Before I begin, I would like to thank William and everybody involved in the Serious Play event on February 8. It was very interesting and a lot of fun.
Recently in FFXI, I have been trying to learn more about crafting and the rituals and communities that surround it. I had started FFXI with no prior RPG or MMO experience, and I was completely unfamiliar with the crafting activity in the game. Once I joined the linkshell KirintheDestroyers, I discovered that crafting in FFXI is a major activity that has an entire community around it and an entire set of rituals associated with it.
When I reached level 51 on my red mage, I asked a KtD woodworker to make me a dark staff. He replied, giving me a specific day and time to meet him. Several days later, at our appointed time, I traded him the materials and his character switched to crafting clothes, moved to face a certain direction, and created a dark staff. He made two more attempts, to my bewilderment, insisting that the day/moon was perfect for a high quality staff. After three "normal quality" staves were made, he sighed in frustration and apologized for not making a HQ. This was one of my first experiences with crafting, and it seemed so complex it bordered on magical.
Crafting, in FFXI, involves combining crystals with certain materials to create goods such as clothes, weapons, food, or medicines/potions. Crystals are obtained from monsters, and materials can be "farmed" off monsters in the game or purchased from NPCs. Players can join all of the crafting guilds (which are game-based). A craftsman can only make items that are less than 11 levels above him. Unlike in games such as WoW, crafters do not buy recipes and they are not restricted to certain crafting paths, so all clothcrafters can make all clothcrafting recipes as long as they are of the sufficient level.
There are other game restrictions on crafting. Players can get all crafts to level 60, but after level 60, players are only allotted 40 levels to be distributed across all other crafts. For example, they may take their main craft to 100, but all of their other crafts can only get to level 60. Or, they may take two crafts to level 80, or one craft to level 70 and another to level 90. And so forth. Fishing is an exception; it can be taken to level 100 regardless of other crafting levels. Fishing also doesn't include the creation of goods, so it is different from all other crafts.
Because many items that are crafted can be sold for profit on the auction house, crafting is a popular money-making activity. Unlike in other games, however, the "synthesis" of materials into a crafted good is not always successful and if a synth "breaks" (fails), the player may lose costly materials.
Because of the time and money involved in crafting, there are many beliefs regarding why some synths break and why some are successful. Through years of discussion about crafting, players believe that there are certain elements that affect crafting: the type of crystal that is used in the synth, the element of the day (e.g. Earthsday), the moon cycle (e.g. 33% waxing crescent), and the direction they are facing while synthing. There is an NPC in San d'Oria who directs players in elemental directions, such as dark being north, ice being east, etc. and crafters rely heavily on this chart.
Players diligently record these elements while crafting, documenting them on websites, blogs, or messageboards. Players' accumulated knowledge is combined on crafting websites like lokyst's crafting timer, which inform players of how difficult a synth will be depending on the crystal they use, the direction the face, the day of the week, and the moon cycle.
Some players keep personal records of their own crafting history. They record every synth in a notebook or an Excel file, tediously working through which combination of elements is the most successful. One player I knew had obtained 100 in goldsmithing (one of the most difficult crafts in the game due to the cost of it) and had an extremely elaborate system he used while synthing. His combinations of elements were not based on the mainstream beliefs or practices but were a based on his experiences. He kept this guide as a carefully-guarded secret. Crafting in FFXI is very competitive, especially when players gamble millions on one synth.
In addition to the public timers and crafting guides, crafters use messageboards on sites such as ffxi.allakhazam and KillingIfrit to discuss which synths are most profitable or which craft a newcomer should take up depending on server (each server has its own economy), resources, and interests. Crafting recipe lists can be found on more "database" type sites, such as ffxi.somepage.com. Finally, fishing has its own dedicated database site at Clan Wind, which allows players to input their skill level, fishing rod type, and crafting rank in order to see where they can fish certain types of fish. Fishermen consider the moon to be correlated to their success in fishing, so Clan Wind also offers a real-time indicator of the moon cycle.
Finally, I recently discovered FFXI Timer for Palm -a downloadable program for Palm Pilots. FFXI does not allow windowing. Although a large number of players (50% according to the survey I conducted last year) do use a "Windower" add-on to the game, it is against the terms and conditions of the game to use it. Therefore, a player created a program for Palm Pilots that allows people to access information for things such as crafting, airship trips, or weaponskills while playing the game.
I find it interesting that most of the communities surrounding crafting can be found out of the game on websites and messageboards. Crafters sometimes ask other players in the game about a type of synth, or which direction they should face. It was not uncommon, on a slow day in KtD, to see a crafter asking which elemental day would follow the current one, which direction to face while using this crystal, or whether the moon cycle was good or bad for a particular synth. Because of the size and experience of KtD, crafters could rely on their linkshell mates to have experience with crafting or to know of a resource (such as a website) that would useful.
Despite the in-game community support, many crafters utilize the resources offered on websites, databases, and messageboards to learn more about their craft. With the Palm Pilot program, players can now research crafting when not on a computer.
April 15 - 21
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