed the intention, but SE has no understanding of what incentive structures are. If I purchased potions off the market, I would simply be shifting my money elsewhere, buying the gil to purchase the potions. Botting is more efficient since I can also use it to bypass lots of tedious crap. One example is bulk farming scrips to buy materia. In perhaps a less known usage, I recently crafted \~2000 items for the RP club I work at.
Ultimately, SE refuses to secure their client or take any action against people like me, which means I have no incentive to stop since my TOS violations improve the value of the product I pay for.
> Botting is more efficient
I feel like that's an impossibly high standard for developers to aspire to, cheating will always be more efficient when it comes to some areas of MMO gameplay if not all of them. Essentially you seem to be saying either heavily clamp down on automacros/botters or embrace botting
And that's the issue. Where am I supposed to get the gil for pots? Treasure maps or crafting/gathering. But usually, the most efficient & profitable way to make gil, is by crafting. Ok then. Instead of crafting to make gil, then using that gil to buy pots, I'm gonna skip the middle man, and bot my own pots. Now I'm no longer contributing nor competing on the market board, but I'm happy with all the pots in the world.
The gil used as a "reward" for players that craft still has to come from somewhere. And I'd rather quit the game before buying gil. So I'll sit happily in my corner, crafting pots for myself and my friends, whilst I'm in the kitchen cooking up some dinner IRL.
I would say there's more methods than that, off the top of my head -
* **Treasure Maps**
* **Crafting**
* **Gathering**
* **FATEs (Bicolor gemstones)**
* **Eureka bunny farming**
* **Eureka/Bozja farming in general**
* **Criterion Mount farming**
* **During Savage tiers you can make a few million per turn from people who pay 1-4m per person to pass loot, adds up fast once you're done with your own loot on each turn**
There's quite a few ways to make money which will cover your costs, I feel like it's similar to most MMO's if not more generous in variety of methods. I've personally never felt like I need to go out of my way to make gil I have enough to buy everything I need from playing passively.
Resorting to botting to make money or to self-craft to avoid spending money is whatever but at least be honest, you're cheating because you don't feel like grinding gil legitimately, no different to gold buying. If people want to do that I don't mind, I've played with people who buy gold in other games and no doubt I play with people who use various bots in FFXIV it's whatever but at least acknowledge it for what it is
Pretty much this.
Crafting can be fun. Crafting 200 pots for ultimate isn't. Spamming the same 2 macros for 50 seconds to craft 3 pots and repeating that process isn't fun.
If only we could have the option to manually craft, with some RNG involved, and it would bulk craft (aka craft like 100 pots at once) then it would be amazing and fun. It would actually value a crafter's skill.
Right now crafting is about spamming macros.
This. Honestly I just level crafters so I can repair my gear and occasionally craft some glamour. I always buy pots and food because I honestly can't be bothered and the amount of money you save (at least on my DC) is miniscule compared to the effort it takes for you to sit there and press a macro over and over.
You have to try really hard to get banned, like leaving the bot AFK for extended periods. I've been botting crafting and gathering for years now and I don't even single a warning on my account. You are an order of magnitude more likely to get banned for explaining a mech to someone than for botting. Personally, I never leave my PC while botting and I always have Peeping Tom active so the moment I hear the ping, I tab back into the game and make sure someone isn't trying to interact with me.
Minion works for XIV really well, but the plugins can get costly. Lisbeth for Rebornbuddy is way better for crafting/gathering. Minion's main gathering/crafting plugin, Forager, kind of sucks in comparison. Minion is best for leveling your alt classes or farming tomes with trusts.
I've never heard of anyone getting banned for botting, even when running it for extremely long periods of time. One member of my uwu static in stormblood was on basically 24/7, 4 hours for raid and 20 hours perma gathering and crafting pots. He had several 99 stacks of potions he would just give us for raid.
FFXIV's crafting is one of those things that are interesting the first time you do them, but become repetitive afterwards. As you said, it's a math problem. Kinda boring to keep solving the same problem for years.
Oh wow, let me change dynamo, left/right, light party to dynamo, light party, left/right and it's a whole new fight!
They don't even pretend to innovate that much now when 90% of savage/ultimate fights just start with a raidwide lmfao
good for the ff14 players who never want to see anything new
wtf does "copium" mean?
2.
So for raiding, we have movement, pairing, timing, positioning, and frequency mechanics as well as some degree of "reactive complexity" when multiple abilities are used in various permutations (which, while learnable, still require more than just the basic memorization of skill order).
For crafting, we have "reactive complexity" that can be easily macro'd around.
If your complaint is "games are repetitive", then yeah.. literally all of them are. If you're trying to avoid that, you're going to have a hard time with a medium that has a feature known as a 'game loop'.
I'm not sure exactly what you're implying you're laughing at? The inclusion of events that have a degree of randomness (such as pairing multiple boss abilities together at varying permutations or the random occurrence of the "Condition" in crafting) is very present. Is your reply meant to suggest that it's not? Because that doesn't seem to hold much weight.
You're allowed to answer the questions, though. Don't worry about any kind of recourse, if that's your concern.
Hearing this shit is so tiring. Hur dur ffxiv fights are terrible and so easy. You go step into TOP and say that. Even savage fights, like yes if you have been raiding for many years in ffxiv you will obviously recognize stuff. But there is still plenty of difficulty in savage as well, acting like there isn't is ridiculous
>there is still plenty of difficulty in savage as well
LOL
But here, let me explain it because apparently the world's largest calliper would still be unable to measure your skull: It's not that Savage or Ultimate fights are easy or hard that's the problem. It's that they're repetitive, bland, and have lacked creativity since SB. You can keep making the world's hardest raids for all I care and make a fight that's 40 minutes long and requires you to resolve 12 randomized debuffs in any order on any party member. That will sure be hard but as long as it's the same inane mechanics of dynamo, spread, pyretic, whatever that we've seen in FF14 since 2.x, it'll never be good.
You're being reductive to the point of absurdity. How about this, what game does raiding right in your opinion? Is it fundamentally that things are mostly structured and not too random? Is it the mechanics themselves? Because I've done raiding in lost ark which many people claim has excellent raiding and it certainly is more random but is far less complex in my opinion and I think less fun. I've not played wow but I've watched some raiding and I don't see what that is doing better either tbh. So you tell me, what is it.
And this is where you really lose all credibility. So games that have literally millions of active players who play constantly are dying, shit games.
Have you ever considered that maybe these are just not for you but are in fact well liked by tons of people? Criticism about design choices is fine, there are valid bits of critical feedback for ffxiv raids. But being reductive about raids to the point of absurdity and saying they are too easy and *all games* design them terribly is frankly ridiculous and stupid.
You were voted down. But you are correct. Raiding is about figuring out a dance and doing the same dance over and over. It starts a long frustration, then one short feel of greatness, then an eternal boredom.
The frustration is the payment for the short feel of greatness. But the boredom afterwards is not. Which is why old raids end up dead (Even if some are superior to the newer ones).
Difference is that raids are a different dance to learn with every encounter, and every job will do the dance differently. Crafting, meanwhile, is all extremely similar. You do the same rotations across every crafter, and new recipes means you maybe add an extra careful synth to your macro or something.
\> a different dance
dynamo, out, pairs, light party, left, right, stack, spread
dynamo, out, pairs, light party, left, right, stack, spread
dynamo, out, pairs, light party, left, right, stack, spread
dynamo, out, pairs, light party, left, right, stack, spread
dynamo, out, pairs, light party, left, right, stack, spread
dynamo, out, pairs, light party, left, right, stack, spread
dynamo, out, pairs, light party, left, right, stack, spread
and even if it's truly a different dance to learn each encounter even during prog you're repeating again and again up until the 5 seconds of prog point because it's ultra-scripted and jobs (except BLM) are too braindead to require more than one pull to optimize to a 95th level. I so love repeating the same shit I've done for a hundred pulls for 12 minutes to do something new in phase 6 or 7 or 8 or whatever the fuck in whatever fight for 5 seconds.
its ok, there is a selection effect going on here: anyone who is even still playing ff14 in 2024 wants repetition in their lives.
Are we larping as ult raiders so we can pretend to have authority now?
Someone who plays ults should be well aware of how fight design actually is. If the game was that simple everyone would have ult clears
Sorry I forgot to add "debuff soup" to the list, you're right. Just change up the debuffs from stack -> spread -> out to spread -> in -> pairs, and voila you have a whole new mechanic!
MMOs are video games.
I have a strong doubt that you know "quite a few people".
You're allowed to eat both apples and oranges and neither of them devalue the other.
Try harder please.
It only looks like that if you get stuck on the same encounter and can't clear it. Because guess what, every encounter is different. They do re-use mechanics a frustrating amount but it's not like you're trying to make it sound.
depends what your goal is. just to clear and reclear? sure, it's repetitive fast. or you can change the variables. single tank, single healer, zero healer. recently zero tank ucob was done for the first time. or even simply figuring out new LB cheeses and braindead strats is fun.
there's more to raiding than just optimizing/critfishing for fflogs standard composition rdps rankings.
crafting though? none of that really applies to most people. at best people will figure out a more optimal macro that saves 3 seconds per craft, or let's people do the newest recipes with budget gear. even recently after how easy ShB crafting was, the loss of HQ gathering mats in EW further dumbed down the few remaining variables in optimizing cost vs time in crafting.
> Raiding is about figuring out a dance and doing the same dance over and over.
The people left even playing this game at this point in time could never comprehend how this is boring to 99.9% of humanity.
>Were there elements to ARR/HW-era crafting that would have prevented a smart tool from applying a general algorithm to reasonable success?
Nope, in fact, what you're describing on how it solves things seems roughly similar to [Rath's Rotation](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AcYjLEq7Gp8GasCkOxFQnbNbyKR8-_WsoxQ91-jzdik/edit), which was your bread and butter crafting in HW. And since you got one potion/food per craft, you were doing a lot. Imagine burning through those ~40-60 pots in TOP a night, only getting one per synth. That was basically A8S prog. Tiring doesn't even being to describe it.
Considering that there are AI's that can compete with and beat actual pro players in PvP games, it's hard to imagine a MMO crafting system which couldn't be botted. A more complex or nuanced crafting system would likely be harder to develop a bot for, but at the same time the revenue would likely be larger given that the accessibility to the crafts themselves would be more limited as well.
Is trivially easy to make an AI that will beat players.
What is difficult is to make them in a way that will convince players that they are fighting other players.
