Crafting is fun!

[TheUltimate3]

To be honest, with the way crafting and gathering work in this game at all, there are really only two options: Crafting be mandatory or Crafting being just about completely useless.

Yoshi's reason (Dungeon stuff > Crafted Stuff) is sound. Stuff gotten from a dungeon encounter from a boss should be better than crafted things at that level. Just how my brain works. For crafting and gathering to be super awesome and fair for everybody and not just the crafter or the guy with deep pockets;

1) Items have to Decay
2) No Items Can Drop from anything but bosses.
3) Crafting and gathering have to be so locked down that one person can't do both.

Item decay and no drops except from bosses kinda need to happen together for it to even matter. Right now, crafted stuff are really for other crafters as for DoW/M once they get something from a dungeon, they have it for life. Let an item break down however, and suddenly you need a new sword. Best example I have for this is SWG where in the beginning, crappy items dropped but everybody knew from the get go that it was vendor trash. Anything substantial, anything at all was crafted and they had a crafting and gathering economy that, in my opinion, worked because that was a legitimate supply and demand situation and prices were set accordingly. One didn't need to have trillions of credits in the back because feasibly, nobody was gonna sell something for stupid amounts, the market simply did not allow it.


The last 1 is the real issue, which is why I'm sure SE added specialization, red scripts, and the like to the game anyway. We can play any job any time we want at any time. For combat roles, that is awesome. For crafting and gathering, it becomes a situation where a market for items and goods is almost non-existent because you are expected to get all the stuff yourself. If everybody has the expectation of being able to do everything, you end up with situations like we had by the end of 2.0, either be an omnicrafter or be mega rich. (you could also make friends but let's be real, that requires your friend to either be an omnicrafter or rich). Hence, why they have moved as far away from that as possible.

I'd personally lock a single character to a single craft or gatherer, and then more or less streamline the process of gathering items in the future (in 4.0 there are no vendors that sell weapons and armor, dungeon bosses have a low drop rate of weapons, all items can decay and break) and clean up the recipes a bit.

But this is a pipe dream of a madman, but to me the reason crafting/gathering is not fun for people now, why it wasn't fun for people before, is more to do with how crafting/gathering is built.