So you spend over a year to gather the mats to build the ultimate weapon (or what ever), then three days later you have to throw it away and start gathering again.
Another option is having to hone the worn out item to making it keep doing max damage etc. However do not make it like one system that I rage quit over. Were this ends up having you hone it every time your in town emptying your never enough room, backpack. Problem is every time you hone the item you halve its life. The game I played, I ended up having not enough money to buy another weapon and not having a weapon because I honed it too often.
Produce a game with any of these features and I will not play, sorry!
We are aiming for 30 minutes of gametime to produce a weapon that lasts a minimum of 3 days of hard use. Not a year to make a weapon that lasts 3 days. If you want to make crafting relevent, there has to be durability.
I think everything is a matter of degree. Our current implementation has it at plus/minus 10%. So the best possible item you could make would be 20% better than the absolute worst item you could make (assuming same material used). There is RNG in the middle, but your skill compared to the difficulty of the item has the biggest effect.
During the good period of UO crafting ( pre-AOS), the problem was that because you were making 500 katanas very easily, any that came out non-exceptional were considered garbage and had no sale value. In our system, by limiting the amount you can make ( by time), sure it will suck if you roll 01 and end up with a low quality weapon ( minus 10) but there will always be a market for it because there just aren´t that many being produced.
The other part is hard to explain outside the context of our other game systems, but to put it in simple terms, there will be a small, but meaningful amount of your combat time that is spent ´cleaning up´ non-threatening mob camps, depending on how you want to play the game, this could even be the majority of your combat time... so they wouldn´t need the exceptional weapons and would probably prefer to buy the cheaper sword to kill a few mongbats while mining.
We are still debating the repair issue. As you said, at times it just gets annoying to keep track of. Still not decided, but my opinion is that a sword just degrades until it breaks. At any point before it breaks you can smelt it and get a portion of the metal back. I´ve seen a lot of systems like you mentioned where you walk the max durability downwards as you repair it, and the damage it does is a % of its current durability compared to it´s max durability. But it never made sense to me that a 50/50 sword would do more damage than a 85/90 sword, and overall the math is just too counter-intuitive to players... I repaired this sword and it lowered it´s max durability??
the aurora world has mini games on the crafting...if ure blacksmith u would have to keep the temerature by heating coolibng etc if it gets to hot or cold the craft would fail also while keaping the temp u need to increase the quality on the item for higher chance to get a quality item...thats really the only i can think off as far as mini games goes in crafting
I do rather enjoy crafting in Achaea, mainly because its text-based and you can add a custom description to nearly everything you create. This cloak my character wears, for example:
Made from the finest silk and velvet, this cloak is soft to the touch and hangs within an inch or so from the ground. The hood is made of simple white velvet with black lining. The only decoration on this cloak rests on the back. Growing from the ground up is the Great Oak that resides in Eleusis with a bronze miniature axe crossing over a bronze sword, marking the Rangers of Eleusis.
I like what I see in here. Something I wanted to touch on
Lets talk about durability:
in uncharted waters 2(SNES, OLDSCHOOL!!!!) if your ships were damaged either by storms or battles, the durability could be repaired, but only within a few points of current durability. so if your Sloop had a durability of 50 and after a battle it's now 48, you could go ashore and bring her back to 50. but lets say after the battle you run into a storm, and it brings the durability down to 42, then you would prolly only get the durability back to a 45. if you used that concept , then how often a player had his blade/armor repaired would determine how long the life of the equipment, of course skills in repair would come into play as well.
Over all, Crafters want to feel needed. one of the best things I liked about wurm, darkfall, and haven and hearth was that for the most part everything was player crafted. guilds had teams of people crafting always to keep their armory in stock. Now the games I mentioned also had another plus for crafters was the fact that since it was full loot systems, then had to A. keep stock up. and B. have different levels and qualities of stock(for PVE and PVP)
Far too long gaming studios in my humble opinion have neglected the crafter.
it would seem that echoes of the past should direct our game makers, unfortunately I just don't see that.
as far as durability goes, here is my post from the CU forums:
This is my take on how the repairing can work. It is based on following facts: 1. As it was said in FP, everyone has ability to repair their eq, even noncrafters. 2. Items have to get replaced eventually, nothing is permanent.
Each item would have 3 stats: Max Durability - this is durability of this item when it is brand new, just created and never used. It would be great if besides being set by recipe it would be also affected by materials used and quality reached during crafting. Current Max Durability - maximum durability repairs restore it to. Current Durability - actual durability, would be a decimal variable which would only be shown as a integer (e.g. 10.8 would just show 10).
