Watched a few episodes of Asobi ni Iku yo, enjoying thoroughly so far. (Yeah, that anime stuff...)

One of the limiting factors for crafting in FF14 is the fuel supply. Crafts require crystals or shards for fuel. Each crystal or shard type is associated with an element. In FF11, you got crystals by killing monsters, which would randomly drop a particular type of crystal depending on what type of monster it was (and then, only if it was a monster that gave you experience). In FF14, you can obtain crystals in that fashion (though they're a lot more random - monsters can drop several different kinds of crystals or shards, and they can drop multiples.)

Shards come from almost everything. You get 'em when you do local crafting quests, you get them from killing monsters (sometimes half a dozen at a time or more), you get them from mining, you get them from harvesting, you even get them from -fishing-. They don't count against your inventory space and you can carry up to a thousand of each shard (or more if you give some to your retainer, put them up in your bazaar, etc.) Crystals were relatively rare in FF11, but they're a little more common in FF14, and shards they hand out like candy.

On the other hand, you need many more shards in FF14 than you needed crystals in FF11. FF11 had relatively few intermediate crafting stages, and each recipe took one crystal. You'd use a crystal to smelt copper ore into a copper ingot; you'd use another crystal and a few copper ingots to make a copper whatsit. FF14 has... well, lemme illustrate it. I made a Bronze Chain Coif for a guild member last night. The recipe itself required 8 earth shards... not much at all, that's only two or three marmot kills. But the components to make it, now... It's composed of a sheep leather strap, a brass buckle, and 2 sheets of bronze chain. But the sheep leather strap had to be cut from sheep leather, the brass buckle forged out of small brass squares and a brass nugget, the chain had to be forged out of 6 bronze rings, which had to be linked from 4 spools of bronze wire, which had to be extruded from bronze ingots, which had to be smelted from bronze nuggets, themselves smelted from copper and tin ore...

The total damage, assuming you skip smelting your own bronze and purchase bronze wire from a vendor, is one fire crystal, 13 fire shards, 4 ice shards, 2 water shards, 22 wind shards, and 55 earth shards. All that for a piece of head armor that sells for maybe 25,000 gil. And that's if every combine goes perfectly; add more shards to re-do any failed intermediate steps. And that doesn't even talk about the base cost of the ingredients.

The problem is that the market price for shards hasn't stabilized yet (though without a functional market, NO market prices have stabilized yet!) Enough people from FF11 are playing 14 that the idea that crystals and shards are valuable is already there; sure, shards aren't as valuable as crystals, but surely they're worth 100 gil apiece? Looking at the above recipe, though, I was down 96 shards; if we value them at 100 gil apiece, I'm over 70k in the hole for ONE piece of armor.

That's not the whole story, though (else I wouldn't have made it!) I didn't perform this transaction purely for charity - it required several smaller crafting attempts, each of which gave me experience, and I actually gained a rank of armorer from the whole thing. Since shards are needed for crafting, and you get crafting experience by crafting, there's a use value in expending them on crafting attempts - or, to put it more bluntly, there's a gil value on gaining experience. And to be sure, I've picked a recipe that has several intermediate steps with a pretty steep cost for illustration purposes. There are other things that I've done which weren't nearly so shard-heavy.

Still, either we're going to see a fall in the price of shards (once a market gets up and running) or we're going to see a hike in the price of finished materials (ditto) - the current price differential isn't sustainable for the long term.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 04:42 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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