Mishaela said:
If someone for whatever reason says no then they can simply find someone else...
And someone else will also charge you the same fashion, maybe more lenient, maybe less, maybe they'll just run off with your ring. Then what?
I'm saying, -we- have the skill level to turn your materials into crap you want, so -we- decide whether we do it for you or not. And if we do decide to do it, then we decide what the conditions are. If you don't like it, level the craft yourself or just shut up, ok? Simple procedure. By the time you get it to the level you can make the HQ with a shred of a chance in hell, you'll probably realize why crafters think like that. We are not obligated to give you free shit. If I want to do something for a friend with his materials, maybe I'll do a free behemoth mantle+1 for example...or
signed winged boots+1 while a total fluke, I didn't care to ask for any compensation, because he's a friend.
Yeah it was my own decision to blow 25mil on my craft... so I choose to buy the materials from the campers, and make money that way instead of camping my life away like you are doing. In your own words,
I repeat - Your own fault if you lost money
but let's turn it around and put it in the case of the camper. Your own fault if you lose time. That archer ring you spent a week camping to get, it means nothing to me, the crafter. It is not a sniper ring. It's an archer ring. In order to make it a sniper ring, it must be synthesized. This is beyond your reach, so you come to us, the crafters to change that. In doing so, you're holding one of our main profit items over our head... an item we could be buying and making profit our own way off of, or losing the synth completely. Again, our risk. Then! Then you demand that if it HQs...the very reason we even bother buying these materials that you are so elusively holding over our heads, that we should just let you keep it, no matter what the outcome! You aren't a crafter obviously (oh i have cooking at lvl 5, i know everything!)... you don't understand how each craft works, as yes they all work differently from one another, and you don't understand just what it takes to be a crafter and make money off of it. Just like camping NMs, there is some skill involved, decision making, prediction (synthing on certain days, times, cycles, things that aren't guaranteed to work all the time), financial organization. Crafting is another competitive world all its own as prices are constantly fluctuating, your competition are snatching up your materials, and so on. So basically look at it as if you are the camper invading a world you don't even understand the basics of.
I repeat - Your own fault if you lost money (lost 25mil? What were you trying to do, make Austere at 50?)
This in itself means you don't have a flying fuck of a clue what you're talking about. First of all you can't make a synth that high above your level...the game doesn't even allow you to. Second of all anyone with half a brain would know how crafting works by the time you could even get the game to allow the synth that you're an idiot for trying that. The reason crafters lose money is because its a competitive climb up a vicious ladder controlled by those who are level 100. In practically every craft the final levels are riddled with loss, due to the highest level crafters controlling the price of skill up materials. As a crafter, the faster you get to 100, the faster your profit is increased exponentially. It's not completely PL'ing as yeah you are limited by what materials are available and how much money you have...on the other hand it may be the ONLY way to skill up to those final levels.
I'll explain what I mean, if you still don't get it.
Level 90-95... there are a few synths that can be used to skill up... specifically cardinal vests, errant pigaches, and mainly tiger masks. The pigaches, for one, sell for a loss on the AH. Not nearly too bad, but pretty bad. They also tend to break more than your average synth due to their clothcraft sub. Knowing this, I did have cloth levelled to it's cap (60). The cardinal vests would be good also if breaking them didn't mean losing expensive materials. Also, supplies to craft them were often difficult to come by. In the end I didn't feel the vests were as worth it as Tiger Masks... the idea of levelling a craft is to minimize loss, as usually the best skill ups are at a loss. There are no profit synths 90-100 really... only the HQs which are extremely gouged in price and for a good reason. It's not often you see a lvl 100 synth HQ'ed. In fact...the chances are less than 1%.
Now here is where the kicker is... Tiger Masks, being the CHEAPEST synth and least loss of all, only requires a few cheap materials and one expensive one... Wyvern Skin. These do not show up often, and a lot of the time people try to jack the price up. The smart crafters have an unspoken cap to how much they'll pay, as they know more will show up over time and they will be sold at the normal price... these gouged skins may sell eventually, and when they do, the price does start to hike up a bit. It's a slow hike, but this also means more loss for the crafters. However, in order to move their product faster (cause they're pumping tons of these out now that skill ups are dead next to 0), they sell at an extreme loss because they MOVE FASTER THAT WAY. And this is how the level 100 crafters control their competition...by making it a loss to catch up with them as they near 100. They will pay more and more for those materials as they get closer to their goal... in an end result being a harder road for those in their wake. So do the math...if you're losing about 50k a synth, pretty much even if you succeed the synth, and you do about 600 of these to get to the final level, there is no way to avoid this without spending years on years waiting for things to move on the AH or possibly risking expensive materials when you're below the cap to make them. So sure I could make a tiny profit skilling up on Austere Robe or something... one thing is... if it breaks (highly likely since I'm skilling up), and lose that tarasque skin, in essence I just lost the equivalent I'd lose to 6 Tiger/Panzer masks, and probably not even get a skill point.
