Ideas to remove less desirable gear from the game

I always thought that this being able to happen cheapens the whole idea of crafting.

 

To be frank I can't think of any RL master craftsman who ever said that salvaging stuff would increase your master skills.

It's a bandaid mechanic that's been here too long.

 

And if this was real life, I would agree. Although I would like to see a bit more "realism" in crafting, a crafting system based on actual real life mechanics would most likely drive players away.

 

Yes, yes, yes.

The biggest reason why we have so much garbage is if an item costs 10k to make, and you salvage it, you get 10 gold worth of crap or if you vendor it you get 20 gold.
So the item stays around. Forever. Languishing on a vendor, or given to a new player for free (meaning they're not buying gear, now, due to the glut of handouts of semi-ok stuff).

The game needs consumption desperately and salvage is the natural place to start.
Give back decent return in materials/components, and people will use it.

Or add a system whereby trash gear can be salvaged to give a consumable that can repair max dura on other gear (at a very slow return, of course) and people would BUY cheaply priced junk gear just to convert it.

Or add a system whereby salvaging gear with certain components can drop the recipe for those components (ie bronze binding etc.) Would be an option for players who need these recipes to get them without resorting to the supply bag lotto, and in any case, increase the number of available recipes making them easier to find and cheaper. Would also be a kind of way to make this teachable if it had decent return, ie. you need the bronze hilt recipe, I'll make 10 swords with it and you break them down and see. That's be kinda cool.

If nothing else, any item with mw/enchants should drop a reasonable amount of silver/gold/metal scraps. If an item's got 30-40 ingots pumped into it with failures and poor rolls, I'd say give us 10 ingots or so back in 'scrap'. So like on the order of 100-150 scraps. Per piece. Seriously. Do you want to get rid of this stuff or not? We still have to get base ore to smelt it with but now suddenly junky gear has another appeal and isn't just going to get vendored, looted, revendored or sit on a player vendor for weeks.

Decent return like this would also open up a market for new players to craft gear, crush it for scraps, and sell on the scraps from their 'learning pieces' instead of that just being a huge sink of hatefulness.

Do all of these things, and salvage has become a viable skill, something people would push higher to get better return, and create more of a commodities market while also getting rid of untold amounts of trash. While you're at it, let us salvage all these rusty plates/cups/forks/keys (metal scraps) and jars/glassware (glass sheets) that drop. You could even add easter egg salvageables, like, add new items into the game only obtainable via this method, i.e. salvaging crafted astrolabes (which uses sun/moon gems) gives 'sky gem' that adds to both sun and moon attunement. There's a lot of potential combos there to potentially explore.

 

The original purpose of alchemy was to transform ordinary materials into extraordinary ones. Which is why a lot of alchemists strived to convert lead into gold.

Why not introduce a mechanic where scrap can be converted into gold or silver scraps via the alchemy skill?

 

I like it, however it would need to actually be economical, and thought out to be useful. Not another 'pull a recipe out of a hat' like we've seen with so many other things.