Another lost level 60

[Kevin]

Actually Horizons did this

The game had some awful features but the crafting and the sense of creating stuff was excellent. The worst aspect of the game was the community. Not that they weren't pleasant people, they were exceedingly pleasant. But 99% of the community were hardcore crafters with no one to sell it to. Pretty much everything I could make after at month or at any time in the future was being dumped on the market for pennies by bored high level people. There was no pvp and high end content was very poor

But helping people make houses was a very interesting aspect. In WoW, I particularly would like to see a player built battleground, so the side with the hard-working crafters has stockades, steam tanks, minefields, and ramparts
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Yep, I played Horizons. When they fired the economists from the staff I knew there were going to be problems. They also had issues with low mob density and huge amounts of camping. The player driven ecomony didn't have any checks to help lowbies, the idea of local economies was broken when they caved and made travel way to easy, or forced travel to be able to anything so you had crafters flooding the consigners with stuff.

Horizons did crafting right (I helped build the machines at the end of beta at a low level even) but they believed they could add content faster than players could get to it. They didn't have stable enough servers for the world events they tried to pull off either. I don't think they ever delivered on the item customization either. The ability to make any weapon look the way you want it too without really changing the stats.

So yeah, I understand some of the reasoning behind WoW doing some of the stuff they did, if you keep the combat interesting you keep more of the hardcore around. But the only really worthwhile end game professions seem to be engineering, alchemy, and enchanting add in tailoring for the bags. The others seem very very marginal with high effort and low reward. I feel Blizzard designed them with a guild in mind. You have one armorsmith in the guild the rest of the guild feeds him. You have a couple of weaponsmiths who specialize in the right things, the rest of the guild feeds him. One tribal, one dragonscale, and one elemental leatherworker, the rest fo the guild feeds him. A casual player can't support those on their own, and having multiples in a guild doesn't seem to make a lot of sense either because of the high mat requirements. Sure some of the crafting is OK while leveling up, but most of it loses it's luster the farther into the game you get, and you can only get better at crafting by being fed or by engaging in high end combat to farm the stuff you need for it.