For a new item, all 3 numbers would be equal. Each time you use a weapon, it get damaged for e.g. 0.1 durability per damage done (real number would be set during testing based on average/max damage done a and average/max durability of items) and armor for 0.1 durability per damage received.
(Following paragraph would be optional, you can set decrease for each repair to one fixed number) When durability would be low (see below), you would repair an item, restoring its Current Durability to Current Max Durability. Based on who would repair it, it would affect Current Max Durability like this: Item repaired by noncrafter or crafter with skill lower then skill needed/recommended to craft this item: Current Max Durability - 10. Item repaired by crafter with sufficient skill, but not its creator: Current Max Durability -5. Item repaired by its creator: Current Max Durability -2.
Therefore the more you would repair an item, the less effective would the repair be, forcing you to replace an item eventually.
Lowered durability would affect how "effective" an item is: lets say up to 50% of Current durability, item would be at 100% strength, then it would lose 2% of strength for every 1% of durability below 50%. (actual item strength = base item strength * (Min(1;2*(Current Durability/Max Durability))) ) All together it means that after some time would item be so "worn out" that even freshly repaired would have lowered strength (because Current Max Durability would be lower than 50% of Max Durability).
Games vary in how important crafting is. . ranging from WOW where crafting is an afterthought, to games like early UO or SW where crafting was a big part of the economy.
The problem is, in all those cases, you basically pressed a button and instantly had the item. There was no ´game´ to actually crafting the item.
Are there any games that have any type of mini-game aspect to crafting?
FFXIV mechanic is actually pretty good until you get maxed out and it becomes more of a rotation. Crafting impact on economy is minor
ArcheAge has putrid crafting (click/combine/nofail/random proc) but the gathering is difficult and the material lists get complex, and crafters should drive the economy
Nothing remotely comparable to SWG on the market.
Yeah, RNG is never a good way to make things interesting when used alone.
Originally posted by bcbully Age of Wushu has about 17 professions, all with mini games plus no two items have the same stats. Pretty cool system.
mini game is more like raise change to crit on that craft, plus if you like bejewel you are pretty good on this, and in the end is more like a rush to get mats from dungeon or recipes to make the equips, but the upgrade system is too random , but you can pay RL cash to change the stats so right now is more pay to win then anything(plus teh only way to get some sets are by buying from CS and most skills set from it are better then the "free" ones)
the crafting I liked more was from FF14 before the re-launch,having to make everything then assemble the things was kinda of feels right
Arche age crafting is pretty solid too since you need to or collect from the world (with is random, save for vein ores nodes) or have a farm plant it then collect when its done, plus the list of items plus crafts are pretty big, one thing I liked here too is the trades you can do, you can craft the trade item then deliver, but one thing I saw here was a whole guild together moving trade packs to a fleet of ships so they could build a castle or something was pretty nice to see, plus you can in worse case sell your labor points for people who want to build homes, ships or the big things, who take a lot of time and need several people to complete.
UO I liked too but was more like do bulk orders to get the good crafting tools so you can have a chance to amke something good, but the good part was if you wanted to gather and collect the whole time without even having to do combat you could and would be rich the same way a person combat oriented.
Fallen earth also had a good crafting system, same way as you need to gather, disasemble items, and you can make from xbows, pistols, rifles, to raise horses and build vehicles, only thing I spend more was making ammo for my pistols and rifles then anything else, but it was a solid craft, right now the game is F2P(I belive this game still exist lol) but from what I saw for you have a really good feeling on crafting you need to be a premium player
so on today standards I guess arche age have the better on this. but hey I guess its more like a pick your poison then anything else.
Aion has the success/fail system that makes it possible for you to fail crafting by chance and the ability to grind up crafting without having to grind for materials.
Everquest 2 has a minigame system that requires input from you to ensure that you do well and craft the item, as well as a skill tree devoted to crafting and gathering materials that can increase the chances of finding rare materials or make it so that a successful craft with no durability loss has a chance to fully refund all materials.
Guild Wars 2 has a system that makes it impossible to fail crafting and allows you to craft with items stored in your bank as well as craft faster the more you craft one particular item.
Neverwinter has a crafting system that allows you to craft items while you are out adventuring or away from your computer that also allows you to craft multilpe items simultaneously.
For the flak and criticism Neverwinter gets, I think it has by far the most "interesting" system to date due to the whole "adventure and craft multiple items simultaneously" deal by allowing you to no longer decide between the two.
