While I think there are many things they can do to improve the system, I overall like mining for my own personal crafting needs. BUT the problem is the crazy amount of people botting and driving the prices of everything down and down. You can see the lowering of prices good for those looking to craft, but its no secret that the shard market is largely made up of gil sellers who are even using teleport hacks now.
As a miner, I dont see many ways to actually make a decent profit anymore, between all the competition from normal players and the cheaters controlling the crystal markets. Ores i once sold for 3-4k a stacks just a couple weeks ago are now down to 1-2k a stack. Shards that sold for 30-40 gil each are now down to 10-15 each. I guess the overabundance of items is to be expected when its so easy to level a gathering class to 50, but its a little disheartening to see once potential profits being moved away from collecting items. As more people get level 50 in all the gathering and crafting classes, the only way to make real gil seems to be Materia or getting lucky with a rare drop.
Edited, Nov 27th 2013 7:36pm by aadrenry
Eorzea Examiner #2: Places to Go, Mining to Do
In this week's column, Ragar talks about gathering in Eorzea and what he would do to improve it
Why Am I Mining Level 5 Nodes At Level 50?!
When you think of max level gathering in most MMOs, you usually picture spending most of your time in high level zones, finding new and wondrous materials. Perhaps you might step back a little and go to a slightly lower zone for a few filler materials or a component the game hasn't provided a max-level alternative for, but that's about it - short of leveling another crafting skill on an alt, you're not about to go back to mining newbie veins for any reason. That's not quite the case in FFXIV. Those low level veins have one very good reason to go back and spend hours mining in circles: shards.
When you start as one of the Disciple of the Hand classes, you notice that all of your crafting recipes take one or two of some elemental shard to craft. Not a big deal at the time since you get a few hundred shards to start with, but sooner or later they'll need to start buying or gathering shards to continue crafting. A little annoying, but it does give low-level gatherers a source of income since it's decent experience until level 10 or so. After a while though, you notice demand for these shards isn't going down but it's not very satisfying to gather these shards for a pittance of XP for hours and hours on end either to sell or use for your own crafting. There must be a way to speed this up! Well... yes and no. You have the elemental shard powers you get at 20 with Miner and Botanist; 400 GP to get two additional shards of that element per hit on a single node. There are also the odd nodes here and there scattered across Eorzea that yield double items per hit, including shards. That's it though - if you want shards to sell or craft with, 90% of the time you'll be doing it the slow, hard way.
Some of you may be looking at this and wondering why I'm focusing on low-level shards. It's a material for low-level crafters and I've seen the next tier of them in level 30+ nodes, so why wouldn't I farm those instead? The reason is quite simple: those crystals actually aren't all that useful. If I remember correctly, prior to unlocking my level 50 recipes, the only Goldsmith items I could make that used crystals were the same dyes every crafter can make at level 30. Every other recipe on my list took an ever-increasing mountain of shards to make. Let's take as an example one of the rings I've been mass-producing for sale, the Zircon Ring. The ring itself takes six Fire Shards and six Wind Shards along with the Electrum Ingot and Zircon. Making the ingot itself takes another five Wind Shards as does cutting the Raw Zircon into a usable gemstone. All told that's 22 shards that go into a single ring and that is probably the cheapest high-level recipe I can make that people will buy. When you consider crafters keeping two retainers stocked with 20 sale items each day, a backlog of crafted items, supplies for special orders and trade chat deals, etc., that's a mountain of shards that someone had to gather one at a time.
Okay, shard farming is obnoxious - what's the solution? The first idea is far from a perfect solution, but it would help to spread the gatherers out and cut back on the horde of Miners with their 50 class quest mining pick farming shards outside Ul'Dah: increase the yield for higher-level nodes. This idea is mostly a band aid fix, but it would move miners off to the areas of the world they're supposed to be exploring for materials. Solution #2 is a bit more work since it involves recipe material changes: switch from shards to crystals around level 30 and add crystals to more high-level nodes. This one's more of a common sense fix since using level 1 materials for level 47 recipes doesn't make a great deal of sense, plus it would put more miners out in those mid-range zones. My last idea for helping with this is actually something I'll be touching upon in a later column: recipe variability. Going back to my Zircon Ring example, let's say the crafting menu gave me the option to swap crystals for shards in a recipe. Some recipes could simply take fewer crystals to complete than shards; others might see a bonus stat or some other trait if you used the more powerful material in the construction. You could even allow for the addition of different colors of crystals for varied bonuses or effects; spread out the requirements enough and you can create demand for gatherers to provide more than just a mountain of low-level materials. This spreads gatherers all over the world, giving the market more variety of high-level materials and helping keep those prices from getting out of control. Of course those high-level gatherers still have my third major annoyance to contend with.