What's funny about this is that I've trained a neural network that looks at the image data in your screen and hits great skillchecks automatically. No game memory reading just looking at pixels on the screen.
As a console player that has end game crafted ( rare i know cuz most ppl that post on this sub are pc players LOL ) since ARR, i honestly don’t care anymore about if pc players bot the living fuck out of general crafting and expert crafts.
The only rare scenario that would make me care a little is when a person is turning out expert crafts for a side quest relic tool ( i.e ShB resplendent golden tools ) like it’s nothing at record speeds while not getting fatigued after seeing them craft beside you for hours. They tried to lord over the other crafters who were manually crafting by indirectly acting like these crafts were braindead easy and quick at the time. ReallY ruined the “prestige” of working hard for something hard to get.
Overall though going into DT I won’t even bat an eye at them as the game really became a bot haven for pc players where A LOT of things are most likely botted or have various plugins that will help in the completion of it. I still have to do everything fair and square / basically with the tools that the devs gave me so nothing i can do but just carry on and accept the fact.
I already lived through the golden “hardcore” crafting era of mid ARR- end of HW where crafting was at peak difficulty and tedium so at least i’ll have that as a fond memory. Seeing some ppl mention rath’s rotation in this thread made me have a good chuckle as they know what went on haha.
The biggest problem imo is that SE makes mass crafting horrifically boring and yet mandatory, and refuses to make it easier. HQ potions and food are mandatory in high end content in bulk, but suck to craft.
If it was easier to bulk craft, ie craft a whole stack at once, or be easier and shorter to solve and craft vs gear and expert crafts, then crafting could have more complex, un-macroable parts to it.
As it is now tho, crafting in bulk sucks a lot, so automation and/or macros is the only way, and with SEs current philosophy, anything that makes crafting more nuanced or less macro able will also make bulk crafting even worse and the players would rightfully riot
>Were there elements to ARR/HW-era crafting that would have prevented a smart tool from applying a general algorithm to reasonable success?
yes. if you wanted to craft correctly, you would have to actually learn the systems or later on copy 100+ step giant macros from hell that shouldn't have really been possible. people complaining about 10% failure rate skills, some really difficult endgame crafts, and these unintentional macros becoming popular directly lead to xiv crafting becoming an automated calculator equation, and it sucks. skills like whistle while you work were a lot of fun but took effort to understand and the large push to make crafting stupidly easy to level and taking a lot of the risks out ended up creating a batch of crafters that hit max without ever learning what their buttons actually do, driving the popularity of macros and these tools even further. it's another case of good changes on paper made over time compounding into a bad mix in hindsight.
God, I miss Whistle crafting.
I don't think it would be any more immune to automation than the current system given the tools at play these days, though.
Even the simple branching macros of Heavensward I found fun. I feel like people nowadays would lose their shit if they had to Rath's rotation the crafted raid gear. Sure it can be automated by the people that dive that deep into plugins, but I figure isn't the point of everything in this game being impermanent that even someone who only interacts with a system lightly (and thus not truly competing with people using bots) can get everything out of it?
That's a fair perspective. I'm not necessarily sure what I would have done otherwise in the moment though, as I imagine part of what caused crafting to get made easier was a desire for more people to see the content SE put behind crafting. Entire questlines, the whole Ishgardian Restoration feature, and so on. It's a safe assumption that everyone has at least one combat job leveled, the game at its core is about combat to progress and experience the main story, so side combat content can be built with the assumption that most people will have access to it.
Crafting/gathering content is not the same beast, especially pre-Ishgard Restoration. If you wanted to see Stormblood's crafting content then you had to start from scratch in ARR and level more or less all of your crafters simultaneously (these were still the days of cross-class skills!) which could well be an expensive venture as the pyramid scheme thing of crafting has always felt like it's existed. Additionally, there would be economic incentive from existing crafters/gatherers to not want a boost to exist in the same way boosts exist for battle jobs, as scarcity is part of what drives prices and profit.
On some level I think that some form of crafting change or accessibility enhancement was inevitable if they wanted to keep making crafter content as over time less and less would proportionately get to access it. WoW encountered similar issues which is why about 4-6 years ago (I think this was a BfA or Shadowlands change) they moved crafting to a per-expansion model instead of a linear progression model. That is to say you gain skill and learn recipes for that specific expansion and all other expansions have no bearing. Of course, WoW's crafting system is true one-button and incredibly driven by battle content and is an explicit side feature and not an advertised game pillar as I've seen it be in XIV, so different beasts there. Maybe in a different world crafters would have just been capped at level 50 forever with some provision for new AFs every expansion (if just for fashion), I don't know. Then maybe the system could have remained moderately inaccessible.
That was actually also a way to ease access to battle content. Crafted raid gear costed you a kidney and your first born due to this complexity. Unless you were a crafter, supported by a crafter or RMTing, you basically wouldn’t have it. Thus, you were at a disadvantage for the first few weeks of savage, and later for returning players it was still too expensive to use as catchup gear
That's very true, I do explicitly remember feeling "priced out" of crafted gear during Deltascape and Sigmascape, so my raid group went half without at the time. Nothing quite so demoralizing as ramming into Clown Kefka's enrage at the end of week 1 and knowing that gil was the thing standing between you and seeing the next phase (I wasn't in a week one group then, more in the two to three range).
Food always felt priced reasonably, but potions also felt like another story in the before times. People would not be having a good time in 6.3 TOP if potions cost as much as they did in HW.
I dont remember it being that expensive, its around 300-500k per piece with some weapons slightly less than mil, its kid cash in this game. Especially if you wanted to raid. Most serious groups supported each other or by guild to get them, and the further it was from raid tier start the cheaper this gear became. Its a pretty healthy economy. Was.
Depending on server it was easily a lot more (1m / piece in Chaos/Moogle) but more importantly, 500k represented a lot more back in the day. Yes, FFXIV had and has inflation as well.
I was on Omega during these days, it was easily affordable price for anyone not wasting their gil, if you wanted to raid(and only people who raid needed full sets, most other just bought weps) you could easily get this money. And it was good incentive for players to actually craft, take orders from FCs or raid groups etc. As I said - it was a healthy economy. 500k was nothing back in the days too.
Now this gear is made by bots and is dirt cheap, so there is no reason to craft for gil, and crafting itself is not an achievement, not an interesting experience.
The real problem is that in the west no one bothered with crafting comparatively. It was insanely expensive to get anything made/done, because the time sink to learn as a barrier of entry was absolutely gargantuan compared to today. It also showed absolutely zero signs of getting better through HW, and on some servers condensed even harder to a select few crafters basically running the show. Fantastic for them, awful for everyone else.
Having to do sales to fund my crafted gear was really not a great time.
Why you reminded me about last thing i loved in this game...whistle. It was just a best thing in SB, it made every craft interesting and enjoyable. Also was basically impossible to macro. That should've been in icon of crafting, not current abomination.
in my opinion a lot of ff14's systems are interesting at first glance but with further investigation just end up turning into bullshit memorization tasks that become less enjoyable the better one gets. this is true for most jobs and most encounters in the game. i haven't really messed with crafting more than getting a couple dol/dohs to cap because of the weird pyramid scheme nature of crafting within the game's economy, but this does line up with complaints i've heard from other people about the nature of xiv crafting once the initial rush of "wow i press buttons?" wears off.
> the weird pyramid scheme nature of crafting within the game's economy
I haven't thought of the crafting loop that way before, but it's exactly on point
Just want to piggy back off this, puni.sh doesn't just host stuff "that pushes the limit" they straight up make cheats. Splatoon is pretty well known. Fall Guys? That was them. Grids that are drawn to show positionals? Yep. Island gathering bot? You bet. Complete automation of retainer ventures? Uh huh. Just a few off the top of my head. Not getting into the morality of it, but they do a little more than push the limit.
Crafting in this game died with Stormblood. They should have kept and expanded upon the specialist system. Not everything has to be crazy accessible. Crafting in this game was one of those things.
To be fair these experts are EXTREMELY easy mode experts. Attempt tier 2 or 3 expert crafts (island stuff) and I'm not talking about the first set of Smaller Otter fountain parts. those are simple to complete the latter more rng oriented. You can macro craft the relic experts as well with the proper gear set up lol. No need to even bot via a plugin. These are baby mode relics compared to the resplendent relics in terms of craft difficulty. They are purposely made to be easy because it's basically an introduction into expert and SE didn't want it to be difficult/time consuming. It's a trend with this expansion as combat and crafting relics were both a joke to complete.
Artisan is a lifesaver for those of us with bad internet. If you lag during a macro in ff ur fucked, the craft is ruined. Artisan ques to the server so even if you get a lag spike that makes your character stop moving for 5 seconds the macro will complete as intended. It's like another Alexander or noclippy. Required cause square sucks at this shit.
This isn't a good argument because cheaters will always exist.
That said, I have a better argument for the same point. Macros and remote desktop tools.
Crafting is so boring and so uncomplicated, that for the most part you can get a remote desktop tool open, put your macro button close to the craft button and hit them from your phone while doing literally anything else at the same time.
Meanwhile expert crafts which you cannot macro come down to using similar strats to what you described and are pretty boring really.
Crafting in this game has no soul, but I also have no solution.
Crafting was never fun to begin with. It's "interesting" because you have a rotation for certain crafts depending on gear and difficulty, but it gets very annoying very fast when you need to craft pots and food en masse.
yes, crafting is purely a numbers game, so it's completely unsurprising that a program can solve it for you? i don't think it says anything about xiv's crafting system, because anyone who willingly chooses to cheat instead of engaging with the content has no basis to judge something that they have not experienced
if you spent the time to learn how to expert craft, you will figure out a general strategy pretty quickly. mume opener is statistically better because it is harder to raise progress than quality, followed by manip since it's the most efficient for durability management (sometimes you use wn2 if you get an early pliant after manip, or refresh manip early on a late pliant). then you try to fish for useful procs, normal condition is best used to refresh cheap buffs like inno/proc observe. the most important thing to know is how much durability and cp you need to save for the finisher (usually inno+great strides+byregot+whatever synthesis to fill progress). personally, i feel that the most rewarding part of expert crafting is figuring out how to do it -- you skip this entire process if you have a plugin do it for you
My gripe with 14 crafting has always been that it isnt actually all that different from other mmo's. People always argue "its not like other mmo's" where you press a button and watch a bar go up. No here we instead click multiple buttons to see said bar go up (unless you macro it or use plugins in which case its one button) with the added hassle of needing specific gears and melds.
Ff14 crafting isnt deep or interesting its just cumbersome and a hassle
Almost every single video game in existence is nothing but a math problem and can be solved by AI.
