How can we make crafting work in an MMO? There are players who will swear certain crafting systems are how you do it, but I'm not so much interested in the mechanics of crafting as the usefulness of it. Crafting is one of the oddest gaming components and one of the most painful to me, because it can't ever overtake raiding or grinding gear as a means for making gear, but at the same time, you have to have a use for it in order for it to be valuable.

WoW used to have a really good way to make crafting useful, which was that bosses could drop epic recipes. You could craft epic gear, from these recipes, and sell it on the auction house in order cash out on player's designs for some high level purps. The issue here is that kind of just, went away, and people care ever so little about crafting anymore.

That wasn't even a really good way to make it useful, since during Wrath of the Lich King, only a few guilds per server would have these recipes. It'd benefit like one person. The rest of producing crafting was useless, just like it is almost in every game. How do we make it better?

ArcheAge is nothing but crafting, but that's kind of different, since you can actually build useful things for the world like vehicles and it's an outlet into farming. Not every game though can have an ArcheAge style crafting system. If a game's primary purpose is combat, then crafting and combat are going to share fate together.

Yet - that might be the solution. Remove the idea of crafting gear, and instead, give a reason for crafting by making it the only avenue for a wealth of other things. Sure, blacksmithing is great, but what if a blacksmith could produce various equipment that provides power, but doesn't drop within dungeons? Say, horseshoes to make your horse move faster, or accessories that increase your character's power.

There is also tools, think games like Minecraft, Starbound, etc. where you build useful items that increase your ability to perform everyday functions. With games like EverQuest Next focusing on voxel technology, that route makes sense, but even without I think it’d be interesting if crafters each cross-contaminated and had to craft each other tools. Blacksmiths crafting axes for Miners or Alchemist creating fluids required to craft magical weapons. WoW has a little bit of this with enchanting, but I think it’d be great to extend it even further.

Ultimately, it’s critical that crafting have some value. WildStar is becoming relevant again considering its free-to-play launch, but, even then I don’t know. I found the crafting system to be awesome while leveling up, but again there is the whole point that you shouldn’t ever be able to farm something you need a raid group to fight and win, yet, without having a point, production for weapons, armors, and any equipment quickly becomes pointless.

It’s frustrating, because, I want to see big beautiful crafting systems where you have tiers of different crafters who either can craft almost anything to those who can craft what most people want or need, sort of like the balance in Wrath of the Lich King. Sadly though, I think that it’s hard to have that these days.

In times of old, crafting materials could be the very best materials, because crafting was as hard as raiding. You had to have the funds to be able to craft and it was limited to very few people who could make high quality items. In Dark Age of Camelot, the amount of stats an item had was linked to quality, which means you’d have to make lots and lots and lots of items to get the quality, which involved luck and working at it – which made it satisfying.

These days’ people aren’t going to want to make 100 items to get a good one, hating the developer for even thinking that. Yet, again, you need a reason to craft.

I probably don’t have enough ideas to fill a big enough bucket to make the best crafting system ever, but I think it’s a discussion we need to have more of and we need to really hound developers to think really hard into their crafting system, so that we can have a real MMO world where you can craft and it be useful and even have some prestige through the system.