by moe

If crafting is difficulty / time consuming / fun, then people will do it, but fewer will do it decreasing supply. Because it's so hard, you can make the rewards... more rewarding, increasing demand. Players who feel they "have to have" something crafted can work through alternate means (gaining currency / wealth) to exchange with a crafter, which can be done on a different timetable than leveling / working at crafting.

The extreme oversimplification of crafting in EverQuest II is why I left the game.

There was a time when not everyone had a complete set of max-level tradeskill alts, and you could actually make money crafting; people commissioned you for work, there was an economy of scarce resources and a need to decide what you should make out of the rare raw that took you several hours to find.

There was no heavy overabundance of bonus experience in order to hit the tradeskill level cap in 2-3 days; it took either a few weeks or maybe a couple of months to hit level 50 because of all the gathering and funding involved.

You weren't able to create items in bulk with one round of crafting; you had to construct pre-components out of fossil fuels for most alchemical recipes, you had to make each strongbox one-by-one, and demand was high all of the time because of these factors. Perhaps more importantly, mastercrafted gear and skills were actually worth something, because rares were actually rare and the gear was usually the best one could find excluding the (formerly) very rare Fabled-tier gear.

It feels like crafting as a profession was thrown away in the name of 'accessibility', for those that would rather spend most of their time in combat without putting any work or attention into crafting. I know it's probably odd, but I don't usually like the combat aspect of MMOs; I preferred the crafting/economic side and playing with the markets, and vanilla EQII is the last time I've been able to experience that kind of playstyle.

WE DO NOT NEED TO BE AFRAID OF COMPLICATED SUBSYSTEMS THAT ARE SECONDARY TO THE ENJOYMENT OF THE GAME.

WE DO NOT NEED TO DUMB DOWN EVERY SINGLE COMPONENT OF A GAME TO MAKE IT ACCESSIBLE.

PLAYERS NEED TO STOP WHINING THAT CONTENT ISN'T ACCESSIBLE TO THEM FOR TIME CONSTRAINTS IF AN ALTERNATIVE PRESENTS ITSELF.