Quality of crafting items and how raw materials affect the outcome.

DesertFang

Not sure if this has been discussed in detail, however, as a long time fan of the early Star Wars Galaxies universe one of my favorite mechanics of the game was that crafting items had variable outcomes based on the quality of the input items.

To me this lead to an incredibly vivid and life like economy inside the game. At early stages of crafting, typically all you cared about was crafting the item, throw it on the Bazzar and someone would eventually buy it as a cheap option for a weapon upgrade or intro weapon into developing your current class.

I personally find this an attractive idea as it incentivizes high quality input items as a standard for any successful tradesman. Not only does this raise the quality of items and give a deeper purpose to crafting, but it is deeply rewarding to source out the highest quality input items and have your output item hit that next level of quality. Being able to sell the same items as a crafter is typical in any crafting situations of an MMO, but to be able to source those high quality inputs and put yourself over on your competition and create a name for yourself to me is truly what crafting should be in an MMO.

I remember traveling across the entire soloar system in SWG just to purchase some of the best weapons in terms of quality and effectiveness from a woman name WolfMother who would only deal in high end/ High quality weapons. It really put an awesome atmosphere around crafting and made people feel proud of their work rather than just being a factory pumping out items as long as you have the materials to do so.

Just my two cents, I think this level of depth would go a long way to really allow a true economy to unfold in game and give people who just want to craft and explore that side of the game a sense of true purpose to go above and beyond a typical recipe.

Dygz

"I think Star Wars Galaxies had a great crafting system... The resource gathering and the crafting system altogether as a whole really was I think way beyond its time. That's kind of the direction we want to go, where there's choices to be made in the crafting system and those choices change what you end up with... It's not just about doing X recipe to get Y item. You know, there's actually thought involved in it and there is you know a market to be captured based on those decisions."
---Jeffrey