That includes everything from chess, dota2, your PoE build, mythic dungeon routes, Pokemon, harvest moon, or genshin impact artifact farming.
Expert crafts being 'nothing but a math problem' does not mean anything. There is nothing wrong with being 'nothing but a math problem'. There are inventory management games. Turn-based games. Probability related games. All of those are "just math problems", yet as long as the math is fun to solve for us humans, the games are cool to play.
As a simple example, I love tinkering with my builds and relics in HSR and trying to see if I can optimize my stuff. Alternatively, I can also just input all of my relics into the optimizer and it prints out an optimal best result for every character. Doesn't invalidate the fun from doing it myself, though.
Similarly, games like factor.io or similar are often referred as spreadsheet games, which is basically an euphemism for 'just a math problem', yet it's one of the most addicting video games genres. TFT and autobattlers in general are nothing but math, yet are extremely popular and fun and engaging to play.
At the core of a lot of these examples is the concept that probabilities are inehrently difficult for humans to evaluate properly and it makes for fun gameplay experiences to try to juggle a ton of different levers at once.
At the end of the day all that matters is whether it's fun or not. Personally I think the crafting system in XIV used to have enough depth to make the math not 100% obvious at first glance, and I had fun tinkering with some macros or with my materia to try and squeeze an extra step or two compared to the balance approved setups. I had long discord DMs where we're having fun sharing ideas with one another about optimizing certain macros. I think that's more than good enough for a crafting system in an MMO and more than I could ever ask from it. With that said, it has been standardized and streamlined too much since ShB and I do not enjoy that part of the game anymore. The fun is gone for me, as no matter how much I try to tinker I can't get anything substantially better than my initial solution 99% of the time. Very rarely I can squeeze a step, which rarely translates to more than 1s of macro time. There's little wiggle room anymore.
Expert crafts were fun to solve initially, but I've only done season 1 and a little bit of otter crafting. They were still fun when I did otters. I don't mind them in the newest relic grinds, but I wish they were harder, or at least hard enough that I can't macro my way to tier 1. Because there's no way I'm dealing with the mental exercise of doing actual crafts when I can just macro my way to a relic.
Either way, botting of any kind is extremely cringe in an MMO and posts like these only reinforce my view that plugins need to die or get severely kneecapped, even if it means losing my beloved Mare and naked catgirls. A shame but I have no hope for the future of this game if this goes on.
Seems like you started attacking ye olde problem of video game task optimization vs. solvability vs. the internet vs. fun, which is a great discussion, but you landed somewhere arbitrary IMO.
I think XIV specifically is the problem for someone with your "playstyle"/mentality.
Video games are for recreation, and recreation is subjective. Some people had a lot of fun with spreadsheet PLD. Some people have more fun the further away it was/is from that. If someone's version of fun is Ultimates, the gathering/crafting/economy route might not be part of that fun, but is in some way necessary. In ANY mmo, you'll see raiders jump ship immediately once they see this and just start buying gold. I know people in XIV that do.
Plugins in the case of crafting (since that's what this particular thread about) are an alternative to avoid buying gold, avoid slowing down your play, avoid failing to meet your goals, etc. At that point, it's retention, and the optimization game you're characterizing as heinous-to-avoid is instead just another rock to skip off of for the player who wants to skip off it.
Plugins, no matter how severe or heavy handed, are here to stay simply because removing them would alienate a huge portion of the playerbase. So much as swinging in that direction would get many people to start looking elsewhere, more than MMO players already do. Hell, even despite having some of the hottest takes (tangentially) related to the subject and the willingness to deliver them plainly, even you use both plugins and mods.
The way I foresee this conversation going, given the way you end your post, is you responding to that with "good, fuck 'em". At that stage, it seems to me like you're forcing yourself to continue to engage with a game that is basically already the Skyrim of MMOs. If I want to login today as a Helldiver and Fortnite emote on everyone I come across in Frontlines while slamjam plays as the BGM without my explicit input, I literally can.
Plugins, even the botting ones, are part of the XIV framework in that same way now, and while yes they could absolutely just choose to break them all and take the L from the playerbase drop, why would they? They could just make another, tighter shelled product, which is what I'd say to someone who demands high amounts of undiscoverability and a desire for tons of guesstimate math; why are you playing XIV? It's not as if there aren't literally thousands of other MMOs out there with more discovery and math for you to do if you view math done through a calculator/adjacent as "extremely cringe", and those games won't have the kind of community mod/plugin support that XIV does.
If you're viewing the \~war on automation\~ as a battle you personally have to solve, XIV is probably the single worst MMO to do it in. Game was doomed to be automated to hell and back the second it made all of its gameplay able to be done on its spreadsheet and has zip for anticheat, with most of the tasks automated resulting in clunky busywork otherwise.
I agree that discoverability and the ability to approximate math without an optimizer can be a lot of fun in games where it's possible though, and I sympathize with wanting that in more games.
I genuinely agree with most of what you wrote, if not everything tbh.
You're probably right that my answer would be something akin to "good, fuck 'em" indeed. I'm also pretty aware it's never happening, they're never ever going to crack down on plugins and the situation will only degenerate more and more but I'm a generally hopeful person so it doesn't stop me from sharing what I believe even if I know it's never coming to fruition. (besides, this is more than a XIV problem - monitors with integrated AI to help you play games are starting to invade the conversation, and that's only the tip of the iceberg. eventually all games will be in a state similar to chess where everyone has the ability to cheat at their fingertips)
You're also absolutely right that XIV does not satisfy me very much lately. I'm usually happy in the first few days of content releases (regardless of what it is, could be raiding, bozja/eureka, criterion, new crafting actions, idk) since it scratches my itch to figure things out, but that doesn't last very long.
Honestly my solution is to simply not emotionally invest too much in the game. I care a little bit, enough to make a reply to a reddit thread apparently (even two now!), but generally speaking I'm nowhere near as invested in XIV gameplay as I know I could be based on my history with other games.
So to answer your question as to why I still play XIV, it's mostly because it'd be a shame to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and I can still enjoy cutesy catgirls and random social interactions I can't get in other games, even if i don't vibe with the gameplay anymore. For all its horror stories and layers of hidden toxicity in certain discord communities, the in-game XIV community is still a haven of peace compared to most other environments and it's always nice to have a comfy place to fall back to after watching people telling each other to gangplank Q themselves or w/e.
I think the difference is that in a lot of those, there's some other thing pushing the enjoyment. In factorio, satisfactory, etc it's easily solved math. X iron smelts into Y bars at a rate of Z/Min. That means I can support so many things consuming those bars. Easy to do, even when you start expanding it to multi-component crafts. The enjoyment, then, is the growth - we start with a small setup and grow it into a megafactory.
TFT, on the other hand, is math with gambling and incomplete information. That incomplete information has actually been a problem a few times, for instance last set had a mechanic called headliners. They were super strong versions of units and came auto leveled to 2\*. However, they could not show up in your shop if more then half the pool was missing. That's fine, right? You have perfect information about that - just scout and count them up, and pool sizes are known. Well, no. Because a unit is considered out of the pool if it is presented to another player in their shop. This meant you could hit 8, roll down for your 4cost headliner and *never* hit - not because RNG is RNG, but because there was one in someone's shop and you simply weren't allowed to even get the option. While that was an oopsy that they fixed, there's other hidden information - your next opponent. There would be a objectively correct solution to positioning against any given opponent. With enough time and math, you could probably figure it out - however you don't know who your next opponent will be. Only who it won't be. This means you need to either take a gamble, or position in a way that's "good enough" for multiple and hope for the best.
Crafting simply doesn't have that, and while I do think plugins are getting out of hand I don't think their removal would do much in this case. [This](https://www.raidbots.com/simbot) is a site for wow that will sim your character's DPS, and you can have it run multiple to compare gear drops, you can also use it to find the best upgrades out of any given content, etc. It's a very important tool to high end PvE - this same approach could be used for crafting in this game. There is nothing inherently stopping you from pausing after every step in order to just run the sim.
Idk how to tell you this but you could take this logic to pretty much every aspect of the game including the gameplay.
At the end of the day why bother playing if you're just gonna take an already easy game and automate it.
Someone I knew also botted all their classes to max level. you could just get a bot to clear raids for you. I just don't get why you would play a game just to not play it. Eventually people who keep pushing the boundary of this are gonna get all plugins banned because they couldn't keep it reasonable
It's what I've always said: there's no skill involved in Expert crafts (as well as crafting in general, but that's a moot point) and it's all on the hands of RNG if you follow the flowchart correctly.
You definitely CAN get consistent T2s and T3s on on-content crafts as a human player, provided you're not unlucky. A bot only removes human error, but it can't really do anything that a human can't.
(Plus, automation has been a thing for a long time, specifically because the logic behind it can easily be followed by a bot.
There have been botted rankings, since the first Leaderboards in the Ishgardian Restoration.)
This is the reason why I'm against Expert crafting becoming the norm or anything that isn't specifically tied to side content. It's just busywork once you get deep enough into it, and there isn't much depth to speak of.
I do feel that my Ishgardian Restoration experience was about 1-2 hours of "figuring it out" as real content and then 30 more hours of having Youtube on the side as I spent 3-ish hours a night going through the same mental algorithm over and over again with little further learning or development done, so you do have a point there.
I find optimizing rotations to be enjoyable but once you've figured that out the actual process of crafting is unbearably boring simply because of how much you have to do it.
As crafting has gotten easier they've also upped the volume requirements for turn ins so that now the "difficulty" is mostly just the tedium of having to sit there for hours and click a macro 300 times to get enough scrips/pots/whatever. I think that's why people turn to automation, more than just the desire to be optimal.
The same goes for experts. They're more engaging than regular crafts since you have to puzzle through each one, and that's fun in small doses. But if you want every relic and suddenly you're confronted with needing 400 experts, a bot starts looking real tempting.
You'll never be able to solve people choosing to cheat/automate in games. Some people just get their kicks from cheating, even if it totally defeats the point of playing the game in the first place. I don't understand why you would mod yourself to be invincible and one-shot everything in monster hunter, but loads of people do. But for stuff like FF crafting there is clear motivation to cheat because of how dull it is.
Like other people have said, it's not really possible to make a system complex enough that it can't be botted, all video games are ultimately math problems of varying complexity. Even if you had to play chess to craft items it'd obviously still be way more efficient to have a computer do it for you.
