1) Everyone could make most stuff, just not very efficiently.
2) Even the endgame stuff that required specialisation could be made without ever having to make worthless stuff.
3) Everything makeable could be destroyed or consumed.
4) Everything could be recycled into a reasonable fraction of its materials.

Contrast this with Warcraft, where most stuff that most crafters make while levelling up can at best only be disenchanted. This is Not Fun and doesn’t contribute to the character feeling useful.

Eve limited crafting by availability of blueprints (and to a certain extent factory slots), rather than grinding time.

A similar paradigm holds true for the pvp gear.. its really good for pvmp.. and not as special for other things.

I like this because I don’t like the WoW paradigm where you go raid a ton and then go clean up people in an activity you weren’t even participating in prior. I also like how people with the best gear can still be easily killed if they step out of line, whereas in wow they became a one-man/woman army oftentimes.

At low levels, head to the bree crafting hall/michael delving in the shire. Guess what you find: quests that require you to seek out other crafters and have them make specific items for you. Now, most 1st characters will NOT have the cash to purchase these items, but many twinks will have plenty of money and will look to complete the quest simply to get the extra xp. Post the bronze armour, for example, on the AH for 50s and there is a good bet that somebody looking to complete the quest will buy it. Huge profit for you, but they are willing to make that sacrifice.

Next, So you are a mid-level character and all of the good armour you can make is 10 levels lower than you? No problem. Just head to a region for a corresponding level to your armour and market your product. You may not want that level 21 chestpiece when you are 33, but a newbie in the Lone Lands certainly will. The beauty of this plan is that even 1st time toons will ALWAYS have a surplus of cash from questing. Better yet, they probably will NOT know that they need 4.25g at level 35. It is ruthless (but not really since you are selling them a decent product) but you can pretty much strip them of all this coin

I will say that I feel LOTRO’s crafting is more useful, or relevant, than WoW was back when I played it. I’m of the opinion that if I’m going to bother putting in my time and effort to craft (which I don’t always do) then I should be able to craft darn good stuff and eventually the best out there. LOTRO typically keeps crafted gear more or less on par with quest rewards, and the end-game crafted gear is the best. Raid gear is slightly better but only seems to function better when you’re actually in a raid, from what I’m told, and I like that idea if it’s true.

I’m all for making crafting more meaningful, more relevant, and most importantly: more FUN. So far a system that is (more or less) universally fun has not been devised.

Then I thought, how long until someone writes a script to do this whole thing and crash the economy?

That’s the balancing act with crafting, isn’t it? Make producing goods a profitable proposition, and you open the door for gold farmers and OCD-grinders. Make it a fiscally losing proposition, and you make it an unappealing, pointless grind fest.

Age of Conan rectifies this somewhat by introducing random encounters in the gathering areas, which both spices up the grind of gathering and takes care of farm bots. There is a semi-functional mini-economy of gems due to crafted weapons and armour having gem slots by default. By and large, though, crafting is broken - there is a limited number of recipes, they make static items (as opposed to, say, UO, SWG or Ryzom, where the crafter’s skill and raw materials play into the equation), the items aren’t particularly good compared to drops or quest rewards, and the act of crafting is an uninspired, dull activity. So by and large, crafting is an unappealing activity within that game, too.

IMHO, there are two ways of making crafting a valuable activity. They’re actually pretty obvious.

#1: Make crafting a fun and challenging activity in and of itself. By attaching, say, an action-puzzle sequence to the act of crafting and causing the end-result to vary in quality dependent on the player’s performance in the sequence, you fix the problem of craft-bots while providing additional challenge and entertainment for the player. Further, crafting becomes dependent both on character- and player-skill. See AoC’s “active combat” system.

#2: By making crafting a complex centerpiece of your game, you can create gameplay centred around game economy and communal progress. In these cases, you make it okay for the player to profit from potentially repetitious crafting activities, because there are so many different steps and varieties that the player can explore there is no need to worry the players will get bored. If you’re a savvy designer, you can facilitate the act of crafting such that core gameplay is directed away from repetitious manipulation of the GUI and towards social interaction with other players - establishing trade agreements, forging alliances, waging economic warfare, competing for raw material and so on. See EVE Online (automated factories, anyone?) and A Tale in the Desert for prominent examples.

There’s some recipes that can only be picked up in raids, along with materials that can only be picked up in raids, but which create BoE items that can be sold on the market for more than the sum of their component parts. However, these are few and far between, and begin to be devalued as more people on a given server learn the recipe.

I think the developers are, for the most part, giving up on making crafting into a moneymaking profession. They know now that people will almost always lose money on professions, and are instead trying to give them something for all their effort.

That said, my first toon that I really leveled up was an explorer. I made fat heaps of cash selling ore that I had almost no use for. I also found it very easy to make leather (hunter) for myself as I leveled. The common recipes were mediocre, but rare recipes outclassed the great majority of quested armor drops as I went. I was not all that hardcore about my crafting, and I was wearing mostly crafted armor all the way up. Drops were never better than what I made, quested stuff sometimes was.

I have played many MMOs where it was either a much worse grind to level crafting or where the great majority of what you could craft was utterly sucky compared to common drops. I have also played a few MMOs that had better crafting, but I’d put LoTRO in my top 5 overall.