Game Design On Making Crafting a System People Want to Interact With (hopefully useful constructive feedback)

So, over the past year or so, I've been thinking pretty extensively about the crafting system in this game.

For crafting as a whole, at least in my experience, it's simply far more time intensive than it has any need to be. Having tried a craftsman and seen the possibilities of crafted gear more recently, I would love to interact with this great system on other characters, but the sheer amount of mind-numbing busywork involved as opposed to just normal combat level progression just makes it an almost insurmountable barrier to entry, especially as gathering levels begin to take longer and longer later in the game.
Another issue I have found is that while for combat, you just get xp from everything because there’s always enemies and you don't need to actually pay attention to what content you're doing unless you want to level particularly fast, for harvesting, you need to seek out and engage with a very mundane and, daresay, lackluster system for a sometimes painful amount of time to make significant progress. While the first several levels are alright, from my experience and what I've heard from others is that the later levels just become a slog to continuing progressing your harvesting levels.

Some solutions I propose for this (although this is by no means comprehensive, and if you have a better idea, I would love to hear it) are to:

• Reduce the curve for xp requirements per level
• Increase harvesting speed across the board
• Provide more ways to get gathering xp (such as quest rewards even if the quest doesn’t expressly pertain to crafting)

I feel that some combination of these would make at least a little difference in the feeling of gathering resources. One other change that may help the player engage with the system is marking on the map what regions provide what level of what type of resource. Not necessarily down to specific nodes, but where are the highest density spots for different tiers of resources.

On the Skills Issue (sorry, I couldn't help myself)

The last issue I will address here is the sheer, almost meaningless feeling, number of different skills to level. I personally don’t see the need for gathering and crafting levels, as you need to level them more-or-less in tandem to actually keep up.
I feel this could be improved by removing crafting level requirements and instead have gear craft at whichever is lower between your combat level or the max level on the resources being used.

If any of you have any further ideas, I’d love to listen and discuss, I’m open to feedback on these ideas, I just want the crafting system to finally feel good.
Also, if any major changes affecting this grind do go through, maybe give max level craftsmen from before the changes a special icon by their name and special spot on the leaderboard, similar to old hardcore, to hopefully avoid cheapening their achievement in their eyes and others’.

 

What if we just made combat levels take longer to do while we are at it.

I agree on one hand, profession levels past level 60ish take too long to do without bombs.
But myself and many others see it as a fun challenge to get them towards 110-120 because it takes so long.

On the other, combat levels are stupidly fast.
Sometimes I wonder if the fast leveling prevents new players from being able to learn the mechanics of the game at their own pace.

If you learn fast it should be rewarded with the next level.
I think it would help new players greatly if getting to a higher level in both gear and understanding of the game go hand in hand.

 

I agree with the first and third bullet points. Most people would agree professions are too grindy, while pretty much everyone agrees with the third bullet point. I'm not too sure the second bullet point is possible solely because speed bombs exist, and these cannot be discarded or nerfed as easily because they cost real money.

The bigger impact to a less grindy professions I think would be crafting professions. It is now much harder (if you use trade market) to level up craftings solely because there is still no Crafting XP or other ways to level them up unlike Gathering XP. Material prices has risen a minimum of 4x, up to 10x+ since the introduction of Gathering XP solely because people don't have to spend much time gathering, which means less materials to flow around the player market. There is also much less players grinding ingredients due to mob totem nerfs and less Loot Bombs, but that's a different story. Also, who thinks crafting 100 potions to get 1 level at lv 110+ is a good way to play the game? You get way more interaction of the game by gathering instead of crafting.

 

I have tried a bit professions and can confirm this is a solid issue.

For the lack of ingredients in trade market, from my experience the main cause is that the demand is so small(maybe except mineral cinder, golden avia feather and soul essence etc, which are used in boss altars) it may take forever to have the ingredients sold.

Since trade market and bank slots are very limited(especially for unranked players) and it is extremely frustrating to see them not being sold, the only way is to sell them to blacksmith.

 

Maybe trade market ingredient specific slots?