In WoW, I had a max leveled crafting character of every class except leatherworking and blacksmithing (well, I had one, but they were both very low). My enchanter was zero profit – unless I sold the mats (massive profit). My tailor only got a call when I wanted to use my own nethers. Leveling up tailoring/chanting/alchemy/something else I’ve forgotten up cost me around 10k gold.

DAoC was nil profit. You’d beg to sell stuff, even if it was just enough to cover half of your mats. Only guildies would pay for your costs, if they were in the mood.

LoTRO only continues the trend. I can sell Barrow Iron Ore (fairly common, teens-level ore) for 5-6s EACH. I can take that ore, make it into a bar (2 ore cost), and get maybe 2-4 silver per bar. I can take 2 of those bars, plus a coal (mined, or bought for a further 2 silver) and make low-grade steel. This might, if the market isn’t saturated, sell for 4-5 silver. Minus the fairly hefty AH cut.

That said, I’ve spent several gold (yes gold, I had 6 gold at 20, simply from selling raw ore), making sure my crafting is absolutely maxed for my level. I have all purple gear, a lot of which I’ve self crafted and worn – seeing as how it’d be worth almost nothing on the AH. Crafting is for suckers. But suckers have more fun.

Even if there is a boss that drops a great item, that boss will get camped, or if in an instance farmed, until it’s not scarce anymore.

I don’t see any way around it without having no dropped items at all. Will the average players stand for that?

The second problem of grinding and only the best products available per level being worth much, well I don’t know, even in real life practice makes perfect. Perhaps a way to recycle finished products would help with that.

I think the scholar profession of LOTRO is a good example of how things should work. I used to hate it since it was so expensive to level up, but now that I can make the best products the money is pouring in. Because you rarely get those products from mobs in the world, only from me and other scholars. With time the profit will lower once more people increase their scholar skill.

Alternatively, we could also mandate one crafter character, per account, per server.

*walks away*

- differentiate them from other player types (you can’t be both a master blacksmith *and* a high-level barbarian monster killer) (Ultima Online)
- take measures to ensure crafters specialize in a tiny sub-section of their craft – make them excel at being “Old Toby Pipeweed Farmers” rather than all-around awesome “Farmers” (Star Wars Galaxies? Anarchy Online?)
- introduce player skill (rather than just character stats) into the crafting equation, through the playing of a mini-game or somesuch (Vanguard?)
- make the crafting equation more complex – allow for a type of ingredient rather than a specific ingredient, where each specific ingredient interacts with other ingredients as well as the character’s (and player’s?) skill to produce unique results (Saga of Ryzom)
- make crafting more worthwhile in the game then just an alternative method for producing goods you can kill stuff with – of course, this would imply that your game has more to it than just killing stuff (A Tale in the Desert)
- make crafting an absolutely integral part of the game – even if the game is mostly about killing things, without a strong guild economy you simply cannot purchase the goods required to kill things effectively (EVE Online)

Instead of integrating lessons learned from other games, even very old ones, into the latest and greatest YAFMMORPG, designers are snoring on with “new” ideas like “reverse engineering”, “slotted items” and “custom colourings”. All the while pandering to the idea that everyone should be able to be a top-of-their-grade crafter just by repeatedly clicking a button, and that crafting is just yet-another-stat-to-boost timesink.

See FFXI for an example of the wrong way to do things, or: “Ah just dropped all of mah gil and three hours on skillin’ up mah fishing from 0 to 0.9″.

Braack: the problem with “sometimes awesome” random properties is that only the awesome ones have any value on the player market. FFXI had a similar system where you could occasionally get a plus 1 version of what you were making, particularly if you had a higher skill than the recipe required. This led to only the plus 1 items having any value on the auction house…all those other attempts became little more than vendor trash.

Just make the finished product more valuable than the components. This is how it should be – it gives you a better reason to craft things yourself (cheaper to make yourself, and a way of making profit).

All you need to do is make the finished item actually useful, like Braack mentioned. Suerly the players wouldn’t price a stick of wood higher than a finished bow, if it was actually useful to say, an Archery skill?