Dev Tracker - News, Discussions

Your point has a little less bite when you realize anyone can buy up NQ jackets and make a jinxed for roughly 145M. You tried to give it an edge by saying they were historically 300-400M and the big bad exploiters ruined it, but the reality is a price of 180M is completely within acceptable boundaries based on materials.

That exploit has long since been fixed, and even if you're right and people are hoarding them.. it's not apparent in the current pricing. If the update is to be believed and mat prices don't skyrocket to accompany it, that reduces the most expensive jinxed piece to in the range of 60M~.

Say it however you want, that's just the latest in a series of difficulty nerfs. You can hate FFXI's crafting until the end of time, you can cry about what you can't afford all day, you can whine about VISA. Nobody's denying you any of that. The reality is it's no different than letting SMN burns run rampant on T4, it's reducing the difficulty factor (in obtaining that gear) by leaps and bounds.

Does anyone translate the JP dev tracker anymore? I noticed that there is like 20 to 30 JP dev posts for every ENG post, I wonder why there is bias towards what they want...

Crafting isn't difficulty. There isn't a minigame attached to it, no buff strategy or JA timing. You just put materials into a box and roll a dice. Farming dynamis or salvage is more "difficult" and that ***barely qualifies. The only thing involved is throwing gil around hoping to win in the casino.

It never should've been a 1/64 rate on T0s with such a small bonus from items.

Better gear doesn't suddenly turn a ***player into a good player anyway. most people wearing whitebox are only 1% less garbage than they were.


Scummoner burning is quite a different thing. while whiteboxing turns garbage into slightly less stinky garbage, leveling smn instantly makes you the 1% even in NQ gear.

The BG forums has most translations of the dev posts. https://www.bluegartr.com/forums/102-FFXI-Official-News-and-Information

As for why JPs get preference, it's a JP game and the devs are JP. They're probably showing loyalty to their original players (who still make up a decent proportion of subscriptions). While they used to care more about other counties, they have been cutting their budget on the game and reducing the size of their support team. At least with JP players they don't need to pay someone to translate player posts for them.

Don't know how many people have to say it or how many different ways, but nobody is claiming crafting is difficult. Acquiring the materials in a way that allows profit is and always has been the challenge with crafting for profit.

The 35M difference between that 180M jacket and 145M of mats is what the crafter gets from their AH camping, mat farming, whatever. The remaining 145M is a cost set by content difficulty/quantity, and is also being adjusted.

By tripling the HQ rate, you cut the amount of content required to produce that item to 1/3. It really isn't that complicated. Any item that exists solely from NPC mats or is otherwise completely independant of battle content is already cheap. The synths that matter use vagary, delve, omen, legion materials.

Maybe this used to be the case, but most modern HQs offer a significant benefit over the NQ. It's no longer 1 acc, it's 10. HQs have set bonuses, NQs don't. Pieces like Turms Mittens/Leggings get colossal boosts to their primary stat.

It's not like Scorpion Harness/Scorpion Harness+1, where they occupy the same slot and it's just a question of how shiny you want to be. Many NQ pieces are useless or borderline so, while the HQs are best in slot.

You most certainly did.


We all know what you were talking about, your not happy with SE making it cheaper for those other scrubs to get whitebox gear. You believe it's taking away from your own perceived achievements. The *** about "goals" is just that, *** since 99.99% of the player base doesn't even bother with the HQ's because of their extreme price tag.

Acquiring 400M gil is not difficult, it's merely a matter of doing dynamis / salvage or other repeatable farming event. Mercing a bunch of stuff isn't difficult, selling Aeonic clears isn't difficult (with SMNs).

None of that ***is difficult so stop pretending it is and that all those lowly peasants having whitebox gear is somehow an affront to you and your friends.

For some this is still very Difficult.

