So in theory, a level-one character could be the best fisherman in the world, never having done a single thing in the game but to fish.

Except. Except in low-level areas, where level-one characters can fish safely, you can only catch certain low-level fish. The fish you can catch in a given lake depend not at all on your skill as a fisherman; it’s geographic. So while a level-one character could be the best fisherman in the world, he still couldn’t actually DO anything other than fish up the same low-level fish that any other player could catch. He couldn’t even catch them FASTER or MORE EFFICIENTLY, because the game doesn’t reward fishing skill that way. All your fishing skill does is let you fish successfully in higher-level areas. So in order to catch valuable fish, you have to be able to get to (and more to the point, survive) higher-level areas. Which means it’s really linked to player level after all, and the only way to raise your player level is through experience points, and experience points are earned only through killing mobs or questing, and questing is almost exclusively about killing mobs.

So while there’s nothing stopping you from creating a level-one character with the goal of being a great fisherman, in order to do anything useful, you’re shunted right back into the kill-ten-boars model of gameplay that you were specifically trying to get away from this time.

I guess what I’m really trying to say here is that sometimes — lately, often — I get the urge to try different things in the great big open sandbox that is World of Warcraft … and despite there being quite a lot of lip-service to alternative ways of playing the game, there really aren’t any viable paths that don’t revolve around mass boar genocide.

Here’s an example. I have an alt in World of Warcraft who’s a tailor. He’s really not anything other than a tailor, because he’s a death knight, and after about a week I discovered that I really don’t enjoy playing a death knight. So he sits around town, takes the cloth I collect on my other character or buy on the auction house and makes bags to sell.

I can easily imagine a system whereby a tailoring pattern would be more of a template, with slots in which to plug raw materials. Say to make a bag, you need some cloth, some thread and some dye. More cloth and thread makes a bigger bag, and the dye lets you customize the color. Maybe if you add an oil or something, you can make the bag waterproof … but the game has no mechanic that relates to waterproofing, so that’s out, at least for now. Point is, a bag is a bag is a bag.

A template for something more complicated, say a robe or a pair of pants, might provide an opportunity to add magical materials, like dusts or essences or whatever, to create something with magical properties. There could easily be an element of randomness there — I sewed those pants under the wrong phase of the moon or what have you, so instead of +10 to stamina they ended up with a random chance to turn the wearer into a duck — but still, there’s not just a TON of variation.

Any crafting system that’s got a lot of random chance turns into an uneconomical prospect, because eight times out of ten instead of sewing a nifty pair of pants you’re going to turn your workshop into a smoldering crater. Any crafting system that’s based on finite combinations of materials is subject to min-maxing and thus can be trivialized.

Part of it is that in the real world, what distinguishes one artisan-made thing from another — and thus, what makes one more valuable than the other — is usually aesthetic. I’m typing this on a laptop sitting at my dining-room table; I like this table not because it’s objectively a better table than any other similar table — it doesn’t have better “table” stats or whatever — but because I just happen to like it. But in a game like World of Warcraft, aesthetics count for little if anything. Sure, for a time there was a lot of wearable gear in the game that came in particularly vivid colors, and you’d hear folks complaining about their toons looking like circus clowns, and they really did. But given two pairs of pants with identical stats, is the purple pair really going to be more valuable, and thus make its maker more successful in the game, than the slightly-less-purple pair?

I mean, maybe in a game like I’ve heard “The Sims 3″ is, where you see your characters up-close and from a variety of angles. In a situation like that, aesthetics matter, or at least they can. But in World of Warcraft, the only part of your own character you ever see is the butt, and unless you’re playing a female blood elf, you really don’t care that much.

(“Does this tier-9 best-in-slot +90-to-agility item make my butt look big?”)

I mean, I would LOVE if the World of Warcraft (just to name my pastime of choice) were less Warcraft and more World-of, and making professions a viable and fun gaming choice would go a very long way toward that. But when I really sit down to think about how it could work, practically, I quickly get overwhelmed.

…of course, I’d still want the ability to design my own recipes, making myself a real artisan, rather than just being the guy who masters the system best (and who subsequently maintains a stranglehold on the economic sector.)

