Thread: Lessons from red scrips for 3.3

In ARR, this game had the best crafting system I had ever seen in an MMO—I enjoyed it so much that despite not having a main class (I always play rogue-types, and ARR didn't have Rogue/Ninja until 2.4), ALC was my first level 50 class, and I was happy that it was.

All through ARR, I loved crafting. I loved the way the progression worked at my own pace, separate from the weekly timers and caps for my combat classes—it was something I could do at my own pace. Sometimes that meant I didn't craft for a week, and other times, it meant I sat down for hours on end, because that's what was fun for me at the time. I did all of it, and participated in high-end crafting for every tier.

Red Scrips (and all of the crafting changes in HW in general) changed, and ruined, just about everything I loved about crafting. It's to the point now where I almost never craft, when I used to do so every day. While I've kept up with the minimums to craft high-end items, I've pretty much never done so (except for a brief period during 3.1) because the system has just stopped being fun.

I know the developers aren't likely to remove Scrips in 3.x, but I very much hope that they consider a new design direction that is more like the ARR one for future expansions.

Originally Posted by Alahra

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Justifiably, devs tend to be afraid of content becoming stale or boring. Thus they end up trying different approaches to it. While scrips ultimately became seen as more of a burden, it didn't have to. They, as always, implemented it wrong. Too many restrictions and time based activities that pertains to not just crafting, but gathering too. So for many of us that do both, it's double the displeasure, meaning it just amplifies the dislike far more. To begin with, they treated it far too much like combat progression gates, which it NEVER should have been. Some restriction is fine, but they just added so many in small doses that it just ended up snowballing into what feels like an avalanche.

Truth be told, if you were to keep doing crafting in the same fashion as it was all throughout ARR, you'd probably be hitting the same feeling you did with scrips soon, if not already, even if they didn't introduce such a system. They really did need to do something to change it up a little, but more or less failed unfortunately. It's important to remember as well that it's not just crafting/gathering that affects why you lose interest in something. Ignoring variables outside of the game, it's the negativity of any form of content that chips away at the game. They tend to fail or make mistakes in so many ways that it reaches a point where you just throw up your hands and walk away (figuratively... maybe literally?).

One huge critique that I have about the team is that they always look towards the future of the game, rarely ever looking at what they can do for it now. Some would say that's the best way to do it or that that means they care, and to some extent I agree, but that's very shortsighted, ironically. Yeah, they take criticism about things towards future content, but they rarely bother to seriously fix what's currently there until far FAR into the future, if ever at all. So just like the crafting/gathering limitations that 3.0 introduced was piling up, so too does all the existing problems as they continue to add new content with its own problems to add on.

QoL problems, such as a need for player controlled chat filters for RMT, has long been an issue with zero... ZERO reason to hope for some sort of remedy in the future. Not exactly a big deal by itself, but tag on all the other issues we have with no fix in sight, and you have that exact snowball effect mentioned. Quite the coincidence that there's multiple ways we can deduce a repeat of history as time goes on.