I know I gona get flamed for this but Wildstar has a really great system thats not for the faint of heart. It has depth in many ways. No two crafters will be the same even if they both pick say weapon smith. It will take a lot of work to really get to top tier crafting. Also you get to play with how each crafted item turns out, so you can really target the customers you want. Here is a video that goes over it... CLICK HERE and let the flaming start!!!
Honestly the mini-game or last step in the manufacturing process doesn't have to be all that complicated or that distracting. It's enough to drop in some added interaction like hitting a specific key/button or something that requires you to add a reagent/flux at a random stage of the crafting action. Beyond that there isn't much reason to make the manufacturing process a game in and of itself.
Gathering resources could also use some improvements. If you take queues from Ryzom, you first search for the resource through prospecting. This searching the ground around you for resources and depending upon your skills you can pull up good quality material nodes or not. Then comes gathering, the node has it's own form of health, duration and such which all fall depending upon how you pull these nodes. You can forcefully pull the nodes which is faster and can pull up more resources but you get a lower quality; on the flip side you gather carefully and pull up higher quality but lower quantity resources. All the while the health and volatility of the node are dropping which means you may have to 'repair' the node which takes up time (thus the total amount of time the node lives) but stops it from exploding in your face, doing damage and dropping the overall quality of the resources you continue to pull.
Where I feel alot of MMOs don't put any effort into or at least make it less monotonous is in the resource refining process. Sure, you go out and get the resources and eventually make them into the consumer goods but why should I need to sit in front of a refining station for 30 minutes refining this cotton. For example, in Archeage you can plant a 16*16 and an 8*8 (large and small scarecrow farm) with cotton and you'll need to refine this to something like 250 fabric. Each fabric takes nearly 3 seconds to complete (this might change at higher level proficiencies but not by much) which means you're spending nearly 15 minutes doing nothing but watching a cast bar fill up 250 times and that's neither interesting or immersive.
GW2 at least saw this and did something to remedy it where each additional resource you refine goes faster, to an extent, but you could do said 250 refines in under a minute because of how fast it would speed up.
In the end, I don't think crafting has to be hard but it does need to require interaction beyond hitting the 'craft' button. I also feel as though developers ignore a crucial part of the process which is resource gathering and I think that's a huge mistake. I have yet to find a game with a better system of resource gathering than Ryzom and even the crafting isn't bad because it uses the different qualities that someone can pull up from nodes which can create custom versions of gear. FFXIV looks to have some great crafting but I have yet to get into that game so I'm at a loss in that department.
The only two crafting systems I've ever found fun or interesting is EQ2 and ESO.
Rift, WoW, GW2 etc. are all just terrible cookie cutter after thought crafting additions imo. This is coming from a pretty big fan of Rift too, the crafting in a lot of games needs work. EQ2 is probably the best I have seen.
EQ1 wasn't bad either.
Currently Playing: ESO and FFXIV Have played: You name it If you mention rose tinted glasses, you better be referring to Mitch Hedberg.
Originally posted by Nanfoodle I know I gona get flamed for this but Wildstar has a really great system thats not for the faint of heart. It has depth in many ways. No two crafters will be the same even if they both pick say weapon smith. It will take a lot of work to really get to top tier crafting. Also you get to play with how each crafted item turns out, so you can really target the customers you want. Here is a video that goes over it... CLICK HERE and let the flaming start!!!
Wildstar does indeed have a deep and rewarding crafting system. Unfortunately, a lot of people won't care because you can't craft best in slot armor and weapons. Its too bad some people can't seem to get past that in mmos. Nevermind all the customization, housing and furniture, best in slot while leveling, best consumables and of course the crafted augments for best in slot drops. They just wont ever get it. Stuck in a mindset where they think they know whats best.
You could tell them that crafting is a single click snoozefest but if its best in slot it would be the greatest crafting system ever. /sigh
Atlantica has the deepest crafting system and the most unique.
Let's say you want to craft armor for all your mercenaries. You can set 15 pieces at a time. The more you set the higher the workload.
You can farm the mats or buy them off the market (player driven economy), most mats are cheap.
After you set your craft, you go do regular battles to contribute to your craft workload until its finished. You have a random chance to craft a range from +0 to +10, which is what makes it so addicting.