Hear me out: I’d love the opportunity to roll a level-one character, maybe do a couple of basic starter quests to get to a capital city, then choose a career and take an apprenticeship to a prominent NPC. Maybe the capital city’s most prominent alchemist, or weaponsmith. Or maybe I rushed things and didn’t do enough quests in the starter zone, and the best tailor in town won’t give me a job, so I have to choose between going back into the wilderness to make a name for myself or taking an apprenticeship with a lower-ranking tradesman — an apprenticeship that’ll advance more slowly and give me fewer perks.

Once I’m an apprentice, there are quests to do — lots and lots of quests, but they’re all related to my trade. There are simple fetch-and-carry quests, or “make ten bolts of cloth out of scraps” quests, or “here’s 10g, use your gathering, haggling or trading skills to go find me a stack of materials.” It’s still the same model of in-game progression, but rather than doing “adventure”-style quests, I’m doing “apprentice”-style quests in order to level up not my armor or my talents, but my tradeskill.

And put some jeopardy into the system. Make some of the apprentice quests dailies, and if I fail to complete 10 in a month, I get fired. Or something.

Eventually, let me work my way up through the game to the point where I can open my own shop somewhere in the city. I don’t have to be logged in myself, obviously; once I reach that point — the tradeskill equivalent of the level cap for regular adventurers — I have a staff of NPC craftsmen who’ll make and sell the items I specify. And I can take on my own apprentices, earning additional gold by training them. Let me set up vendors in other cities and towns, establishing business arrangements with other craftsmen to supply or purchase raw materials or crafted goods. That armorer needs tons of leather bindings? No problem, I’ll agree to sell him a thousand a week at such-n-such price. Since I only have so many employees I have to make choices about which business deals I take — or I can increase my own capacity by attracting more (player-character) apprentices.

Of course, that would be a massive system, essentially a whole parallel World of Warcraft with quests and advancement and all that. But golly, it’d be fun. Certainly not for everybody, and maybe not as one’s main character, but I’d love to have a level-capped adventurer main and a renowned tradesman alt.

(And yes, I’m acutely aware of the inherent problems of implementing a system like that. There’s the most obvious one for starters: How do you let players set up shops in major cities without coming up with a way to provide infinite real estate? It may not be the right answer, but the best answer I’ve been able to come up with is to ignore that problem altogether: Real estate is a finite resource, and an expensive one. Want to open your own shop in the best part of town? Be prepared to deposit a heck of a lot of gold on the first of every month, or you’ll lose your lease.)

I started off as a Tailor, since that was probably the easiest of the crafting professions and one that any crafter could solo gather the materials for. Tailoring was unique in that the quality of the base components was largely irrelevant. What mattered was your sense of style. Any fool could, for example, make a factory run of identical fibreplast jackets. Where you made a name for yourself was in handcrafted goods, coloured and styled individually, and organised into unique ensembles. Mass produce the raw materials, sure, but handcraft the finished product if you wanted to stand out.

There are only so many wedding dresses you can make before you start getting bored, of course, so I then switched to Shipwright with the introduction of the Jump to Lightspeed expansion. This is where the quality of your raw materials makes the difference. I’d begun stockpiling ores etc months beforehand. I’m talking millions of tons of the stuff, and had mining plants working on half a dozen planets. However, the stuff I was mining was mediocre quality at best. This was fine for grinding, though, and by the time I hit Master Shipwright I had a large stock of average quality starships ready to sell with a small supply of above average resources ready to build those special orders.

Levelling shipwright taught me something very important about SWG’s crafting system. Any fool, with enough resources, could become a Master Craftsman, whether that be Architect, Weaponsmith, Shipwright, Droid Engineer, Armoursmith, Chef, whatever… But the guys who really stood out from the crowd in the real crafting professions (i.e. not tailors) were the ones who’d been in it for the long haul and amassed large stocks of the very best resource spawns. The true grind in SWG for a crafter began AFTER you’d earned the Master title in your chosen profession – it was gathering the best resources that allowed you to make the best stuff, and that took a LONG time.