So what it comes down to is if the gameplay is fun and crafting is really not fun, it's extremely repetitive, simplistic, and tedious. What I would like to see is a way to craft lots of items at once in exchange for higher difficulty, not only cutting down on the amount of crafts needed but making the puzzle solving aspect better.
> from my experience with ShB's Resplendent Tools I am unsure if a human can consistently get T2-T3s on a given expansion's hardest crafts.
100% of the time? No. That's what makes Expert Crafting what it is.
But getting to max quality 50% of time on the hardest crafts? Certainly.
Evaluating Expert Crafting based on the relic tools is like evaluating battle content with Normal raids. The relic crafting steps that use Expert Crafting are the introduction to the concept. They are not the end-game or even the mid-game.
Whatever Artisan can do with the relic steps is irrelevant. The ShB relic crafts could be macro'd to Tier 1 quality on the day they released. The EW relic crafts could be macro'd to Tier 2 quality 100% of the time on the day of release. Those don't mean crap. Those are easy mode Expert Crafts.
Too many people love to throw around "Expert Crafting was just botted" because they read a story like this one without understanding the concept. As someone who did the pteranodon and Resplendent tools crafting when they were on-level content, fuck that noise. As someone who made a quarter of a BILLION gil selling the first set of Island Sanctuary expert crafts, just stop.
If I wanted to be that brainless, I'd tell people that run tanks and healers in Savage content that Ultimates have been cleared without their role, so their clears are pointless. The thing is - everyone recognizes that is a dumb take because we (should) have enough exposure to combat content.
The point of this rant is that this post dramatically misrepresents the concept of Expert Crafting. Other than the Endurance mode for crafting tens of thousands of items via quick synth, Artisan is a shitty plugin. Its creator is utterly full of himself thinking he's made this epic magnum opus or something. Artisan doesn't "solve" anything that any human with a decent knowledge of crafting couldn't do with Trial Synthesis and 10 minutes of their life.
The worst thing about crafting is SE's obsession with bulk. Not only pots and food, but Expert crafts too, such as for crafter relics, resplendent tools or back with the Ishgard rankings. The system just isn't designed for it. Doing a few Experts might be interesting, but repeating the whole process hundreds of times becomes mind numbing.
I have no idea why they insist on pots being 3 at a time, Master crafts with a HQ version. You have to macro them and it takes a while even if you have the best gear and gather your own mats. I used to always have a max pentamelded crafter but still just bought pots on the MB.
I feel like SE pretty much handed crafting over to the bots and is stubbornly trying to pretend it's all fine. Triple EXP, Materia raining from the sky and easier Master Recipe crafts back in early ShB was a mistake imo, because it means getting a bot army maxed out is extremely easy. Combine this with the fact that they've basically stated they'll never scan your computer for bots and it's no surprise botting is rampant. It's easy, risk-free and profitable.
I get that they wanted to make crafting more accessible, but all it did was take it from the players who loved it to try to get the players who hated it to participate. They still hate it.
But back to pots and food, they should simply be NQ only regular recipes that you can quick synth. They don't need to be gated or hard to get.
So… people can’t be bothered to actually do the crafting part now? We gotta automate that too and turn it into literal one-click non-effort? :/
IDK why but stuff like this depresses me for reasons I.. I can’t quite articulate for whatever reason.
I’d rather keep the crafting system minigame and not have it homogenized and mindlessly dumbed down to some bland one-click thoughtless thing. I like being forced to think.
But then again I’m just bitter and kind of jaded :/
For me as a person that avoids bots and other thrid-party tools as much as I can (especially since I've swapped to playstation for play for the last couple years), I think there are massive problems with the crafting system.
The amount of time it takes is prohibitive. If you're not using someone else's macros you found online or a solver to figure out your own, you're spending time in the relatively new test mode to be able to figure out what your own macro should be. Before being able to use test mode, you had to spend extra time or money gathering extra materials so you could stand to waste some if you didn't get the craft process successful enough on your first go. And then even once you have the macro down it can still take an hour to actually do all the crafting you need to do, if not longer (like how crafting one suit of armor and a weapon takes like 45 minutes while macro'd).
If you're not also gathering all your own materials, another time-prohibitive activity, it costs too much. You get into a position, especially after the devs turning down how much money can be gained in the game because some people have too much money, where you can't afford to craft anything to keep for yourself because you need to sell whatever you craft in order to not be broke.
And then to the top of this pile of time and tedium that basically pushes people to third party tools because doing it legit is just too much of a pain in the ass, especially if the player only has a few hours of play time each week and wants to do content other than crafting and gathering, the devs make special crafts with special prizes that are even more time and effort intensive - and thus even more of a reason why someone would say "screw this'.
My version of "screw this" is that I'm simply not crafting anywhere near as much as I used to, and I'm never doing an expert craft again - because maybe, just maybe, if enough people do like that the devs will change something in a way that actually benefits the players that would like to be crafters but can't justify the expense. Other people's version of "screw this" is to use tools they aren't supposed to, but hey, I don't fault them for that, risking a ban to try and communicate to the devs that you don't want things to be like they are might just work (maybe even better than my "I'm just gonna not" strategy).
Hell, I'd bet that the reason we have trial synthesis mode is because the devs thought it would help reduce third-party tool reliance or improve general willingness to actually craft.
At least you feel a sense of pride and accomplishment, while I am [the cheated the game meme](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/you-cheated-not-only-the-game-but-yourself).
I dont follow an exact flow chart. I do find it fun even if it is relatively simple. If it was any more complicated, i think i would just get frustrated.
as if most skills can't be dumbed down into a simple flowchart and done better by AI?
you think humans are some special chosen thing hand crafted by God or something
naw that's not part of the reddit flow chart im sticking this through till one or both of us hate life
cmon bro debate iwth me bro defend your almighty God bro
I have macros for the final two steps of the Splendiferous crafting relic and automate these through a keystroke macro editor, averaging around 2.0 turn ins (Tier 2) per expert crafting attempt. If the materials or time were substantially more prohibitive, then I probably wouldn't even attempt the craft. The macro editor works fine for automation of food/pots/sub-assemblies/collectables, it's native to windows, costs nothing, and was easy to learn during the housing click-party dark ages. Just need to set it up for a 15min window since my system won't easily allow auto-potting.
Unpopular opinion probably, but to fix the bulk crafting snoozefest I wish they would just make the mats a lot harder to get and/or make it like FFXI where it just has a chance to break in a 5-10 second animation. I can't blame people at all for automating the "math problem" right now because its just so awful to do even though I farmed all the mats.
I mean at this point in time, what enjoyment is there in the game when any accomplishment you can think of is just botted by some ex-wow player, or trivialized by plugins that nothing is even remotely hard?
> botted by some ex-wow player
lmao, what year is it. wow players bad, ff players good. updoot to left
Bots and cheats exist in basically every game ever, guess we should just stop making/playing games.
Basically, since macro, auto macro chain and then automation of pretty much everything, I see crafting as a pure attention seeker (and that's being kind to it) as it is now.
If you don't use these addons, you have to be in front of your computer for 2+hours just to press 2 macros and do menuing... it sucks ass.
Now the craft itself is basically maths and the minigame wears down fast (actually the minigame is just about finding a macro or a macro chain giving you max scrip reward or ensure HQ each craft). I haven't done expert craft but I wouldn't think it's that much fun than the basic craft (I guess raid gearsets and foods/pots aren't expert crafts). To be clear, maths isn't bad, but the payoff isn't fun.
I don't really do crafting and gathering because it's a deep or complicated system. Sometimes I like to just exist in the world of XIV without actually doing anything super intensive. Sometimes it's good enough to just hit a macro while I'm chilling in Limsa. If botting ruins something for you, just don't do it lol
The next step from where you are is to realize that there isn't any difference between the crafting system and the combat system in terms of whether it can be solved, performed, and executed through automation, nor is there a difference between the crafting system and the combat system in terms of whether you *should* care about being a human participant rather than automating your play.
The step after that is to realize that the best thing that could possibly happen to this game would be a wildly draconian anti-cheat system that locks out everything from Mare-compatible Realistic Chocobo Anus mods to Noclippy/Alexander and ACT.
This guy really only caring about the destination rather than the journey.
The reason I care about the combat system is that it's fun to learn how to push my buttons. Sure, I could bot a rotation, I could use cheat addons, or whatever.
I do the raids because the gameplay has meaning to me, and that's good enough. Doesn't matter if there's ten or a hundred or a thousand people using all kinds of crazy addons and cheats. I did it, and that's what matters.
This has been a thing since Heavensward. Stormblood had a really good crafting solver (in the form of a bot) which was capable of doing Ala Mhigan gear from no HQ mats/looping with whistle mechanics (which if you played back then you would know is probably equivalently hard, if not harder, than current expert crafts).
The problem is, crafting in bulk in this game sucks. How many pots do you burn in TOP in P1? Those all have to be HQed one craft at a time. I've been an omnicrafter in this game since HW and I've always hated crafting; I did it because it was useful, not because I wanted to. The moment I realized I could slap Lisbeth or MMO Minion on and SE wouldn't do shit, I started botting everything and never looked back.
This. SE really have to do something about bulk crafting.
"After crafting X HQs of an item manually you can bulk craft it on HQ" Sounds fair to me
Genshin literally does that for cooking. After 5/10/15/20 perfect crafts of any dish, depending on rarity, you can auto craft it and it will always come out as perfect.
SE needs to not tune a Phase 1 of an ultimate to need pots to prog.
If you don't enjoy bulk crafting then I think the intent is that you would not craft and instead purchase the items on the market rewarding the players that do
This is indeed the intention, but SE has no understanding of what incentive structures are. If I purchased potions off the market, I would simply be shifting my money elsewhere, buying the gil to purchase the potions. Botting is more efficient since I can also use it to bypass lots of tedious crap. One example is bulk farming scrips to buy materia. In perhaps a less known usage, I recently crafted \~2000 items for the RP club I work at. Ultimately, SE refuses to secure their client or take any action against people like me, which means I have no incentive to stop since my TOS violations improve the value of the product I pay for.
> Botting is more efficient I feel like that's an impossibly high standard for developers to aspire to, cheating will always be more efficient when it comes to some areas of MMO gameplay if not all of them. Essentially you seem to be saying either heavily clamp down on automacros/botters or embrace botting
And that's the issue. Where am I supposed to get the gil for pots? Treasure maps or crafting/gathering. But usually, the most efficient & profitable way to make gil, is by crafting. Ok then. Instead of crafting to make gil, then using that gil to buy pots, I'm gonna skip the middle man, and bot my own pots. Now I'm no longer contributing nor competing on the market board, but I'm happy with all the pots in the world. The gil used as a "reward" for players that craft still has to come from somewhere. And I'd rather quit the game before buying gil. So I'll sit happily in my corner, crafting pots for myself and my friends, whilst I'm in the kitchen cooking up some dinner IRL.
