Crafting's Issues and Solutions

Let me establish my premise that crafting (production of end items) equipment is broken. A *crafter* cannot make any money in this game. A *gatherer* however is able to get rich quickly. This is ass-backwards. To have an actual economy, crafting needs to be in a position where it can stand by itself. IE - There can be dedicated crafters that buy all their raw materials and are able to turn a profit.

What we have in practice however is that crafting is actually a deficit. You will LOSE money *attempting* to craft things vs selling raw materials.

This is even more obvious when you check the WTS forum. There are 4 things that are selling in that section: Gold/RMT, Raw Mats, Rares, and Artifacts. There is effectively ZERO market share for crafted gear. The economy might as well not even consider it.

Here are a few reasons for this problem:

A) Enchanting and MW stats are extremely variable - There is no control over what I'm making if I end up with anything at all. "Junk" stat items have no purpose - They don't sell and you can't use them in any shape or form to try to recoup even the base cost of materials.

B) Breakage. This is a multi-tiered problem. The laughable part about it is that this only serves to create scarcity of high end items (which can and should be achieved in other ways). The largest issue here is the concept that you will need to craft 20+ of the same item to MAYBE get something usable.

Scarcity can be solved in many other ways. Crafted gear being the "best" could simply make the salvaged pieces be that much more rare so that once you finally got that piece, it meant something. Refining could require 5-10 times as much iron/copper ore (only "material" creation ore)/cotton/wood similar to the obsidian chip change that went in a few patches ago.

This is my solution:

The "pyramid" of the crafting system would be changed. It would take FAR more effort/materials/time to craft the base piece of gear. This means that it would take 5 or more times as much ore/cotton/wood/leather etc. as base materials.

Salvageable ingredients become the "best" gear. Scarcity is maintained by making these ingredients, you guessed it, rare. This can take the form of a low salvage chance, a low drop rate, both, and/or raid loot. This serves a few goals:

1) These salvaged materials are extremely sought after. They actually mean something.

2) The best gear is still crafted by crafters, but there is a *true* full circle adventuring vs crafting component.

3) You ensure the *best* gear requires the best adventuring players. There is *purpose* to endgame PvE. Similar stipulations can be applied to a real PvP system that actually has a PvP currency if needed.

Rationale - As it stands we're crafting all this extra "junk" that sits on vendors and doesn't sell because it truly is junk. Let's add a little scarcity into the base items and make those have some value.

As an added bonus, this would even make it easier to tweak refining skills without creating a HUGE impact on the economy since, for example, saving 1-2 ore on something that takes 10-20 ore is a much different thing than taking 2-4 ore per ingot. Much easier to make small adjustments when dealing with bigger #'s is the take-home here.

Next up is the variability of the enchanting and masterwork system. It needs to be dialed WAY back or simply removed. Probably the single most damning thing towards making money as a crafter is being unable to realistically take an order and deliver it to specification.

This can be done in a few ways but these are my personal favorite:

1) Enchanting/MW base skill increases the # of choices. At GM you have 5 and at 120 you have 8, for example.

2) Drops from nodes/mobs/events/dailies/etc. that GUARANTEE a particular stat to appear among the current setup of choices. This is tedious to develop but would help A LOT with the concept of "loot". This could also be expanded to increasing the % success rate as well.

3) A successful Enchant/MW simply pulls up a menu and you choose which thing you want.

In addition to the up-front cost/rarity trade-off I mentioned earlier, I also want to tweak the failure "breakage" concept. To further stimulate the crafting economy, I want someone to be able to bring me a weapon and I hand them a weapon back at the end. So with that in mind this is what I'd change:

1) Failure on Enchanting/MW prevents further Enchanting/MW of that crafted item. Artifacts would function as they do currently with each failure breaking the artifact. Crafted artifacts would count as crafted gear. At the time of writing I am leaning towards failure on either Ench or MW prevents further Ench AND MW ability of the item.

2) Depending on which try # the failure lands on (IE 1st try @ 95% chance to succeed), the item loses a certain amount of durability. The higher your % to succeed the lower the amount of durability is lost. I'm not 100% on these numbers but it should hurt and dissuade the mindset of going until you fail every time you craft. A "fair" starting amount would be 5%, 10%, and 20% of the base durability (IE boots would lose 2.5, 5, and 10 durability) for tries 1 through 3 respectively at GM and drop a bit as your success % increases. 4+ would obviously hurt even more.

3) Enchant/MW attempts made with less than 40% (so 4th or more with high skill) chance of success run the risk of critical failure in which the item does break in addition to what was mentioned above. This % would be LOW, like 5ish% to start and increase by 5% each time. 99% of the player-base won't be concerned with this, but the "best of the best" will have even further added scarcity added in for good measure.

Rationale - Crafting needs purpose. Right now that purpose is simply to remove things from the game which serves nobody. We all hate it and the developers have their hands tied behind their backs trying to make anything work. Crafting is currently a non-player in the economy. It truly has no presence because it's a "1%'er" activity with how expensive it is.

"Front-Loading" the effort in crafting something does wonders. There's an achievable goal that was met once you've crafted something and you're only going to *hopefully* make it better. The odds that you won't end up with anything usable at all are non-existent unless you were truly trying to push it to the limit and lost. There is minimal concept of "I'm going to have to make 20 of these things and I probably won't end up with anything useful at the end".

 

I'm not sure this in of itself is a terrible thing. If you have something specific in mind. The problem is you can't customize gear for a customer if you don't know what they want. And so good luck putting all that extra stuff into a gear hoping to sell it to a random buyer.

However, this touches on one personal pet peeve. Crafters do not want to make things randomly. You have an idea of what you want.. and you try to make that. You don't say.. try to make a chair and accidentally make a chandelier. Enchanting and masterwork should not be exceptions.. If you know how to enchant a STR buff and the items will take it.. then that's what you're trying to do.. you're not likely to get a light effect by mistake. The more random your options the less sense it makes.

My solution, is to make more options available by skill level. A GM+ should always get nearly all available options to choose from.

Breakage during crafting is painful.. BUT in the mind of the devs it serves a purpose they think needs serving. SO.. if you want to change this you must first address the dev's reasoning for it. It's basically a resource sink and in my opinion an unnecessary one. It drives up prices artificially high which cases problems.. where the market itself should be allowed to dictate how much in the system is too much. Too many resources in the market would only serve to drive prices down. Fewer people will harvest and/or craft when it's easier to purchase a finished product.. eventually there will be more demand.. prices go up.. etc and somewhere along the line the market will find it's own balance.

Unfortunately, a limited time/budget/manpower environment favors the quite and easy 'fix' which is usually the gamey solution that just feels unnatural.

 

It's really a shame. This is, IMO, the most glaring issue the game currently faces. Crafting, plain and simple, is not part of the economy. It's too random and as a result entirely too expensive. This, for me, is a much bigger issue than load times.

 

Whacking my dead horse one more time. The reason raw materials will always be more valuable than finished products is because they are valued for their use in leveling craft skills. Until this changes, you will always make more gold as a harvester than a producer. Which, I agree, is broken.