Crafting worked like this. First you gathered raw materials. Let’s say you’re making a really simple blaster pistol suitable for a starting character. You need Fibreplast and any metal. So you go prospect for those two resources, either drill it up by hand or lay down an extractor and come back the next day. Once you have the resources, you can then make the blaster, but at the end of crafting you get the option to experiment and improve up to four of five aspects of your weapon. The amount you can experiment is limited by both your skill level (irrelevant if you’re already a Master) and the quality/purity of the resources you’re working with. Just digging up any old crap will ensure your weapon is distinctly average, regardless of your skill. Every week or so, there was a “resource shift”, where the amount of resources that spawned in the galaxy reset randomly. All the miners would rush out and prospect again, looking for the best spawns of the current crop of resources.

Remember our cheap starter blaster pistol? Let’s move on a little. A mid level blaster would require compenents to be crafted and then assembled into the finished item. Rather than any old metal and any kind of fibreplast, you now required specific types, steel and synthetic fibreblast, and that’s just for the barrel. Moving on to end game weapons like a Geonosian Sonic Blaster, the barrel might now need just just any old steel, but a specific kind of Uridium Steel. At the highest levels of crafting the base resource requirements became punishingly specific. And here’s the clincher, that Uridium Steel you needed to complete a run of Geonosion Blaster barrels? It’s not currently in spawn, or it is but the purity of the current spawn is junk. So you either don’t make any Geonosian Blasters, or you make lower quality ones, or you don’t make any and wait, weeks, maybe months, for a decent quality spawn to appear and hope you can get to it in time.

This is why I say the grind as a crafter in SWG only began after you’d mastered the profession of your choice. There were crafters who’d been at it for years, and had stockpiles of the finest resource spawns that had ever appeared on their servers. You knew if you saw their names on an item that you were going to get a piece of gear that was the best in its class, and you paid throught the nose for it. I made millions selling good quality weapons and starships, these guys made billions selling the very best.

Another way SWG made it possible for crafters to play their own game was through the Merchant profession. It was possible for a player to Master any two professions at once and have some points left over. The Master Weaponsmith was responsible for building some of the finest weapons in the Galaxy, but the Master Merchant was responsible for selling them. Each server would have half a dozen very exclusive shopping malls with a Master Merchant selling goods produced by the best crafters on his array of vending droids.

Sadly, the game is a shadow of its’ former self. The nerfing of the crafting professions’ beautiful complexity is what made me quit the game, although perversely, I then moved onto WOW which porbably has the most dumbed down crafting in any game I’ve played yet. I still look back fondly on my days in SWG as the most famous tailor on my server (and a mediocre shipwright and weaponsmith)

The best solution is to make both of them work together in harmony. The problem with a crafting system like WoW is that it takes absolutely no skill to manufacture crafted goods. This is where EQ2 is light years ahead of WoW.

I believe that Blizzard has one or maybe two people working on crafting for all of WoW. Jon LeCraft (I’m not kidding!) is his name. He rarely gives interviews and to my knowledge *never* has the decency to post on the official forums.

Given the astronomical profits and resources that Blizzard has at its disposal it’s a crime that they haven’t done more to flesh out crafting as a meaningful MMO activity.

I am pretty dis-enfranchised with Blacksmithing at the moment – its pretty difficult to get crafting recps end game currently unless you are in 10 man hardmodes or 25 mans (which I am unable to do at the moment).

I am prepping a series of articles on re-thinking the professions, one at a time. Keep your eyes out, you may just like it

But what I love about crafting in Runes of Magic. The recipes yeild unique looking items that can be used in conjunction with the aggregator(transfers stats from 1 item to another). NO MORE CLONES

Plus, RoM crafting is independent from character leveling. Sure, if you WANT to gather high level ore, you can try to go to that area, or buy the mats from the auction house.

Either way, I could stay character level 16 for the rest of my life, and max my gathering and profession skills:)

the last nice things is a bit more choice. You can actually take every profession. You can max 1 to level 60, 3 to level 40, and the rest to level 20.