Originally posted by Torvaldr What good is crafting second rate junk? Crafting is generally a huge gold and time sink. I don't think it's fair to deride people that find second-rate progression unsatisfying especially when investing a lot of time and resources that might better be spent elsewhere. It's a role playing game. A huge aspect of that is improving your character. I think a player does know what's best and not accepting mediocre progression doesn't mean they are short-sighted or don't know what is best for their characters. Most crafting systems,whether simplistic click factories, or interesting complex systems are ancillary at best or worst.In Rift I am a capped crafter in all professions except Dreamweaving. Nothing is particularly useful about that considering the massive plat investment it takes to get there. It has cost me thousands of plat in consumables and resources to get there. World gear easily supercedes my crafted gear. The runes aren't bad. Most of the rest is mediocre at best and very expensive to produce.Wanting a fun crafting system that is also valuable and vital aren't mutually exclusive. They are mutually exclusive to raid-centric treadmill progression.
Fact is, most decent crafting systems offer much more than just best in slot. And it is unfair to condemn an entire crafting/gathering/economy as "second rate" just because you can't personally create the best weapon in the game.
Take for example FFXIV. No I cannot craft gear as powerful as top tier raids, but the other 99.9% of the game, I can craft the absolute best. Nearly ten months since launch and I still can't keep my vendors supplied fast enough. I purchased my own plot, have my own house, and millions in the bank from crafting and gathering.
So if someone chooses to dismiss a deep crafting system because of less than 1% of the items in the game are out of their reach, I don't think that is the game's fault. I think its actually pretty short sighted.
Comments
We are aiming for 30 minutes of gametime to produce a weapon that lasts a minimum of 3 days of hard use. Not a year to make a weapon that lasts 3 days. If you want to make crafting relevent, there has to be durability.
I think everything is a matter of degree. Our current implementation has it at plus/minus 10%. So the best possible item you could make would be 20% better than the absolute worst item you could make (assuming same material used). There is RNG in the middle, but your skill compared to the difficulty of the item has the biggest effect.
During the good period of UO crafting ( pre-AOS), the problem was that because you were making 500 katanas very easily, any that came out non-exceptional were considered garbage and had no sale value. In our system, by limiting the amount you can make ( by time), sure it will suck if you roll 01 and end up with a low quality weapon ( minus 10) but there will always be a market for it because there just aren´t that many being produced.
The other part is hard to explain outside the context of our other game systems, but to put it in simple terms, there will be a small, but meaningful amount of your combat time that is spent ´cleaning up´ non-threatening mob camps, depending on how you want to play the game, this could even be the majority of your combat time... so they wouldn´t need the exceptional weapons and would probably prefer to buy the cheaper sword to kill a few mongbats while mining.
We are still debating the repair issue. As you said, at times it just gets annoying to keep track of. Still not decided, but my opinion is that a sword just degrades until it breaks. At any point before it breaks you can smelt it and get a portion of the metal back. I´ve seen a lot of systems like you mentioned where you walk the max durability downwards as you repair it, and the damage it does is a % of its current durability compared to it´s max durability. But it never made sense to me that a 50/50 sword would do more damage than a 85/90 sword, and overall the math is just too counter-intuitive to players... I repaired this sword and it lowered it´s max durability??
i was in closed beta of eq2 and we had a "saying" that most dangerous mob in the game is the alchemy table
MSI GE70 - i7-4700MQ, GeForce GT 750M, 8gb ram, 750gb 7200RPM HDD and 128gb SSD
first of all, there is quite a few mmorgs where everything is crafted, not only items on higher levels.
second, it isnt really a crafting mechanism.
I do rather enjoy crafting in Achaea, mainly because its text-based and you can add a custom description to nearly everything you create. This cloak my character wears, for example:
Made from the finest silk and velvet, this cloak is soft to the touch and hangs within an inch or so from the ground. The hood is made of simple white velvet with black lining. The only decoration on this cloak rests on the back. Growing from the ground up is the Great Oak that resides in Eleusis with a bronze miniature axe crossing over a bronze sword, marking the Rangers of Eleusis.
I like what I see in here. Something I wanted to touch on
Lets talk about durability:
in uncharted waters 2(SNES, OLDSCHOOL!!!!) if your ships were damaged either by storms or battles, the durability could be repaired, but only within a few points of current durability. so if your Sloop had a durability of 50 and after a battle it's now 48, you could go ashore and bring her back to 50. but lets say after the battle you run into a storm, and it brings the durability down to 42, then you would prolly only get the durability back to a 45. if you used that concept , then how often a player had his blade/armor repaired would determine how long the life of the equipment, of course skills in repair would come into play as well.
