Useful and meaningful crafting system

[Kevin]

I joined Horizons quite late. At that point the game had become a little pointless since there were far more crafters than demand so all you were was a lowbie who would take an hour to make something a level 100 could make in 20 seconds. Because of the general lack of demand the level 100s did make low level items

Basically the equation is simple. The ability of high level crafters to provide goods need to approximately match the demand

Horizons failed to provide a satisfying economy because everything was glutted except buildings and people couldn't be bothered to build buildings as they weren't exciting enough. Building a castle to stave off an orc invasion that would have a realistic chance of winning would have been fun. Helping someone build a Large House because they fancy having one but can't be bothered to build it themselves because it takes ages isn't fun

WoW fails to provide a satisfying economy because it's so adventurer-oriented. Most adventurers much prefer to get a good item from a drop than from a crafter. Secondly it has standardised items. Arcanite Reaper may be fairly hard to make but all Arcanite Reapers are the same quality. If it was as hard to make but the stats varied then people would want many more made so they could get one from the top 10%. This would (to continue this example) mean that the price multiplies by 10 which both customers and suppliers would see as a nerf, even if the average stats remained the same. From the suppliers point of view it means you make some good some bad and some average ones and can only sell the good ones. From the customer's point of view the average price goes up.

They could introduce variable stats to new uber items but even so it only matters if crafted items are better than drops. If they did allow crafters to make an exceptionally high stat Uber Atomiser of Uberness then the end game becomes about who has access to a high level Swordsmith, enough access so that if the smith makes 10 swords he puts the best aside for you. This means being the king of end game pvp depends not on player skill, not on pvp ranking, not on successful raiding but on who you know. I don't expect them to do this in WoW for the simple reason that none of this is new information to the game designers, it's all old considerations that they reviewed and discarded as part of making WoW an incredibly easy game to excel in. Since they are in the business of satisfying egos it's important to the business that people don't become discouraged

SWG remains my favourite mmo for crafting, even though it's a long time now since I played. Basically each resource had variable stats. You used the best possible resource to make your uber item. And crafters who assiduously surveyed for resources and stockpiled them made better items than anyone else. Adventurers could find uber loot which was essentially a really good resource for a crafter to use. And stuff fell apart after you had had it a while, especially if you died a lot (pvp exempt from decay though)
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Yes Horizons had failings that ruined the idea of the crafting system and many other things. However many of the ideas could have worked if there weren't so many fatal implementation flaws.

SWG sounds like it did some of the same stuff as Rhyzom. You could spend time looking for better mats but the stuff that was made with the lesser mats was still good enough that you wouldn't just turn it down. I really enjoyed that a piece of armor needed a lining, a binding agent, a hard armor substance, and something else (most crafted items took 4 things) and that if I needed a total of 10 binding agents I could 3 different ones that were either the same quality level but differnet types or even different quality levels of the same type. And again everything you used affected color, armor value modifiers, shape, etc. If you used bug shells it looked different than if you used wood. But I didn't play the game past a lot of the early stages so I don't know how bad it fell apart.

But yeah it's hard to find a game with a worse crafting system than WoW. :)