The other flip side to whatever they do with crafting (Guess we'll find out for sure in a week) is that the prices may not go down at all. In a free market where we the playerbase determine the cost of things (for the most part, NPC vendors aside) the prices may actually increase.
Take for example when we have VW Campaigns. The knee jerk reaction is "OMG, Heavy Metal prices might sink because of everyone doing Qilin, Aello and there will be a surplus of plates/pouches" when it's usually around that time that the more casual of players (myself included on this when I 99'd Daurdabla last summer) decide to upgrade their empy weapons. So sure there's more HMPs around, but there's also more players looking for them, so the prices don't plummet as much as you'd think. It's not as if HMPs now became Treant Bulbs and inventory filler.
Same may go for this. Only replace extra players building their empy weapons with crafters all coming out to try to HQ stuff if it's made that much easier. (also, tbd as we all know how much stock to put into SE update notes) Suppose it's some monumental increase to T0 rates - you'll have more people trying to make them, thus making the demand for _______ mats higher, and the prices going up as our free market experiment dictates.

Difficult:

needing much effort or skill to accomplish, deal with, or understand.

Dunno about you, but doing 6-700 runs of salvage to get 400mil gil sounds like a lot of effort to me!

Crafting isn't difficult.

Acquiring crafted HQs is difficult.

There is a difference.

But not much skill is needed.

Effort in this case meaning degree of ability to proceed.

It's mindless and almost scriptable, some people have even gone so far as to make it scriptable. If you are doing it normally then it's just boring and tedious.


This would be a good thing. The goal isn't to reduce prices absolutely, it's to increase circulation and thus decrease exclusivity / rarity. White box Abjurations or SU3 shouldn't be the MMO equivalent of a golden toilet. Though to be honest prices are most certainly going to go down, if only because current prices are so obscene as to make them equivalent to said golden toilet. Demand will certainly go up but not enough to offset the massive reduction in material costs. A good off-hand measurement for this is to take whatever material reduce costs happen and divide them in half and that's the actual reduction if the item would otherwise be in high demand.

*edit*

Picture to better illustrate.

Right, if you are just farming the gil to buy it, then the difficulty is determined by the content used to farm the gil.

If you are farming the materials, then the difficulty is determined by the content that produces the materials.

I mean, to say that crafting gear is not difficult kind of discounts all of the content in the game, since SE has done a decent job of spreading the materials across different endgame systems.
This can be aleviated, somewhat, by dual-boxing/automation, since farming materials is tedious and not particularly profitable across several players. It still isn't fun.

The credit card argument assumes that the AH has a high enough quantity of materials or the HQ itself. This isn't the case, depending upon the server.

Which brings us to crafting itself. I still remember when ilvl abjuration gear had just come out, and several of us made an assembly line to make the individual components. Of course, this could be streamlined. But it still isn't fun, requires a lot of inventory/mules and occupies a large portion of time of the toons involved. If someone is crafting on a main, automated or not, that main is glued to the floor somewhere crafting.

I don't have an opinion on increasing the HQ rate. I can see the bad--the game's economy is based upon how it is now. I cannot predict the outcome of their adjustment. Not only because they screw up every damn adjustment they propose, but also because such a change will surely impact the supply of materials, the number of people still bothering to craft, etc.
I can also see the good, since it is widely accepted that there are people exploiting the current system. This will just even out the playing field between those cheating and those not.
I think we can all agree that if they make it easier to obtain HQ gear, they will have to more rapidly add new replacement gear. This is Comeatmebro's point: it seems SE is burning the candle at both ends.

Even if this is a positive change for the player community, this isn't going to prompt me to re-sub. If this were in response to the crafting exploits, it is certainly too late and probably too little. It is not something anyone has been asking for, as there are much bigger issues worth addressing *MNK still sucks cough cough*.
It seems to me that SE is trying to address job balance issues through adding new gear. Sure, this could be smart, as it could allow them a sustainable way to ignore the spaghetti code and extend the life of the game. But some of the imbalances are so foundational that I don't think this will work. Plus, I've seen SE routinely snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
Until I see them working on the issues important to me in a way that directly makes sense to me, I am not willing to trust their vague, indirect ideas to result in any good changes...