Over all, Crafters want to feel needed. one of the best things I liked about wurm, darkfall, and haven and hearth was that for the most part everything was player crafted. guilds had teams of people crafting always to keep their armory in stock. Now the games I mentioned also had another plus for crafters was the fact that since it was full loot systems, then had to A. keep stock up. and B. have different levels and qualities of stock(for PVE and PVP)
Far too long gaming studios in my humble opinion have neglected the crafter.
it would seem that echoes of the past should direct our game makers, unfortunately I just don't see that.
To Protect The Helpless From The Heartless
as far as durability goes, here is my post from the CU forums:
This is my take on how the repairing can work. It is based on following facts:
1. As it was said in FP, everyone has ability to repair their eq, even noncrafters.
2. Items have to get replaced eventually, nothing is permanent.
Each item would have 3 stats:
Max Durability - this is durability of this item when it is brand new, just created and never used. It would be great if besides being set by recipe it would be also affected by materials used and quality reached during crafting.
Current Max Durability - maximum durability repairs restore it to.
Current Durability - actual durability, would be a decimal variable which would only be shown as a integer (e.g. 10.8 would just show 10).
For a new item, all 3 numbers would be equal. Each time you use a weapon, it get damaged for e.g. 0.1 durability per damage done (real number would be set during testing based on average/max damage done a and average/max durability of items) and armor for 0.1 durability per damage received.
(Following paragraph would be optional, you can set decrease for each repair to one fixed number)
When durability would be low (see below), you would repair an item, restoring its Current Durability to Current Max Durability. Based on who would repair it, it would affect Current Max Durability like this:
Item repaired by noncrafter or crafter with skill lower then skill needed/recommended to craft this item: Current Max Durability - 10.
Item repaired by crafter with sufficient skill, but not its creator: Current Max Durability -5.
Item repaired by its creator: Current Max Durability -2.
Therefore the more you would repair an item, the less effective would the repair be, forcing you to replace an item eventually.
Lowered durability would affect how "effective" an item is: lets say up to 50% of Current durability, item would be at 100% strength, then it would lose 2% of strength for every 1% of durability below 50%.
(actual item strength = base item strength * (Min(1;2*(Current Durability/Max Durability))) )
All together it means that after some time would item be so "worn out" that even freshly repaired would have lowered strength (because Current Max Durability would be lower than 50% of Max Durability).
Yeah, RNG is never a good way to make things interesting when used alone.
mini game is more like raise change to crit on that craft, plus if you like bejewel you are pretty good on this, and in the end is more like a rush to get mats from dungeon or recipes to make the equips, but the upgrade system is too random , but you can pay RL cash to change the stats so right now is more pay to win then anything(plus teh only way to get some sets are by buying from CS and most skills set from it are better then the "free" ones)
the crafting I liked more was from FF14 before the re-launch,having to make everything then assemble the things was kinda of feels right
Arche age crafting is pretty solid too since you need to or collect from the world (with is random, save for vein ores nodes) or have a farm plant it then collect when its done, plus the list of items plus crafts are pretty big, one thing I liked here too is the trades you can do, you can craft the trade item then deliver, but one thing I saw here was a whole guild together moving trade packs to a fleet of ships so they could build a castle or something was pretty nice to see, plus you can in worse case sell your labor points for people who want to build homes, ships or the big things, who take a lot of time and need several people to complete.
UO I liked too but was more like do bulk orders to get the good crafting tools so you can have a chance to amke something good, but the good part was if you wanted to gather and collect the whole time without even having to do combat you could and would be rich the same way a person combat oriented.
Fallen earth also had a good crafting system, same way as you need to gather, disasemble items, and you can make from xbows, pistols, rifles, to raise horses and build vehicles, only thing I spend more was making ammo for my pistols and rifles then anything else, but it was a solid craft, right now the game is F2P(I belive this game still exist lol) but from what I saw for you have a really good feeling on crafting you need to be a premium player
so on today standards I guess arche age have the better on this. but hey I guess its more like a pick your poison then anything else.
Depends on your definition of "interesting".
Aion has the success/fail system that makes it possible for you to fail crafting by chance and the ability to grind up crafting without having to grind for materials.
Everquest 2 has a minigame system that requires input from you to ensure that you do well and craft the item, as well as a skill tree devoted to crafting and gathering materials that can increase the chances of finding rare materials or make it so that a successful craft with no durability loss has a chance to fully refund all materials.
Guild Wars 2 has a system that makes it impossible to fail crafting and allows you to craft with items stored in your bank as well as craft faster the more you craft one particular item.
