WoW's done it. EQ2's done it.
Guilds hoard the materials for themselves, and trickle the remnants onto the auction/market board for absurd, asinine prices, be them components or finished goods.
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Removing the melds would make the gear absolutely useless. The draw to the gear as someone who raids is the ability to customize the secondaries to my liking. If you remove that I have literally no use for it. Tanks would have no use for jewelry and craters would be out of business aside from glamors.
Remove the melds and allow crafted gear to be upgrade via twines/coats the same way that tome gear is upgraded. Melding is a stupid system that is enhanced in the level of stupidity by making it entirely RNG. Even from what you are saying crafted gear is only useful for DoH/DoL, tanking accessories, and hardcore progression raiders for the first 2 weeks tops, which is already a narrow portion.
I like the melding. I'd prefer it if there was some means of removing a materia safely, but I understand why there isn't (they're supposed to be one-shot items).
There's so much more they could add to the materia/melding system if they simply expounded upon the available materia types, and their means of acquisition.
Get rid of the primary/secondary Stat materia, and make the elemental stats matter. Include materia with different effects. Could be fun.
It could also be fun of materia actually could be used to improve upon a gear's ilvl, or a method of improving the gear further for all our efforts(even if it has to be bound or unsellable...) but that, even with all the rng, luck, and bs we have to go through, is apparently is too much to ask.
Yep, you got that right.
The gear is absolute garbage. It is so far away from useful NO ONE would ever consider it okay, ever.
Useless, and as such they have made crafting useless.