JPs are "getting preference" right now for two main reasons.

One, the dev team members are Japanese. Shocking, but they are more likely to reply to players when they can read the forum posts themselves. o_o This has always been an issue, but it's badly exacerbated atm due to the second reason.

Two, NA forums has had no dedicated Community Rep since Camate left. They did put up a job posting for the position, which was closed in March of this year, but no word on if it was actually filled or not, and we have yet to see anyone active. :/

So, there's no one on staff right now who's able to connect us to the devs. Recently, a JP player actually reached out to us and is trying to make our plight known on JPside, but realistically, we can only expect to get a bit of sympathy from their players at most.

I do rough translations over on bgwiki at the above link, which I hope helps a bit. ^^ Anyone who understands spoken Japanese should keep an eye out for FP35 on the 8th, since they said they'll be explaining the upcoming crafting changes.

Not only do I agree with Saevel here, but consider too that he's on by far the most populated server. If S-E intends to keep the existing server structure and not reduce/combine them, it's an even bigger problem on the servers outside of the top 1-2. I'm absolutely not trying to get into the arguments of whether Asura (or a smaller number of larger population servers) is better than continuing to maintain smaller servers, but assuming there aren't plans to significantly reduce number of servers that means it makes even more sense to make HQ synths more common.

I'm on a mid-sized server (Phoenix), no desire to move since I do most stuff with a longtime group of LS friends - and let me tell you, HQs are rare indeed for most stuff, to the point of not being realistically obtainable even if someone WANTS to pay the uber-inflated prices that gear would demand. Not that it's widely available on any server, but the problem is even worse on smaller population servers with lower chance of even having crafters attempting to synth a particular item.

To take an example, for the Su3 Oshosi (RNG COR) set:
* I don't believe an HQ piece has EVER been up on the AH on my server (Phoenix), nor am I aware of one ever having being Bazaared.

* For 4 of the 5 NQ (not HQ!) pieces in the set, less than 10 have been sold on the AH on my server (NQ body is the only piece with 10+ AH sales).

* Looking at FFXIAH.com "owned" stats (which I am well aware leaves plenty of room for error, but it's also not irrelevant for getting a quick read on availability): I only see 7 Oshosi+1 pieces owned on ALL servers... and 5/5 of those are one person (Primex on Ragnarok). So, aside from one guy, that's 1 HQ body (someone on Fenrir) and 1 HQ feet (Ragnarok) owned... across all servers. Take Ragnarok out of the equation and there is only ONE +1 from the set on all other servers.

Same story for some other Su3 gear (and expensive accessories). Take Heyoka PUP/BST set: I don't see a single HQ owned on FFXIAH.com on any server. Certainly haven't seen one available for sale on AH or Bazaar on my own server. And this is good gear: I actually use 5/5 NQ pieces as BiS behind only the HQ (at least situationally) for one reason or another on PUP: tanking/enmity, pet DD, hybrid master/pet TP gear, etc.

All of this is with Su3 gear having been around since the MAY update. 4 months!

It's even impacting the availability of NQ gear, since crafters have less incentive to take a loss on NQ with a low rate of HQing their expensive synth. It's a really high buy in chance of striking the HQ lottery even for a crafter with perfect skill/gear. It's resulting in crafters not even attempting to make the synthed gear.

With how broken guildwork is and has been, I don't know that the owned lists are that accurate any more. Most people don't use it at all now. I also don't necessarily agree that just because a HQ piece exists, you should have it. Omen bodies have been out since last december, and the scan rates aren't much better(18 nisroch jerkins, 19 shamash robes, 30 ashera, 26 dagon plate, 20 udug jackets). Month for month, they're showing up much slower than Su3 HQ. I personally have 4 pieces of HQ Oshosi, and 7 of Ea.

If someone was really dedicated to obtaining a HQ Su3 that could be done in a much more reasonable timespan than getting an omen body as is. Why should gear be common just because it's crafted? Why should all bis gear be easily obtainable?

