Is it wiser to take up crafting, or to just sell the components?

[Yellow Mage]

Re: Is it wiser to take up crafting, or to just sell the components?

Sound familiar?

Yeah, it does. I distinctly remember hearing something like that from another overly negative person:

I love this chart. "Just like in real life, the people making tons of money don't do hard labor".

[Thalyn]

Re: Is it wiser to take up crafting, or to just sell the components?

Thanks for the replies to this post! It's given me some good ideas on something else to do during my city lurking times. At first I focused on cooking (gotta do something with all those fire crystals) but sadly noted San D'Oria has no guild to make it truly fruitful. But that doesn't stop me..I still make my corn and anything else I find or fish for. I am thinking about leathercrafting. For someone who is quite a bit a ways under those magical levels 18-21, should novice players focus on crafting?

Between costs and the decision to restrict select crafting guilds to certain cities, when it comes to crafting this game seems to be extremely unfriendly towards low level players.

In an effort to try out crafting, I took my low level character into the Zeruhn Mines in an attempt to gather some ore. After two uses of my pickaxe, it broke. Two more mining attempts later and my second pickaxe broke. My third pickaxe broke on the very next mining attempt. Before all was said and done I had gone through just over 1,000 gil worth of equipment (five pickaxes) and only recovered eight copper ores. Maybe that’s a drop in the bucket for everyone else, but 1,000 gil is a huge deal when you’re still under level 15. I left the mines depressed realizing I could have just bought eight copper ores for a fraction of what I spent on mining tools.

Frankly, it's very odd how the introductory gate-guard NPC and fame-level 1 reputation quests make an effort to introduce new characters to crafting within their first few levels, but then you find out you probably can't pursue the craft you're interested in until you're a high enough level (i.e. 20) to easily travel to another city.

[Raydeus]

Re: Is it wiser to take up crafting, or to just sell the components?

Thanks for the replies to this post! It's given me some good ideas on something else to do during my city lurking times. At first I focused on cooking (gotta do something with all those fire crystals) but sadly noted San D'Oria has no guild to make it truly fruitful. But that doesn't stop me..I still make my corn and anything else I find or fish for. I am thinking about leathercrafting. For someone who is quite a bit a ways under those magical levels 18-21, should novice players focus on crafting?

There's nothing wrong with starting with crafting at lower levels (fishing is specially new-player friendly), just need to do research to know what to craft.

So it depends on what synths you can find that can be made with the materials you have at hand or can get at your city's AH.

[Malacite]

Re: Is it wiser to take up crafting, or to just sell the components?

I guess I understand why you might break stuff while you're lower than its target level, but why do I critical break something that I'm more than 10 levels over the cap for, or worse, 40 levels over the cap for? Come on.

Oh god the other day I spent an entire hour breaking leather belts for iron ingots. Finally managed a stack, and on light day I go to synth the 1st batch of 6 into sheets... all is well. 2nd synth... WHAM Critical failure and I lose all 6 ingots.

I have 53 smithing skill, that recipe caps around 23-25. GTFO SE.

[Raydeus]

Re: Is it wiser to take up crafting, or to just sell the components?

I see, so Malacite's true identity is that of a Chinese manufacturer.

Can't explain the low quality and the low synth rate otherwise.

[Takelli]

Re: Is it wiser to take up crafting, or to just sell the components?

Oh god the other day I spent an entire hour breaking leather belts for iron ingots. Finally managed a stack, and on light day I go to synth the 1st batch of 6 into sheets... all is well. 2nd synth... WHAM Critical failure and I lose all 6 ingots.

I have 53 smithing skill, that recipe caps around 23-25. GTFO SE.

That is the SAME issue that I have as well. I just gave up crafting unless I get the materials while leveling or just killing stuff as I am running from one place to another. other wise, I just wont craft any more.

I have lost about 200k on breaks before I will start making a profit. And thats on a synth that is 30 levels lower than my current cap. Thats just total BS

[Karinya]

Re: Is it wiser to take up crafting, or to just sell the components?

Really? The economy is horrible. The rich get richer and no one else can make any money. Sound familiar?

Players who know how to make money get richer. Since those players know how to make money, they were already rich. (Sadly this doesn't include me - maybe because there's no secret and making money takes time, which I don't have a lot of).