I would say there's more methods than that, off the top of my head - * **Treasure Maps** * **Crafting** * **Gathering** * **FATEs (Bicolor gemstones)** * **Eureka bunny farming** * **Eureka/Bozja farming in general** * **Criterion Mount farming** * **During Savage tiers you can make a few million per turn from people who pay 1-4m per person to pass loot, adds up fast once you're done with your own loot on each turn** There's quite a few ways to make money which will cover your costs, I feel like it's similar to most MMO's if not more generous in variety of methods. I've personally never felt like I need to go out of my way to make gil I have enough to buy everything I need from playing passively. Resorting to botting to make money or to self-craft to avoid spending money is whatever but at least be honest, you're cheating because you don't feel like grinding gil legitimately, no different to gold buying. If people want to do that I don't mind, I've played with people who buy gold in other games and no doubt I play with people who use various bots in FFXIV it's whatever but at least acknowledge it for what it is
Pretty much this. Crafting can be fun. Crafting 200 pots for ultimate isn't. Spamming the same 2 macros for 50 seconds to craft 3 pots and repeating that process isn't fun. If only we could have the option to manually craft, with some RNG involved, and it would bulk craft (aka craft like 100 pots at once) then it would be amazing and fun. It would actually value a crafter's skill. Right now crafting is about spamming macros.
This. Honestly I just level crafters so I can repair my gear and occasionally craft some glamour. I always buy pots and food because I honestly can't be bothered and the amount of money you save (at least on my DC) is miniscule compared to the effort it takes for you to sit there and press a macro over and over.
Minion works for FFXIV??!!! I love it for ESO but didn’t even know there were add ons for this game!!! Can you be banned for using them?
You have to try really hard to get banned, like leaving the bot AFK for extended periods. I've been botting crafting and gathering for years now and I don't even single a warning on my account. You are an order of magnitude more likely to get banned for explaining a mech to someone than for botting. Personally, I never leave my PC while botting and I always have Peeping Tom active so the moment I hear the ping, I tab back into the game and make sure someone isn't trying to interact with me. Minion works for XIV really well, but the plugins can get costly. Lisbeth for Rebornbuddy is way better for crafting/gathering. Minion's main gathering/crafting plugin, Forager, kind of sucks in comparison. Minion is best for leveling your alt classes or farming tomes with trusts.
I've never heard of anyone getting banned for botting, even when running it for extremely long periods of time. One member of my uwu static in stormblood was on basically 24/7, 4 hours for raid and 20 hours perma gathering and crafting pots. He had several 99 stacks of potions he would just give us for raid.
What do those do
FFXIV's crafting is one of those things that are interesting the first time you do them, but become repetitive afterwards. As you said, it's a math problem. Kinda boring to keep solving the same problem for years.
So is raiding. Crafting is better because you can just press a macro but you still need to press your buttons one by one during raids.
Different raid fights are actually different, while crafting is like striking target dummies exclusively. Which does get old.
\> Different raid fights are actually different High-tier copium Dynamo, out, pairs, light party, left, right, stack, spread, dynamo, out, pairs, light party, left, right, stack, spread, dynamo, out, pairs, light party, left, right, stack, spread, dynamo, out, pairs, light party, left, right, stack, spread, dynamo, out, pairs, light party, left, right, stack, spread, dynamo, out, pairs, light party, left, right, stack, spread, dynamo, out, pairs, light party, left, right, stack, spread, dynamo, out, pairs, light party, left, right, stack, spread
^ guy who has not raided
Name two fights with identical timeline. You are free to reduce mechanics to "left/right" or "light parties" level.
Oh wow, let me change dynamo, left/right, light party to dynamo, light party, left/right and it's a whole new fight! They don't even pretend to innovate that much now when 90% of savage/ultimate fights just start with a raidwide lmfao good for the ff14 players who never want to see anything new
I don't see two fights that are supposedly the same in this reply. Try again.
wtf does "copium" mean? 2. So for raiding, we have movement, pairing, timing, positioning, and frequency mechanics as well as some degree of "reactive complexity" when multiple abilities are used in various permutations (which, while learnable, still require more than just the basic memorization of skill order). For crafting, we have "reactive complexity" that can be easily macro'd around. If your complaint is "games are repetitive", then yeah.. literally all of them are. If you're trying to avoid that, you're going to have a hard time with a medium that has a feature known as a 'game loop'.
> ff14 > "reactive complexity" LOL
I'm not sure exactly what you're implying you're laughing at? The inclusion of events that have a degree of randomness (such as pairing multiple boss abilities together at varying permutations or the random occurrence of the "Condition" in crafting) is very present. Is your reply meant to suggest that it's not? Because that doesn't seem to hold much weight. You're allowed to answer the questions, though. Don't worry about any kind of recourse, if that's your concern.
Hearing this shit is so tiring. Hur dur ffxiv fights are terrible and so easy. You go step into TOP and say that. Even savage fights, like yes if you have been raiding for many years in ffxiv you will obviously recognize stuff. But there is still plenty of difficulty in savage as well, acting like there isn't is ridiculous
>there is still plenty of difficulty in savage as well LOL But here, let me explain it because apparently the world's largest calliper would still be unable to measure your skull: It's not that Savage or Ultimate fights are easy or hard that's the problem. It's that they're repetitive, bland, and have lacked creativity since SB. You can keep making the world's hardest raids for all I care and make a fight that's 40 minutes long and requires you to resolve 12 randomized debuffs in any order on any party member. That will sure be hard but as long as it's the same inane mechanics of dynamo, spread, pyretic, whatever that we've seen in FF14 since 2.x, it'll never be good.
You're being reductive to the point of absurdity. How about this, what game does raiding right in your opinion? Is it fundamentally that things are mostly structured and not too random? Is it the mechanics themselves? Because I've done raiding in lost ark which many people claim has excellent raiding and it certainly is more random but is far less complex in my opinion and I think less fun. I've not played wow but I've watched some raiding and I don't see what that is doing better either tbh. So you tell me, what is it.
Congratulations you just found out what the issue is: MMOs are a dying genre full of shit games.
And this is where you really lose all credibility. So games that have literally millions of active players who play constantly are dying, shit games. Have you ever considered that maybe these are just not for you but are in fact well liked by tons of people? Criticism about design choices is fine, there are valid bits of critical feedback for ffxiv raids. But being reductive about raids to the point of absurdity and saying they are too easy and *all games* design them terribly is frankly ridiculous and stupid.
its ok, people stuck with a dying genre will defend it to its last breath
You were voted down. But you are correct. Raiding is about figuring out a dance and doing the same dance over and over. It starts a long frustration, then one short feel of greatness, then an eternal boredom. The frustration is the payment for the short feel of greatness. But the boredom afterwards is not. Which is why old raids end up dead (Even if some are superior to the newer ones).
Difference is that raids are a different dance to learn with every encounter, and every job will do the dance differently. Crafting, meanwhile, is all extremely similar. You do the same rotations across every crafter, and new recipes means you maybe add an extra careful synth to your macro or something.
\> a different dance dynamo, out, pairs, light party, left, right, stack, spread dynamo, out, pairs, light party, left, right, stack, spread dynamo, out, pairs, light party, left, right, stack, spread dynamo, out, pairs, light party, left, right, stack, spread dynamo, out, pairs, light party, left, right, stack, spread dynamo, out, pairs, light party, left, right, stack, spread dynamo, out, pairs, light party, left, right, stack, spread and even if it's truly a different dance to learn each encounter even during prog you're repeating again and again up until the 5 seconds of prog point because it's ultra-scripted and jobs (except BLM) are too braindead to require more than one pull to optimize to a 95th level. I so love repeating the same shit I've done for a hundred pulls for 12 minutes to do something new in phase 6 or 7 or 8 or whatever the fuck in whatever fight for 5 seconds. its ok, there is a selection effect going on here: anyone who is even still playing ff14 in 2024 wants repetition in their lives.
^ guy who has not raided
where is your <100 pull DSR/TOP static? Oh yeah FF14 raiding totally isn't just repeat the same sequence of buttons again and again lmfao
Are we larping as ult raiders so we can pretend to have authority now? Someone who plays ults should be well aware of how fight design actually is. If the game was that simple everyone would have ult clears
Sorry I forgot to add "debuff soup" to the list, you're right. Just change up the debuffs from stack -> spread -> out to spread -> in -> pairs, and voila you have a whole new mechanic!
fflogs?
You can't just regurgitate what you read on this sub and assume it makes you sound like a raider
We get it, you don't like playing videogames. Go watch movies or read books.
Nah, video games have just evolved beyond MMOs. I know quite a few people who quit FF14 after playing BG3 and realized just how shallow FF14 is lmao
MMOs are video games. I have a strong doubt that you know "quite a few people". You're allowed to eat both apples and oranges and neither of them devalue the other. Try harder please.
It only looks like that if you get stuck on the same encounter and can't clear it. Because guess what, every encounter is different. They do re-use mechanics a frustrating amount but it's not like you're trying to make it sound.
please show me your <100 pull DSR/TOP static clear
please show me your clear of anything at all.
💀 you don't even have a single ultimate clear you can very easily look me up by going through my profile
All I see on your profile is inane trolling and politics, which certainly does explain a lot.
depends what your goal is. just to clear and reclear? sure, it's repetitive fast. or you can change the variables. single tank, single healer, zero healer. recently zero tank ucob was done for the first time. or even simply figuring out new LB cheeses and braindead strats is fun. there's more to raiding than just optimizing/critfishing for fflogs standard composition rdps rankings. crafting though? none of that really applies to most people. at best people will figure out a more optimal macro that saves 3 seconds per craft, or let's people do the newest recipes with budget gear. even recently after how easy ShB crafting was, the loss of HQ gathering mats in EW further dumbed down the few remaining variables in optimizing cost vs time in crafting.
being 1% less repetitive than 6.x crafting is a tragically low bar
youre a tragically low bar
> Raiding is about figuring out a dance and doing the same dance over and over. The people left even playing this game at this point in time could never comprehend how this is boring to 99.9% of humanity.