Right now, if you exempt crafted HQs and omen bodies, a competent player can get full BiS for any job in under a month. While omen bodies will remain untouched by the update, I don't think allowing everyone to max any job that quickly is a good thing. On our way back to the days when every DD wore the exact same thing, with even less standout options than ever before.

Well some of that is those pieces being fairly niche and requiring the estrucheon. And while high in some stats often lack other stuff you'd want in those uses.

Don't think Oshio +1 is really that great for rng outside of during double. Not even sure most of the nqs are even with those up. Really could use some store tp on the non body pieces. Or add some rapid shot alongside the snapshot on those pieces. Might be decent shooting pieces for cor but they also melee a bit when they are dding

Heyoka is really guilty of the nice high stats without the complimentary. Sure that really high acc (highest in slot by a bit) and haste for auto but lack of store tp hurts it for tp and lack of base stats/da help it for ws dmg. Enmity really helps for gaining hate lack of dt makes it both harder to keep alive and to limit enmity loss.

For bst it's kind of interesting since you can still idle in dt and then macro in for ready moves to make them more accurate AND give more enmity and they aren't hurt by lack of stat mods. Of course if you don't want your pet to tank having the enmity on your super high acc might not be the best lol

availability of HQ gear isnt to bad, really compared to armada berks from 75 era its very common. with those you NEVER lost gil, because the NQ was made for profit, just because there would only be 1-3 people on the server with the gil to get smithing to 100.

Issue with crafting isnt SE's implementation, its the player base. If NQ's sold off at a profit, then the HQ would sell off for only 10x the price. Thus a craft would have a steady stream of income to keep trying, and once every 2 months on avg (1 synth per day) they would hit the jackpot on EACH item, thats a very great income in todays economy.

However this can never happen, simply because you got a few power crafters on each server with capped gil across multiple accounts. They craft just because they feel like it, and can break even on HQ and not care or be affected financially. Thats why you see SU3 gear going for under 150m now, when realistically thats break even at best since you will avg 2m+ in loss per NQ and needing 64 synths to produce 1 HQ. Not only will you need an initial 300m~ to create a HQ, but then you must sell ALL the NQ and the HQ to maybe make gil. This also explain the 300m price still on some of the popular parts, a crafter just eats 100% of NQ loss and try to break even from sale of 1 HQ. Do you realize how much time that takes? I doubt most servers have sold 64 NQ's yet of each piece.

Supply of crafter is just to high, demand is low, its pretty simple.

That's reversed. There is plenty of demand for several T0 synths but due to materials being a shitfest to get combined with a very low HQ rate, the supply is very low.

SU3 bodies, which are the T0 synths we're discussing, are going for 300~400 million each. The only reason Arke is low is the virtually non-existent demand for it. Anything that's T1 or better can be done for a fraction of the cost of T0's due to the 4x higher HQ rate.

It's not a small group of power crafters making crafts for no reason and ruining the market for the rest, HQ crafters aren't nearly as rich as you think they are, they blow hundreds of millions of gil on lottery tickets and work the math to try to cash in for a small profit. The reason you are seeing prices drop dramatically on Asura, and this is mostly on the Abjuration bodies, is cheaters who had a craft mule on another server coming to the most populated, and therefor highest demand server, and selling off their stuff slowly over time. I know a few of them, they try to sell 1~2 per month and just treat it as steady income.

What needs to happen is the main ingredients becoming FAR more common, or the HQ rate on T0's is raised. Either of those two will raise the supply sufficiently for those items to actually be realistic instead of golden toilets.

while not a discussion of the VALUE of Su3 gear, I must say that oshosi gear is the first gear available to ranger that directly boosts double shot... and that's huge. It also hurts availability that woodworking isn't the dominant craft it was during elemental staff days, so there aren't as many people working on that shield as, say, goldsmithing, smithing, or leather.