Getting my drift now? Loss in crafting is unavoidable as you near the upper levels. 0-60 is a range that is pretty insignificant overall...until you break the line of 60, you are not yet a crafter, because you would be amazed at how many people have EVERY craft to 60 at least. There is nothing about having a craft from 0-60 that makes you distinguishable or outstanding. Many people can make anything 0-60, meaning you don't need to go to people for some synth in between... and that means people wont need to come to you. There's no point in charging for things when the end profit is the same as the material cost...which is usually what synths those levels ARE... sold at material cost. The reason for this is because like I said...anyone can make them. If everyone could just level every craft to 60, and make item A, well you also got everyone else making those too, meaning no one would have to buy them if they wanted one...
So now someone goes beyond 60... lets say 70. They are no longer part of this circle of insignificance that everyone is trapped in, they can make things no one else can, and can HQ things that would be difficult for those at 60. Now people need to come to them because they are unable to do the same as the lvl 70. The guild distribution system makes it so people cannot be masters in every craft without a mule...which is in of itself also a pain to do because then you need to often level all your subcrafts to 60 AGAIN, which is pretty costly. But I like this system because it means you are forced to specialize. Person A can take smithing to 100, but then they can't also rival Person B who is a leathercrafter 100. They are two completely different crafts after 60. Before then, both person A and person B can both make the same items up to 60.
Now lets talk about the cost of our profit items. You the camper, in our eyes, are the greedy ones, and likewise, we, in your eyes are the greedy ones. It's just a complete deadlock in ways of thinking...which one is really the greedy one? Who really knows. All I know is, crafters want to make profit, and we use crafting to make money without having to subject ourselves to toiling in the fields like slaves (that is, farming for a mediocre 10k an hour). We know which items people will buy, and for how much. We know the material cost of everything to make those items. We know our average % chance of HQ, but we cannot predict an HQ. We understand how much we will lose if the synth breaks, or if we do not HQ in some cases, can be a major loss. Simply put... if the cost of the materials to make the item cause the synth to become way too much of a loss to be worth making anymore, we do one of two things.
Stop making that item (see Behemoth Mantles, 1mil loss for an NQ, the HQ is pretty hard to make), which means we stop buying the materials altogether until the price goes down or changes to make the item worth making. Cause seriously, you think I wanna piss away 1mil gil for no reason just so you can have a decent mantle? No fuckin way. If crafters are not making the item, then people cannot have the item.
The other thing we can do is simply raise the price of the end product to compliment the price of materials. That is... when amemits shot up to 300k per skin, in order to make a proportion of profit like we did when they were 160k, we had to raise the price of the +1 also... otherwise what used to be merely a 1/6 required to break even, becomes a 1/3... that's halved chance of making back the money sunk into the synth if the price of the mantle remains the same.
So instead you think buying these materials grants you the right and priveledge to have us do the synth for you and let you have whatever pops out, even if it's a super rare synth worth like 20 mil. Again, like I stated about archer rings, in your hands... these materials are worthless. You cannot take a crystal and synth them. Just because you spent the money on the materials, does not mean they are going to magically become an item you want, HQ or NQ. The moment you put them into the crafters hands, they carry your money, and you trust them with it. Nothing is stopping them from just running off with those materials. Everytime someone buys materials I could be using to synth my own products, who doesn't have the means to make anything with those, I see it as someone stealing from my resources which I rely on to make money. When you buy Amemet skins, you are buying junk. When I buy them, I'm buying Amemit Mantles+1. Or maybe not. I can't tell until I go ahead and synth them. If someone goes "ok i bought 2 archer rings, synth plz", you just bought supplies I could have bought. You are stealing my materials... they are worthless in your hands.
See what I mean?
If you are willing to play the game by the crafters rules, then do so, but in most cases you are just better off buying the end result yourself and selling the materials to make them, because usually what you would have the most chances of getting anyway from the crafter is just what you could've bought for less than the material cost. You could have a crafter synth your archer ring only to end up losing 20k out of the deal indirectly, without being charged. But they set the rules for HQ... we both must agree on the conditions of synthing. I may agree to do it for free, sure... I may agree not to. If I don't agree to do it the way you want, then tough luck "bubba", go someplace else. Because the way I see it, doing it on a "whatever pops out" basis is worthless to me either way and a waste of my time. I'd rather not see an HQ knowing it could've been mine, had I bought the materials. It's all a game of chance, but just remember that most of the items in game are not worth what you think it is until you can make something with them yourself. Until then, you're just holding junk.