FFXI doesn't have a stock market or a rentier class. There are no exploitative Wal-Mart owners. There aren't even any monopolies. Any way that the rich can get richer, anyone else could use too, if they had the knowledge and time. (Well, maybe except methods that depend on TH2. It does seem like all thieves are rich. But you know what to do about that... level THF.)

Wouldn't kill SE to allow players to just make money somehow, but they honestly killed every good way for honest players to make gil in the game.

Players killed every good way to make gil in the game. Supply and demand - the more players are doing the same thing, the less profitable it is going to be, and a way of making gil is only "good" if it's better than other ways, which will get it beaten down to average in short order.

If SE gave players a new way to make *money*, it would reinflate the economy. If they gave players a new way to get *stuff*, whatever stuff you could easily get would be devalued because it was easy to get.

I think a few things could stand to be devalued a bit (imperial wootz comes to mind), but overall, adjusting the economy is not so easy, and if you want something that takes substantial effort from other players, you'll most likely have to put in substantial effort yourself to produce equivalent value (or else get lucky at something like Under Observation or Up in Arms drops).

[Elwynn]

Re: Is it wiser to take up crafting, or to just sell the components?

Players who know how to make money get richer. Since those players know how to make money, they were already rich. (Sadly this doesn't include me - maybe because there's no secret and making money takes time, which I don't have a lot of).

Exactly. The best way to make money is to have money, and spend it on something that makes you more money. (And the worst way is to expect someone to give it to you.)

If someone never has more than 10k gil at a time because of spending it all on gear as soon as more comes in, they'll never be rich.

Also, if you can't wait a few days to buy gear, you will inevitably end up buying when the price is high. Right now the HQ elemental staves are in a high price period, and I'm not going to pay 100k more just have them right now, when I could use the money for something productive. It's not like I've absolutely have to have them, since I'm not doing endgame or anything like that.

I've been working to keep a base level of 1 million gil. If I really need something badly that brings me below 1 million, I can "loan" myself some gil, then start farming or whatever to get more gil.

Money management is so important, yet so few people have any clue about it. That is the main reason why some people are rich, and others aren't. There are so many cases of people winning a million or more in a lottery, then they're poor again within a year or two.

Players killed every good way to make gil in the game. Supply and demand - the more players are doing the same thing, the less profitable it is going to be, and a way of making gil is only "good" if it's better than other ways, which will get it beaten down to average in short order.

Translation: you have to keep finding new ways to make money. Sometimes can find something completely new, sometimes there are ways that only work every now and then, and sometimes you can find an old way that everyone else has forgotten. And it's not just other players doing the same thing that can make something not worth doing; I was making decent money harvesting in Saruta and selling Red Grass Cloth, until the September update (level sync) hit, and suddenly the demand dried up.

The recent Proud Beard RMT era provided a month in which someone who was aware of the water crystal prices in Bastok and knew how to efficiently farm water elementals could make some decent money. I got a few million off that, with at least 1 million in just the last five or so days. I'm now at 2.4 million, and starting to consider 2M as my base gil level.

And I haven't even had a chance to sell Imperial Silvers in the past few weeks. That's another potential 1M from overnight idling.

[Yellow Mage]

Re: Is it wiser to take up crafting, or to just sell the components?

Dangit Elwynn, making me feel all unwise with my money and needing 116.5k (plus Bastok fame!) for all my WHM spells. >_>

[Sekighara]

Re: Is it wiser to take up crafting, or to just sell the components?

Really? The economy is horrible. The rich get richer and no one else can make any money. Sound familiar? Wouldn't kill SE to allow players to just make money somehow, but they honestly killed every good way for honest players to make gil in the game.

Avatar runs, npcing items, killing beastmen with thf, and Chest/Coffer hunts all ways to remove players from your gil making progress and it is faster but with an extremely low yield of profit. Really there are ways to make money but it requires some thought and dedication. For instance fishing I have a friend that sells nebi stacks for 9k and he fishes up 3 stacks and then puts them on ah then does other things. On baha it is 8-9k a stack so that is at least 15,800 gil a day if sold from jeuno. That is steady income. Cooks can make stead income because of it. Supply and demand are always there but so is the structured system. Because no one has ever made a ls that specializes in crafting and material procurement and then used it to make a dynamic bazaar for requests then the AH has had no player competention which would intern lead to true monopoly of anything. So even if over used and dragged into the mud things that have made money in the past still work today just on a smaller scale so requires more time.