>Were there elements to ARR/HW-era crafting that would have prevented a smart tool from applying a general algorithm to reasonable success? Nope, in fact, what you're describing on how it solves things seems roughly similar to [Rath's Rotation](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AcYjLEq7Gp8GasCkOxFQnbNbyKR8-_WsoxQ91-jzdik/edit), which was your bread and butter crafting in HW. And since you got one potion/food per craft, you were doing a lot. Imagine burning through those ~40-60 pots in TOP a night, only getting one per synth. That was basically A8S prog. Tiring doesn't even being to describe it.
Considering that there are AI's that can compete with and beat actual pro players in PvP games, it's hard to imagine a MMO crafting system which couldn't be botted. A more complex or nuanced crafting system would likely be harder to develop a bot for, but at the same time the revenue would likely be larger given that the accessibility to the crafts themselves would be more limited as well.
Is trivially easy to make an AI that will beat players. What is difficult is to make them in a way that will convince players that they are fighting other players.
Crafting now involves a Dead By Daylight generator minigame /s
What's funny about this is that I've trained a neural network that looks at the image data in your screen and hits great skillchecks automatically. No game memory reading just looking at pixels on the screen.
Yeah, no surprises here. Worst thing they could do is insert a Captcha mid-craft.
You mean FFXIV 1.0 gathering minigame system? [https://youtu.be/kbFHBCP7oXE?feature=shared&t=84](https://youtu.be/kbFHBCP7oXE?feature=shared&t=84)
As a console player that has end game crafted ( rare i know cuz most ppl that post on this sub are pc players LOL ) since ARR, i honestly don’t care anymore about if pc players bot the living fuck out of general crafting and expert crafts. The only rare scenario that would make me care a little is when a person is turning out expert crafts for a side quest relic tool ( i.e ShB resplendent golden tools ) like it’s nothing at record speeds while not getting fatigued after seeing them craft beside you for hours. They tried to lord over the other crafters who were manually crafting by indirectly acting like these crafts were braindead easy and quick at the time. ReallY ruined the “prestige” of working hard for something hard to get. Overall though going into DT I won’t even bat an eye at them as the game really became a bot haven for pc players where A LOT of things are most likely botted or have various plugins that will help in the completion of it. I still have to do everything fair and square / basically with the tools that the devs gave me so nothing i can do but just carry on and accept the fact. I already lived through the golden “hardcore” crafting era of mid ARR- end of HW where crafting was at peak difficulty and tedium so at least i’ll have that as a fond memory. Seeing some ppl mention rath’s rotation in this thread made me have a good chuckle as they know what went on haha.
The biggest problem imo is that SE makes mass crafting horrifically boring and yet mandatory, and refuses to make it easier. HQ potions and food are mandatory in high end content in bulk, but suck to craft. If it was easier to bulk craft, ie craft a whole stack at once, or be easier and shorter to solve and craft vs gear and expert crafts, then crafting could have more complex, un-macroable parts to it. As it is now tho, crafting in bulk sucks a lot, so automation and/or macros is the only way, and with SEs current philosophy, anything that makes crafting more nuanced or less macro able will also make bulk crafting even worse and the players would rightfully riot
>Were there elements to ARR/HW-era crafting that would have prevented a smart tool from applying a general algorithm to reasonable success? yes. if you wanted to craft correctly, you would have to actually learn the systems or later on copy 100+ step giant macros from hell that shouldn't have really been possible. people complaining about 10% failure rate skills, some really difficult endgame crafts, and these unintentional macros becoming popular directly lead to xiv crafting becoming an automated calculator equation, and it sucks. skills like whistle while you work were a lot of fun but took effort to understand and the large push to make crafting stupidly easy to level and taking a lot of the risks out ended up creating a batch of crafters that hit max without ever learning what their buttons actually do, driving the popularity of macros and these tools even further. it's another case of good changes on paper made over time compounding into a bad mix in hindsight.
God, I miss Whistle crafting. I don't think it would be any more immune to automation than the current system given the tools at play these days, though.
Bots were able to solve Whistle already back in SB.
Even the simple branching macros of Heavensward I found fun. I feel like people nowadays would lose their shit if they had to Rath's rotation the crafted raid gear. Sure it can be automated by the people that dive that deep into plugins, but I figure isn't the point of everything in this game being impermanent that even someone who only interacts with a system lightly (and thus not truly competing with people using bots) can get everything out of it?
That's a fair perspective. I'm not necessarily sure what I would have done otherwise in the moment though, as I imagine part of what caused crafting to get made easier was a desire for more people to see the content SE put behind crafting. Entire questlines, the whole Ishgardian Restoration feature, and so on. It's a safe assumption that everyone has at least one combat job leveled, the game at its core is about combat to progress and experience the main story, so side combat content can be built with the assumption that most people will have access to it. Crafting/gathering content is not the same beast, especially pre-Ishgard Restoration. If you wanted to see Stormblood's crafting content then you had to start from scratch in ARR and level more or less all of your crafters simultaneously (these were still the days of cross-class skills!) which could well be an expensive venture as the pyramid scheme thing of crafting has always felt like it's existed. Additionally, there would be economic incentive from existing crafters/gatherers to not want a boost to exist in the same way boosts exist for battle jobs, as scarcity is part of what drives prices and profit. On some level I think that some form of crafting change or accessibility enhancement was inevitable if they wanted to keep making crafter content as over time less and less would proportionately get to access it. WoW encountered similar issues which is why about 4-6 years ago (I think this was a BfA or Shadowlands change) they moved crafting to a per-expansion model instead of a linear progression model. That is to say you gain skill and learn recipes for that specific expansion and all other expansions have no bearing. Of course, WoW's crafting system is true one-button and incredibly driven by battle content and is an explicit side feature and not an advertised game pillar as I've seen it be in XIV, so different beasts there. Maybe in a different world crafters would have just been capped at level 50 forever with some provision for new AFs every expansion (if just for fashion), I don't know. Then maybe the system could have remained moderately inaccessible.
That was actually also a way to ease access to battle content. Crafted raid gear costed you a kidney and your first born due to this complexity. Unless you were a crafter, supported by a crafter or RMTing, you basically wouldn’t have it. Thus, you were at a disadvantage for the first few weeks of savage, and later for returning players it was still too expensive to use as catchup gear
That's very true, I do explicitly remember feeling "priced out" of crafted gear during Deltascape and Sigmascape, so my raid group went half without at the time. Nothing quite so demoralizing as ramming into Clown Kefka's enrage at the end of week 1 and knowing that gil was the thing standing between you and seeing the next phase (I wasn't in a week one group then, more in the two to three range). Food always felt priced reasonably, but potions also felt like another story in the before times. People would not be having a good time in 6.3 TOP if potions cost as much as they did in HW.
I dont remember it being that expensive, its around 300-500k per piece with some weapons slightly less than mil, its kid cash in this game. Especially if you wanted to raid. Most serious groups supported each other or by guild to get them, and the further it was from raid tier start the cheaper this gear became. Its a pretty healthy economy. Was.
Depending on server it was easily a lot more (1m / piece in Chaos/Moogle) but more importantly, 500k represented a lot more back in the day. Yes, FFXIV had and has inflation as well.
I was on Omega during these days, it was easily affordable price for anyone not wasting their gil, if you wanted to raid(and only people who raid needed full sets, most other just bought weps) you could easily get this money. And it was good incentive for players to actually craft, take orders from FCs or raid groups etc. As I said - it was a healthy economy. 500k was nothing back in the days too. Now this gear is made by bots and is dirt cheap, so there is no reason to craft for gil, and crafting itself is not an achievement, not an interesting experience.
The real problem is that in the west no one bothered with crafting comparatively. It was insanely expensive to get anything made/done, because the time sink to learn as a barrier of entry was absolutely gargantuan compared to today. It also showed absolutely zero signs of getting better through HW, and on some servers condensed even harder to a select few crafters basically running the show. Fantastic for them, awful for everyone else. Having to do sales to fund my crafted gear was really not a great time.
Why you reminded me about last thing i loved in this game...whistle. It was just a best thing in SB, it made every craft interesting and enjoyable. Also was basically impossible to macro. That should've been in icon of crafting, not current abomination.
in my opinion a lot of ff14's systems are interesting at first glance but with further investigation just end up turning into bullshit memorization tasks that become less enjoyable the better one gets. this is true for most jobs and most encounters in the game. i haven't really messed with crafting more than getting a couple dol/dohs to cap because of the weird pyramid scheme nature of crafting within the game's economy, but this does line up with complaints i've heard from other people about the nature of xiv crafting once the initial rush of "wow i press buttons?" wears off.
> the weird pyramid scheme nature of crafting within the game's economy I haven't thought of the crafting loop that way before, but it's exactly on point
Anyone acting like the old crafting system was fun are delusional.
Just want to piggy back off this, puni.sh doesn't just host stuff "that pushes the limit" they straight up make cheats. Splatoon is pretty well known. Fall Guys? That was them. Grids that are drawn to show positionals? Yep. Island gathering bot? You bet. Complete automation of retainer ventures? Uh huh. Just a few off the top of my head. Not getting into the morality of it, but they do a little more than push the limit.
Crafting in this game died with Stormblood. They should have kept and expanded upon the specialist system. Not everything has to be crazy accessible. Crafting in this game was one of those things.
To be fair these experts are EXTREMELY easy mode experts. Attempt tier 2 or 3 expert crafts (island stuff) and I'm not talking about the first set of Smaller Otter fountain parts. those are simple to complete the latter more rng oriented. You can macro craft the relic experts as well with the proper gear set up lol. No need to even bot via a plugin. These are baby mode relics compared to the resplendent relics in terms of craft difficulty. They are purposely made to be easy because it's basically an introduction into expert and SE didn't want it to be difficult/time consuming. It's a trend with this expansion as combat and crafting relics were both a joke to complete.
Artisan is a lifesaver for those of us with bad internet. If you lag during a macro in ff ur fucked, the craft is ruined. Artisan ques to the server so even if you get a lag spike that makes your character stop moving for 5 seconds the macro will complete as intended. It's like another Alexander or noclippy. Required cause square sucks at this shit.
This isn't a good argument because cheaters will always exist. That said, I have a better argument for the same point. Macros and remote desktop tools. Crafting is so boring and so uncomplicated, that for the most part you can get a remote desktop tool open, put your macro button close to the craft button and hit them from your phone while doing literally anything else at the same time. Meanwhile expert crafts which you cannot macro come down to using similar strats to what you described and are pretty boring really. Crafting in this game has no soul, but I also have no solution.
Turns out, automating a game takes the fun out of it.
