@OP
Yea, I wasn't entirely sure if you were specifically only offering hte synth mats as a reward or not, but I just kind of wanted to make this public statement regardless. GL getting the tekko~
Carbuncle.Josiahfk said:
»You're right that attitude can be profitable; look at big business today and how the same behavior can make a company millions. But the only thing it shows is that money means more than anything else to someone that behaves like that.
The selfishness here is being placed on the crafter, when in reality I think far more blame rests on the consumer
in this sistuation(offering a few mil for a very expensive item).
Someone asking to synth mats into HQ's for free (or anything less than 25% of what the item actually sells for - which may as well also be considered free in my opinion at least) is LITERALLY asking you to give the consumer X million gil, for absolutely nothing. If an item normally sells for 50M, and someone offers me 5M for an HQ if they provide the materials, they are essentially saying that their work gathering the materials was worth 45M(minus the actual cost of the mats), and my work as a crafter obtaining whatever skill level necessary to tier the synth is worth 5M.
45M vs. 5M lined up with the following:
Buying items off of the AH vs. The initial financial backing/risk/time/AH camping required to completely level the craft/relevant subs.
If you are the type of person that is willing to give tens of millions of gil away to faceless strangers as some act of benevolence, then by all means you are more than free to do so, and that is a very charitable act. But my main point here isn't that being charitable is a bad thing -- my point is that such offers being considered a reasonable exchange between consumer and crafter are incredibly selfish on the part of the consumer.
I don't bring a hunk of scrap steal to Chevrolet and say "hey brah, HQ me a corvette and I'll give you $10,000, for an auto that retails for $75,000" This of course would be ridiculous, and the same level of absurdity is analogous to crafting in this game. An item's value is not solely a product of the materials invested; the value is also a summation of time, having the means to conduct the desired process (whether that be synthing something or building an automobile), along with what I mentioned earlier.
From a consumer's perspective though, I can understand the frustration of trying to acquire items that either A. Do not exist, or B. Are too expensive to obtain.
In these instances, I would recommend bringing a crafter enough ingredients to conduct 24-36 synths of the desired HQ item (assuming that the item is tier 1). Make the deal that the crafter can keep any HQ's beyond the first. This way, you as a consumer are nearly guaranteed to obtain your HQ item (at the cost of 24 synths), while the crafter has a decent chance of obtaining an HQ just at the cost of his services/time (maybe even 2 HQ's if he is incredibly lucky). Either way; in this type of example, I think both consumer and crafter could feel like they are being given a fair deal. The consumer gets their item for likely a third of market cost, and the crafter likely gets some free HQ attempts.
This example obviously does not apply well to all synths, since obtaining enough materials to conduct some hexed synths 36 times in one sitting is laughable at best.