It generally is just a pain to sell the HQs when you do HQ, and you take a huge loss(on NQs) because people are idiots on the NQs

Actually, surprisingly there isn't many Goldsmithing Shields because of the Brass Jadagna trial

It's the price tag on HQ's, it's so obscene that 99.99% of the market just walks away causing crafters to have to scrounge for buyers. Worse is that because the HQ rate is so low, the crafters end up with a ton of failed NQ's that they need to either throw away or sell for whatever they can to recoup some of the costs. It's a free market and people will pay what they pay reguardless. If you have 20 failed NQ's sitting at 5mil each and your competition has another 20 failed sitting at 4mil each, he's going to sell his faster and nobodies going to buy yours. 20 at 4min each is still better then 0 at 5mil and there is absolutely nothing you can do to stop or change it.

This is all caused by the low HQ rates, too many NQ's not enough HQ's and obscene costs due to rarity of main synthing materials. Raise the T0 HQ rate and you have less wasted NQ's sitting around along with more people interesting in buying HQ's for reasonable prices.

Again golden toilets. Many people would love to have a golden toilet, incredibly few of them are willing to pay millions of USD for one.

Yeah, but that's someone being stupid. If something takes 8m to make, and requires a KI to make it. Why undercut and ruin the piece forever? Because, people are impatient and stupid.

Because 1 > 0.

Your basically questioning why free markets work. Why does a car manufacturer charge $24K on a model when they can "hold out" and charge $40K instead? Because their competition will lower it's price to get that market share. You can't control a price by "holding back", not unless you own the entire supply like De'Biers does.

The bottom prices of super rare gear isn't it's cost to make NQ but it's profit on HQ's. The loss from all those NQ's is baked into the obscene price of the HQ, otherwise those NQ's would just sit in inventory and be a complete loss of gil.

Manufacturers will frequently sell of excess inventory at a deep discount, so deep it's actually a loss for them, in order to push unwanted inventory out the door and recoup some of the lost costs.

On Leviathan here, people are special. They literally undercut themselves.

The people undercutting NQ Su3 are not likely to be crafters. The NQs drop in gobbiebox and that damaged the NQ price across all servers. People pull a piece from box that's not in super high demand, see it as free gil, and undercut.

Given they were specifically put behind a gate, it's pretty assenine for SE to have put them in the gobbiebox lotto. That all but guaranteed the first listings would be from people who didn't even craft.

Free markets also destroy companies with bad business practices. In FFXI, crafters with bad business practices can fund their idiocy with other methods or sheer luck.

What you're speaking of is a loss-leader, and yes there is a minor parallel between the HQ/NQ situation in FFXI. However again, you miss the key that separates a free market from what we have in FFXI. With a loss-leader, it is done either to generate excitement around a brand or company to encourage future purchases of profit-generating items, or to break into a segment of the industry foreign to a company. In the latter, the revenue is generated through established products.

In FFXI, a buyer purchases a NQ anonymously off the Auction House with no brand or company(read: crafter) recognition to encourage future purchases to make up for that loss-lead. Most cases are single purchases, and few will be saving for the future HQ, and will be happy with the NQ.

Another reason that loss-leaders work in the real world is product aging. If Google wants to break into the smartphone world, they might undercut their first model to try and entice iPhone and Samsung users to switch (a loss-lead). But that phone will age and die, and even the most diligent of users will eventually want the shiny new one with new toys anyways. Then, if Google produced a good product, their 2nd generation phone will jump in price to match other segments of the competition, and they'll make their money. There's no product aging in FFXI. In many ways it boils down to that when trying to compare real world markets to the pseudo-market in FFXI.

just thought of something. If you want to compare FFXI's market to something in the real world, compare it to the American Health Care system. Hospitals and doctors perform the very close to the same procedures (the result is the same, sometimes maybe a deeper scar or not as nice of a room during your stay) on a person without insurance who will never pay the bill as someone with extremely high end private insurance. And they bill that insurance and individual tens of thousands of dollars for that procedure that someone else doesn't pay for (unless you count bad credit payment).

Sounds pretty close to the cost differential between NQ and HQ to me!