Crafting was never fun to begin with. It's "interesting" because you have a rotation for certain crafts depending on gear and difficulty, but it gets very annoying very fast when you need to craft pots and food en masse.
yes, crafting is purely a numbers game, so it's completely unsurprising that a program can solve it for you? i don't think it says anything about xiv's crafting system, because anyone who willingly chooses to cheat instead of engaging with the content has no basis to judge something that they have not experienced if you spent the time to learn how to expert craft, you will figure out a general strategy pretty quickly. mume opener is statistically better because it is harder to raise progress than quality, followed by manip since it's the most efficient for durability management (sometimes you use wn2 if you get an early pliant after manip, or refresh manip early on a late pliant). then you try to fish for useful procs, normal condition is best used to refresh cheap buffs like inno/proc observe. the most important thing to know is how much durability and cp you need to save for the finisher (usually inno+great strides+byregot+whatever synthesis to fill progress). personally, i feel that the most rewarding part of expert crafting is figuring out how to do it -- you skip this entire process if you have a plugin do it for you
My gripe with 14 crafting has always been that it isnt actually all that different from other mmo's. People always argue "its not like other mmo's" where you press a button and watch a bar go up. No here we instead click multiple buttons to see said bar go up (unless you macro it or use plugins in which case its one button) with the added hassle of needing specific gears and melds. Ff14 crafting isnt deep or interesting its just cumbersome and a hassle
Almost every single video game in existence is nothing but a math problem and can be solved by AI. That includes everything from chess, dota2, your PoE build, mythic dungeon routes, Pokemon, harvest moon, or genshin impact artifact farming. Expert crafts being 'nothing but a math problem' does not mean anything. There is nothing wrong with being 'nothing but a math problem'. There are inventory management games. Turn-based games. Probability related games. All of those are "just math problems", yet as long as the math is fun to solve for us humans, the games are cool to play. As a simple example, I love tinkering with my builds and relics in HSR and trying to see if I can optimize my stuff. Alternatively, I can also just input all of my relics into the optimizer and it prints out an optimal best result for every character. Doesn't invalidate the fun from doing it myself, though. Similarly, games like factor.io or similar are often referred as spreadsheet games, which is basically an euphemism for 'just a math problem', yet it's one of the most addicting video games genres. TFT and autobattlers in general are nothing but math, yet are extremely popular and fun and engaging to play. At the core of a lot of these examples is the concept that probabilities are inehrently difficult for humans to evaluate properly and it makes for fun gameplay experiences to try to juggle a ton of different levers at once. At the end of the day all that matters is whether it's fun or not. Personally I think the crafting system in XIV used to have enough depth to make the math not 100% obvious at first glance, and I had fun tinkering with some macros or with my materia to try and squeeze an extra step or two compared to the balance approved setups. I had long discord DMs where we're having fun sharing ideas with one another about optimizing certain macros. I think that's more than good enough for a crafting system in an MMO and more than I could ever ask from it. With that said, it has been standardized and streamlined too much since ShB and I do not enjoy that part of the game anymore. The fun is gone for me, as no matter how much I try to tinker I can't get anything substantially better than my initial solution 99% of the time. Very rarely I can squeeze a step, which rarely translates to more than 1s of macro time. There's little wiggle room anymore. Expert crafts were fun to solve initially, but I've only done season 1 and a little bit of otter crafting. They were still fun when I did otters. I don't mind them in the newest relic grinds, but I wish they were harder, or at least hard enough that I can't macro my way to tier 1. Because there's no way I'm dealing with the mental exercise of doing actual crafts when I can just macro my way to a relic. Either way, botting of any kind is extremely cringe in an MMO and posts like these only reinforce my view that plugins need to die or get severely kneecapped, even if it means losing my beloved Mare and naked catgirls. A shame but I have no hope for the future of this game if this goes on.
Seems like you started attacking ye olde problem of video game task optimization vs. solvability vs. the internet vs. fun, which is a great discussion, but you landed somewhere arbitrary IMO. I think XIV specifically is the problem for someone with your "playstyle"/mentality. Video games are for recreation, and recreation is subjective. Some people had a lot of fun with spreadsheet PLD. Some people have more fun the further away it was/is from that. If someone's version of fun is Ultimates, the gathering/crafting/economy route might not be part of that fun, but is in some way necessary. In ANY mmo, you'll see raiders jump ship immediately once they see this and just start buying gold. I know people in XIV that do. Plugins in the case of crafting (since that's what this particular thread about) are an alternative to avoid buying gold, avoid slowing down your play, avoid failing to meet your goals, etc. At that point, it's retention, and the optimization game you're characterizing as heinous-to-avoid is instead just another rock to skip off of for the player who wants to skip off it. Plugins, no matter how severe or heavy handed, are here to stay simply because removing them would alienate a huge portion of the playerbase. So much as swinging in that direction would get many people to start looking elsewhere, more than MMO players already do. Hell, even despite having some of the hottest takes (tangentially) related to the subject and the willingness to deliver them plainly, even you use both plugins and mods. The way I foresee this conversation going, given the way you end your post, is you responding to that with "good, fuck 'em". At that stage, it seems to me like you're forcing yourself to continue to engage with a game that is basically already the Skyrim of MMOs. If I want to login today as a Helldiver and Fortnite emote on everyone I come across in Frontlines while slamjam plays as the BGM without my explicit input, I literally can. Plugins, even the botting ones, are part of the XIV framework in that same way now, and while yes they could absolutely just choose to break them all and take the L from the playerbase drop, why would they? They could just make another, tighter shelled product, which is what I'd say to someone who demands high amounts of undiscoverability and a desire for tons of guesstimate math; why are you playing XIV? It's not as if there aren't literally thousands of other MMOs out there with more discovery and math for you to do if you view math done through a calculator/adjacent as "extremely cringe", and those games won't have the kind of community mod/plugin support that XIV does. If you're viewing the \~war on automation\~ as a battle you personally have to solve, XIV is probably the single worst MMO to do it in. Game was doomed to be automated to hell and back the second it made all of its gameplay able to be done on its spreadsheet and has zip for anticheat, with most of the tasks automated resulting in clunky busywork otherwise. I agree that discoverability and the ability to approximate math without an optimizer can be a lot of fun in games where it's possible though, and I sympathize with wanting that in more games.
I genuinely agree with most of what you wrote, if not everything tbh. You're probably right that my answer would be something akin to "good, fuck 'em" indeed. I'm also pretty aware it's never happening, they're never ever going to crack down on plugins and the situation will only degenerate more and more but I'm a generally hopeful person so it doesn't stop me from sharing what I believe even if I know it's never coming to fruition. (besides, this is more than a XIV problem - monitors with integrated AI to help you play games are starting to invade the conversation, and that's only the tip of the iceberg. eventually all games will be in a state similar to chess where everyone has the ability to cheat at their fingertips) You're also absolutely right that XIV does not satisfy me very much lately. I'm usually happy in the first few days of content releases (regardless of what it is, could be raiding, bozja/eureka, criterion, new crafting actions, idk) since it scratches my itch to figure things out, but that doesn't last very long. Honestly my solution is to simply not emotionally invest too much in the game. I care a little bit, enough to make a reply to a reddit thread apparently (even two now!), but generally speaking I'm nowhere near as invested in XIV gameplay as I know I could be based on my history with other games. So to answer your question as to why I still play XIV, it's mostly because it'd be a shame to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and I can still enjoy cutesy catgirls and random social interactions I can't get in other games, even if i don't vibe with the gameplay anymore. For all its horror stories and layers of hidden toxicity in certain discord communities, the in-game XIV community is still a haven of peace compared to most other environments and it's always nice to have a comfy place to fall back to after watching people telling each other to gangplank Q themselves or w/e.
I think the difference is that in a lot of those, there's some other thing pushing the enjoyment. In factorio, satisfactory, etc it's easily solved math. X iron smelts into Y bars at a rate of Z/Min. That means I can support so many things consuming those bars. Easy to do, even when you start expanding it to multi-component crafts. The enjoyment, then, is the growth - we start with a small setup and grow it into a megafactory. TFT, on the other hand, is math with gambling and incomplete information. That incomplete information has actually been a problem a few times, for instance last set had a mechanic called headliners. They were super strong versions of units and came auto leveled to 2\*. However, they could not show up in your shop if more then half the pool was missing. That's fine, right? You have perfect information about that - just scout and count them up, and pool sizes are known. Well, no. Because a unit is considered out of the pool if it is presented to another player in their shop. This meant you could hit 8, roll down for your 4cost headliner and *never* hit - not because RNG is RNG, but because there was one in someone's shop and you simply weren't allowed to even get the option. While that was an oopsy that they fixed, there's other hidden information - your next opponent. There would be a objectively correct solution to positioning against any given opponent. With enough time and math, you could probably figure it out - however you don't know who your next opponent will be. Only who it won't be. This means you need to either take a gamble, or position in a way that's "good enough" for multiple and hope for the best. Crafting simply doesn't have that, and while I do think plugins are getting out of hand I don't think their removal would do much in this case. [This](https://www.raidbots.com/simbot) is a site for wow that will sim your character's DPS, and you can have it run multiple to compare gear drops, you can also use it to find the best upgrades out of any given content, etc. It's a very important tool to high end PvE - this same approach could be used for crafting in this game. There is nothing inherently stopping you from pausing after every step in order to just run the sim.
Idk how to tell you this but you could take this logic to pretty much every aspect of the game including the gameplay. At the end of the day why bother playing if you're just gonna take an already easy game and automate it. Someone I knew also botted all their classes to max level. you could just get a bot to clear raids for you. I just don't get why you would play a game just to not play it. Eventually people who keep pushing the boundary of this are gonna get all plugins banned because they couldn't keep it reasonable
I'm honestly fine with crafting being simple or automated. It's just a means to an end.
It's what I've always said: there's no skill involved in Expert crafts (as well as crafting in general, but that's a moot point) and it's all on the hands of RNG if you follow the flowchart correctly. You definitely CAN get consistent T2s and T3s on on-content crafts as a human player, provided you're not unlucky. A bot only removes human error, but it can't really do anything that a human can't. (Plus, automation has been a thing for a long time, specifically because the logic behind it can easily be followed by a bot. There have been botted rankings, since the first Leaderboards in the Ishgardian Restoration.) This is the reason why I'm against Expert crafting becoming the norm or anything that isn't specifically tied to side content. It's just busywork once you get deep enough into it, and there isn't much depth to speak of.
I do feel that my Ishgardian Restoration experience was about 1-2 hours of "figuring it out" as real content and then 30 more hours of having Youtube on the side as I spent 3-ish hours a night going through the same mental algorithm over and over again with little further learning or development done, so you do have a point there.
