I played WoW for a while, and found crafting to be a mixture of "must-haves" and "stupid grinding." You relied entirely on benevolent developers to put a little bit of content out that would allow crafters to compete with whatever amazing gear the newest patch delivered. Sometimes you'd have to craft a bunch of a type of item for a specific boss, like all the fire-resist gear needed for some of the early raids. That wasn't too bad, since it became more of a guild activity. But for individuals, it meant you had to make a bunch of unmarketable gear from expensive parts just to raise your skill.
I was an engineer on my first character, and it was wacky funtimes. Very little of it was useful, but it had some entertaining qualities and occasionally a nice synergy with my class. The later crafting improvements picked up on this and started implementing various niche and novelty items. It would have been nice to be able to repair gear as well as create it, for those long dungeons.
One skill that always seems to be in demand is alchemy. The products are consumable, so there is always a consistent demand, and players are willing to fork out for that tiny extra push that may net them the better gear. Even in offline RPGs like Oblivion, alchemy was an indispensable skill.
If I had to design a crafting system for RPGs, I'd promote the idea of class (or race) synergies. While that barbarian *could* choose to sew dresses and pick flowers, you'd think he would have an inherent understanding of weapon and armor crafting. The skills would just be an extension of the class. For talent-tree based RPGs, there could be related crafting-trees that players invest skill points into with each level. Switching would be an expensive but not necessarily time-consuming choice, and the different classes could overlap in potential crafting-trees so a small group players could enjoy some diversity.
Material gathering should, IMO, not take up a crafting-skill spot. In fact, it's just a crappy skill. I shouldn't have to spend days grinding up herbalism just because the particular leaf I want to pick is found beside particularly ornery bears.
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Topic: Crafting in (MMO)RPGs (Read 3525 times)