Neverwinter has a crafting system that allows you to craft items while you are out adventuring or away from your computer that also allows you to craft multilpe items simultaneously.
For the flak and criticism Neverwinter gets, I think it has by far the most "interesting" system to date due to the whole "adventure and craft multiple items simultaneously" deal by allowing you to no longer decide between the two.
Since when is Tuesday a direction?
Honestly the mini-game or last step in the manufacturing process doesn't have to be all that complicated or that distracting. It's enough to drop in some added interaction like hitting a specific key/button or something that requires you to add a reagent/flux at a random stage of the crafting action. Beyond that there isn't much reason to make the manufacturing process a game in and of itself.
Gathering resources could also use some improvements. If you take queues from Ryzom, you first search for the resource through prospecting. This searching the ground around you for resources and depending upon your skills you can pull up good quality material nodes or not. Then comes gathering, the node has it's own form of health, duration and such which all fall depending upon how you pull these nodes. You can forcefully pull the nodes which is faster and can pull up more resources but you get a lower quality; on the flip side you gather carefully and pull up higher quality but lower quantity resources. All the while the health and volatility of the node are dropping which means you may have to 'repair' the node which takes up time (thus the total amount of time the node lives) but stops it from exploding in your face, doing damage and dropping the overall quality of the resources you continue to pull.
Where I feel alot of MMOs don't put any effort into or at least make it less monotonous is in the resource refining process. Sure, you go out and get the resources and eventually make them into the consumer goods but why should I need to sit in front of a refining station for 30 minutes refining this cotton. For example, in Archeage you can plant a 16*16 and an 8*8 (large and small scarecrow farm) with cotton and you'll need to refine this to something like 250 fabric. Each fabric takes nearly 3 seconds to complete (this might change at higher level proficiencies but not by much) which means you're spending nearly 15 minutes doing nothing but watching a cast bar fill up 250 times and that's neither interesting or immersive.
GW2 at least saw this and did something to remedy it where each additional resource you refine goes faster, to an extent, but you could do said 250 refines in under a minute because of how fast it would speed up.
In the end, I don't think crafting has to be hard but it does need to require interaction beyond hitting the 'craft' button. I also feel as though developers ignore a crucial part of the process which is resource gathering and I think that's a huge mistake. I have yet to find a game with a better system of resource gathering than Ryzom and even the crafting isn't bad because it uses the different qualities that someone can pull up from nodes which can create custom versions of gear. FFXIV looks to have some great crafting but I have yet to get into that game so I'm at a loss in that department.
The only two crafting systems I've ever found fun or interesting is EQ2 and ESO.
Rift, WoW, GW2 etc. are all just terrible cookie cutter after thought crafting additions imo. This is coming from a pretty big fan of Rift too, the crafting in a lot of games needs work. EQ2 is probably the best I have seen.
EQ1 wasn't bad either.
Currently Playing: ESO and FFXIV
Have played: You name it
If you mention rose tinted glasses, you better be referring to Mitch Hedberg.
Wildstar does indeed have a deep and rewarding crafting system. Unfortunately, a lot of people won't care because you can't craft best in slot armor and weapons. Its too bad some people can't seem to get past that in mmos. Nevermind all the customization, housing and furniture, best in slot while leveling, best consumables and of course the crafted augments for best in slot drops. They just wont ever get it. Stuck in a mindset where they think they know whats best.
You could tell them that crafting is a single click snoozefest but if its best in slot it would be the greatest crafting system ever. /sigh
Atlantica has the deepest crafting system and the most unique.
Let's say you want to craft armor for all your mercenaries. You can set 15 pieces at a time. The more you set the higher the workload.
You can farm the mats or buy them off the market (player driven economy), most mats are cheap.
After you set your craft, you go do regular battles to contribute to your craft workload until its finished. You have a random chance to craft a range from +0 to +10, which is what makes it so addicting.
Fact is, most decent crafting systems offer much more than just best in slot. And it is unfair to condemn an entire crafting/gathering/economy as "second rate" just because you can't personally create the best weapon in the game.
Take for example FFXIV. No I cannot craft gear as powerful as top tier raids, but the other 99.9% of the game, I can craft the absolute best. Nearly ten months since launch and I still can't keep my vendors supplied fast enough. I purchased my own plot, have my own house, and millions in the bank from crafting and gathering.
So if someone chooses to dismiss a deep crafting system because of less than 1% of the items in the game are out of their reach, I don't think that is the game's fault. I think its actually pretty short sighted.