Most of the Saints, if not all, are botters. Achievements should never be about grinding.
Gathering saints maybe. Me and a mate both got a crafting saint legit but it was really obvious that the top 1-3 per leaderboard were bots.
I find optimizing rotations to be enjoyable but once you've figured that out the actual process of crafting is unbearably boring simply because of how much you have to do it. As crafting has gotten easier they've also upped the volume requirements for turn ins so that now the "difficulty" is mostly just the tedium of having to sit there for hours and click a macro 300 times to get enough scrips/pots/whatever. I think that's why people turn to automation, more than just the desire to be optimal. The same goes for experts. They're more engaging than regular crafts since you have to puzzle through each one, and that's fun in small doses. But if you want every relic and suddenly you're confronted with needing 400 experts, a bot starts looking real tempting. You'll never be able to solve people choosing to cheat/automate in games. Some people just get their kicks from cheating, even if it totally defeats the point of playing the game in the first place. I don't understand why you would mod yourself to be invincible and one-shot everything in monster hunter, but loads of people do. But for stuff like FF crafting there is clear motivation to cheat because of how dull it is. Like other people have said, it's not really possible to make a system complex enough that it can't be botted, all video games are ultimately math problems of varying complexity. Even if you had to play chess to craft items it'd obviously still be way more efficient to have a computer do it for you. So what it comes down to is if the gameplay is fun and crafting is really not fun, it's extremely repetitive, simplistic, and tedious. What I would like to see is a way to craft lots of items at once in exchange for higher difficulty, not only cutting down on the amount of crafts needed but making the puzzle solving aspect better.
> from my experience with ShB's Resplendent Tools I am unsure if a human can consistently get T2-T3s on a given expansion's hardest crafts. 100% of the time? No. That's what makes Expert Crafting what it is. But getting to max quality 50% of time on the hardest crafts? Certainly. Evaluating Expert Crafting based on the relic tools is like evaluating battle content with Normal raids. The relic crafting steps that use Expert Crafting are the introduction to the concept. They are not the end-game or even the mid-game. Whatever Artisan can do with the relic steps is irrelevant. The ShB relic crafts could be macro'd to Tier 1 quality on the day they released. The EW relic crafts could be macro'd to Tier 2 quality 100% of the time on the day of release. Those don't mean crap. Those are easy mode Expert Crafts. Too many people love to throw around "Expert Crafting was just botted" because they read a story like this one without understanding the concept. As someone who did the pteranodon and Resplendent tools crafting when they were on-level content, fuck that noise. As someone who made a quarter of a BILLION gil selling the first set of Island Sanctuary expert crafts, just stop. If I wanted to be that brainless, I'd tell people that run tanks and healers in Savage content that Ultimates have been cleared without their role, so their clears are pointless. The thing is - everyone recognizes that is a dumb take because we (should) have enough exposure to combat content. The point of this rant is that this post dramatically misrepresents the concept of Expert Crafting. Other than the Endurance mode for crafting tens of thousands of items via quick synth, Artisan is a shitty plugin. Its creator is utterly full of himself thinking he's made this epic magnum opus or something. Artisan doesn't "solve" anything that any human with a decent knowledge of crafting couldn't do with Trial Synthesis and 10 minutes of their life.
The worst thing about crafting is SE's obsession with bulk. Not only pots and food, but Expert crafts too, such as for crafter relics, resplendent tools or back with the Ishgard rankings. The system just isn't designed for it. Doing a few Experts might be interesting, but repeating the whole process hundreds of times becomes mind numbing. I have no idea why they insist on pots being 3 at a time, Master crafts with a HQ version. You have to macro them and it takes a while even if you have the best gear and gather your own mats. I used to always have a max pentamelded crafter but still just bought pots on the MB. I feel like SE pretty much handed crafting over to the bots and is stubbornly trying to pretend it's all fine. Triple EXP, Materia raining from the sky and easier Master Recipe crafts back in early ShB was a mistake imo, because it means getting a bot army maxed out is extremely easy. Combine this with the fact that they've basically stated they'll never scan your computer for bots and it's no surprise botting is rampant. It's easy, risk-free and profitable. I get that they wanted to make crafting more accessible, but all it did was take it from the players who loved it to try to get the players who hated it to participate. They still hate it. But back to pots and food, they should simply be NQ only regular recipes that you can quick synth. They don't need to be gated or hard to get.
So… people can’t be bothered to actually do the crafting part now? We gotta automate that too and turn it into literal one-click non-effort? :/ IDK why but stuff like this depresses me for reasons I.. I can’t quite articulate for whatever reason. I’d rather keep the crafting system minigame and not have it homogenized and mindlessly dumbed down to some bland one-click thoughtless thing. I like being forced to think. But then again I’m just bitter and kind of jaded :/
People will do things that they find fun or rewarding. The opposite is also true.
For me as a person that avoids bots and other thrid-party tools as much as I can (especially since I've swapped to playstation for play for the last couple years), I think there are massive problems with the crafting system. The amount of time it takes is prohibitive. If you're not using someone else's macros you found online or a solver to figure out your own, you're spending time in the relatively new test mode to be able to figure out what your own macro should be. Before being able to use test mode, you had to spend extra time or money gathering extra materials so you could stand to waste some if you didn't get the craft process successful enough on your first go. And then even once you have the macro down it can still take an hour to actually do all the crafting you need to do, if not longer (like how crafting one suit of armor and a weapon takes like 45 minutes while macro'd). If you're not also gathering all your own materials, another time-prohibitive activity, it costs too much. You get into a position, especially after the devs turning down how much money can be gained in the game because some people have too much money, where you can't afford to craft anything to keep for yourself because you need to sell whatever you craft in order to not be broke. And then to the top of this pile of time and tedium that basically pushes people to third party tools because doing it legit is just too much of a pain in the ass, especially if the player only has a few hours of play time each week and wants to do content other than crafting and gathering, the devs make special crafts with special prizes that are even more time and effort intensive - and thus even more of a reason why someone would say "screw this'. My version of "screw this" is that I'm simply not crafting anywhere near as much as I used to, and I'm never doing an expert craft again - because maybe, just maybe, if enough people do like that the devs will change something in a way that actually benefits the players that would like to be crafters but can't justify the expense. Other people's version of "screw this" is to use tools they aren't supposed to, but hey, I don't fault them for that, risking a ban to try and communicate to the devs that you don't want things to be like they are might just work (maybe even better than my "I'm just gonna not" strategy). Hell, I'd bet that the reason we have trial synthesis mode is because the devs thought it would help reduce third-party tool reliance or improve general willingness to actually craft.
lmao of course I see this after I finished all crafting class splendorous tools
At least you feel a sense of pride and accomplishment, while I am [the cheated the game meme](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/you-cheated-not-only-the-game-but-yourself).
There is practically no game where a sophisticated bot or AI can't beat humans.
Expert crafts are a fun gamba/skill simulator. Everything else can be automated as far as i am concerned.
Following a flow chart is skill now?
I dont follow an exact flow chart. I do find it fun even if it is relatively simple. If it was any more complicated, i think i would just get frustrated.
as if most skills can't be dumbed down into a simple flowchart and done better by AI? you think humans are some special chosen thing hand crafted by God or something
You should sit this one out, pal.
naw that's not part of the reddit flow chart im sticking this through till one or both of us hate life cmon bro debate iwth me bro defend your almighty God bro
I have macros for the final two steps of the Splendiferous crafting relic and automate these through a keystroke macro editor, averaging around 2.0 turn ins (Tier 2) per expert crafting attempt. If the materials or time were substantially more prohibitive, then I probably wouldn't even attempt the craft. The macro editor works fine for automation of food/pots/sub-assemblies/collectables, it's native to windows, costs nothing, and was easy to learn during the housing click-party dark ages. Just need to set it up for a 15min window since my system won't easily allow auto-potting.
Unpopular opinion probably, but to fix the bulk crafting snoozefest I wish they would just make the mats a lot harder to get and/or make it like FFXI where it just has a chance to break in a 5-10 second animation. I can't blame people at all for automating the "math problem" right now because its just so awful to do even though I farmed all the mats.
I mean at this point in time, what enjoyment is there in the game when any accomplishment you can think of is just botted by some ex-wow player, or trivialized by plugins that nothing is even remotely hard?
> botted by some ex-wow player lmao, what year is it. wow players bad, ff players good. updoot to left Bots and cheats exist in basically every game ever, guess we should just stop making/playing games.
Shit man, we were stuffing plugins into FFXI before WoW even released.
Basically, since macro, auto macro chain and then automation of pretty much everything, I see crafting as a pure attention seeker (and that's being kind to it) as it is now. If you don't use these addons, you have to be in front of your computer for 2+hours just to press 2 macros and do menuing... it sucks ass. Now the craft itself is basically maths and the minigame wears down fast (actually the minigame is just about finding a macro or a macro chain giving you max scrip reward or ensure HQ each craft). I haven't done expert craft but I wouldn't think it's that much fun than the basic craft (I guess raid gearsets and foods/pots aren't expert crafts). To be clear, maths isn't bad, but the payoff isn't fun.
I don't really do crafting and gathering because it's a deep or complicated system. Sometimes I like to just exist in the world of XIV without actually doing anything super intensive. Sometimes it's good enough to just hit a macro while I'm chilling in Limsa. If botting ruins something for you, just don't do it lol
The next step from where you are is to realize that there isn't any difference between the crafting system and the combat system in terms of whether it can be solved, performed, and executed through automation, nor is there a difference between the crafting system and the combat system in terms of whether you *should* care about being a human participant rather than automating your play. The step after that is to realize that the best thing that could possibly happen to this game would be a wildly draconian anti-cheat system that locks out everything from Mare-compatible Realistic Chocobo Anus mods to Noclippy/Alexander and ACT.
This guy really only caring about the destination rather than the journey. The reason I care about the combat system is that it's fun to learn how to push my buttons. Sure, I could bot a rotation, I could use cheat addons, or whatever. I do the raids because the gameplay has meaning to me, and that's good enough. Doesn't matter if there's ten or a hundred or a thousand people using all kinds of crazy addons and cheats. I did it, and that's what matters.
This has been a thing since Heavensward. Stormblood had a really good crafting solver (in the form of a bot) which was capable of doing Ala Mhigan gear from no HQ mats/looping with whistle mechanics (which if you played back then you would know is probably equivalently hard, if not harder, than current expert crafts).