Back on the rails. The crafting of certain things are easier then others, for instance goldsmithing and smithing are the hardest overall due to ores not being stackable and the desynths being the devil. But leather craft, clothcraft, alchemy and cooking are great starting. Now you won't be able to do one synth a day and get millions all those produce a low level craft material that sells fast and for more then the material used to make them. I recommend if your still considering your self new to not to hardcore power level a craft yet it will turn you off quick.

[Takelli]

Re: Is it wiser to take up crafting, or to just sell the components?

Dangit Elwynn, making me feel all unwise with my money and needing 116.5k (plus Bastok fame!) for all my WHM spells. >_>

I feel the same. I have over 300k, and I'm still poor (got lucky on Royal Jelly Archers ring lol). I HAD over 500k, but I spent it all on gear, and everything as I needed gear/spells to level Rdm.

[Aksannyi]

Re: Is it wiser to take up crafting, or to just sell the components?

I don't need people to tell me how to make money (I have plenty), I am simply saying that a lot of the good ways of doing so have been killed by SE because of the RMT, which definitely makes it harder for newer people to make gil. I have said this a zillion times, that I don't think killing these methods of making gil were going to do anything but hurt the player. And looky here, people are struggling to make gil, but the RMT is still going strong. They've actually made it more likely that people will buy gil, ironically enough.

[Sekighara]

Re: Is it wiser to take up crafting, or to just sell the components?

Aksannyi thats profound and all but that really doesn't help Thalyn? It is mostly understood you have money by the majority that are here posting on a regular basis and unfortantly RMT happened and we have to deal with the results. So using your post as a place to start disproving is the only way to help Thalyn. Stating how horrible and hard gil is to get is only nailing one into the coffin that is know target for a nail gun and while it may be true Thalyn has to play in the confines of the game as it is not what it should be like.

[Aksannyi]

Re: Is it wiser to take up crafting, or to just sell the components?

This is a forum, and threads get derailed. I am not off the topic of the thread itself, but the original post. I have no advice for him as I am not a crafter, however, crafting has proven (in my experience) to be a monumental waste of time and gil.

There is no need for you to backseat moderate, if you have a problem with my posts you may either report me or ignore me, but I am contributing to the discussion as it unfolds. Rerailing a derailed thread is difficult, I give you props for trying, but honestly, good luck.

As for talking about how difficult it is to get gil, why should I lie? It is not easy to get gil. It is once you know what you're doing, but finding out what it is exactly that you need to do in order to make it is the difficult part, something that takes some people years to figure out. I'm not going to sugarcoat it. Making gil when you are entirely new to the game and you have no methods behind it is very difficult. And to add to that (and tie in to my other post) SE has made it harder by nerfing common gil-making methods, in order to curb RMT, who simply find other ways to make their gil and continue to sell to the people who were buying before and oftentimes the people whose gilmaking methods got nerfed. How they are incapable of seeing that is beyond me.

I guess if the OP wants to craft that's up to him, but it's a long expensive road to do so, time consuming as well. He should know that before starting. And it only gets harder as you increase in level. Not saying it isn't worthwhile in the end (it often is) but that it may not be worth his time to get into it. Only he will be able to say if it ends up being worth it or not.

[Elwynn]

Re: Is it wiser to take up crafting, or to just sell the components?

...and there are most definitely ways to make money that RMT haven't ruined, but that's because they require some actual work, and can't be done by a level 1 mule! I already mentioned how I made most of my first million by harvesting W. Saruta. The nice thing was that I could do it while watching TV, because most of the time I was either in automove or spamming my harvest macro.

In fact, though my first craft was Alchemy, and it took a bit of work to get that leveled up, my second was Clothcraft, and being a Windurstian and also doing harvesting, it leveled to 50 so fast it was almost hax.

As for the spells, sometimes you just gotta bite the bullet on them. At least the first three teleports can be quested relatively easily. (I still have yet to do the Vahzl quest, but I bought the scroll about as low as the price has ever been.) I thought BLM was worse, mostly because of Flood and Blizzaga III and all the INT+ gear I needed. I quested Sleepga II long before I needed it.