Crafters should live in the real world..

all weapons deteriorate at a much faster rate than armor, which is soemthign they said they intended to do, how long something lasts only really needs to be in line with how hard it is to make/how expensive it is. weapons arent bad, alot of armor is very expensive

 

Because, if you are going to force the issue, when push comes to shove adventurers are more important to the game than crafters. All crafting could be removed from the game and replaced with NPCs that buy components and sell equipment without fundementally changing the game. Conversely, it'd be pretty difficult to get a large player base for a crafting based MMO with no combat or exploration.

 

I come from ArcheAge, where all the combat/pvpers flamed out ages ago, except for the guys who spent thousands of dollars on the black market for gear who still play to justify their expenses. For the most part, the player base that has persisted for the past 2 years consists of people playing "house" with their friends, buying costumes/cosmetics for their homes, and doing 100% safe zone trade runs to afford those items on the auction.

If that's not a good example for you, take Black Desert Online as another one. It has instanced housing, but people love decorating it. They can buy things for cheap on a global auction, use it to craft, then sell the crafted item on the auction for a markup. While my friends were out fighting and leveling, I was mastering Cooking and was one of the top 5 cooks in the game at launch. I wasn't even level 30 yet and had tons of money because I sold *xp food* to the questers. I was far from the only person doing that. There were also horse tamers, alchemists, and a variety of other production-related things to do, including areas with 100% non-combat gathering.

 

ArcheAge and Black Desert Online have both suffered massive player attrition in the last year. The focus on crafting may have made a segment of the existing player base happy, but it isn't bringing in new players.

 

I don't think any crafting system in any MMO is really well developed enough to, for example, be the main focus of the game. That includes this game in it's present state. Crafting is more of an addon. But the potential is there to make a really compelling crafting system in SotA that really does attrack new players and give existing players added depth to explore.

 

Strictly speaking, if you like crafting, an MMO is always going to be an inferior experience to single player options. Any system the SOTA develops could be invariably copied to a single player game and improved by removing the artificial time sinks inflicted on most parts of MMOs.

 

Well, first of all we should not forget: this is a game ment to be fun. Makeing the economy too realistic will prove counterproductive on that behalf.
To be more specific:
I'm pretty new to the game and would never know where to get most of the reagence and crafting-fuel-stuff from if I couldn't get it from a npc-vendor. And you cannot trust on players to deliver all the basic supplies needed for crafting and magic for affordable prices, especially for starting players. sure, some players will truely try to do so. But others will buy their stock to resell them at higher prices.
A way to make basic crafting and magic suuplys available might be, to put their generation at the start of the gathering/refinment/crafting-chain of learning. First thing a crafter would have to learn is how to get/make his/her own fuel for their craft. And of course they need to be pointed to that... by quests for example. How do I make wax or curing salt today? I heard there are salt-nodes to mine... but how do I find them as a newb? I havn't seen a single one yet. As long as those kind of question cannot be answered, as long as new players have no chance to get basic supplies for their craft, yes reagents, too, as long as you would be at the whim of those trying to beat the system for personal gain (as in real life) that long you have to sell those basic stuff by npc vendors to a reasonable price, as it is done right now.

 

Unfortunately the devs are not confident enough in SOTA to allow the playet to have fun. Currently they are fine-tuning the fun drip rate like an IV to maximize how long their content will last while providing just enough fun to prevent attrition of "fun-seeking" players.

 

I have to confess, it might look that way, but the little optimist in me tells me, that's not the plan and things will get better... If not... well, SotA IS part of the real world economy with all it's cruel odds and ends...

 

I've being playing SOTA since the Rs were in the single digits, and have a full hat collection and I didn’t invest enough time or money that I feel it necessary to defend my investment. If I plot the progress of SOTA over the last few years, based on my observations, the trend line doesn't suggest that the level of refinement that many folks are hoping for will be reached anytime within the next few years.

 

One of the things I think would help make crafting more viable is a large increase in the diversity of itemization. We shouldn't just have animal skins, we should have a skin for each named animal in the game with unique properties for each. If the crafting skills tree were increased in diversity to match, it would encourage more specialization and more specific 'niches' for crafters to fill. This way, not everyone is self sufficient and there is less competition among specific crafters, which allow them to charge more. Like, not all textile crafters now compete against each other, just the wolfskin specialized +focus crafters compete against each other.

 

You could be right on that. Although I have seen them make massive strides in relatively short periods of time. They did, in fact, make a lot of changed to crafting recently that significantly improved the system (e.g., addding masterworks). Hopefully they can get time to make another push.

 

Agreed. For example, if you get a polar bear pelt, the resulting item made with the fur should be white in color. The purpose of the masterworking system was to increase specialization but I don't think it goes far enough. Also masterworking is only for production skills (smithing, carpentry, tailoring). They really need to do something with refining skills (tanning, textiles, smelting, milling) to specialize them. For example, maybe if you GM tanning, you could get polar bear leather instead of generic leather.

 

Well, they added more for those that put in the requisite time grinding ore or grinding to buy ore, but it's an extension of the system, not really an improvement. As it stands, the crafting system is less interesting than Minecraft's which is a pretty low bar.