Tradeskill challenge

In the long run I'm a bit disappointed by the tradeskill system in World of Warcraft, it has the wrong kind of challenge. High-level crafting involves either lots of grinding, or it involves going to dungeons in a group / raid. Unfortunately that is exactly the same sort of challenge that the rest of the high-level game offers. There isn't any difference between grinding mobs for faction to buy a tradeskill recipe, or grinding mobs to farm gold. And whether you join a group / raid to find a piece of equipment, or to find a rare recipe, is also the same. That pretty much eliminates crafting as viable alternative playstyle. It just runs in parallel to what you are doing anyway.

That is insofar sad as this is not the case in the low- and mid-level part of the game. If you chose tradeskills like herbalism / alchemy, or mining plus smithing or engineering, gathering resources is a game in itself. You might occasionally get into a fight, and you better have a higher level than the monsters around you, but otherwise picking flowers or mining ore is significantly different from grinding mobs.

Unfortunately there isn't much demand for mid-level crafted items. With half of the population being level 60, only the highest level crafting products have a market. Which means resources that drop only in dungeons, and recipes that either require lots of faction grinding, or rare recipe drops from dungeons. Raslebol got his Greater Fire Protection potion recipe after numerous expeditions to LBRS, and now he would need to farm fire elementals for the main ingredient, which only drops on about every 10th kill. He has recipes for high level flask type super-potions, but to make them he needs to go to the alchemy lab deep down in Scholomance. "Hey guys, hold the raid for a minute, I need to brew a potion!"

Now I certainly don't want to go back to games where the challenge of crafting was that you needed to perform the same series of clicks many thousand times. For a much better way of doing crafting, you only need to have a look at Puzzle Pirates: Crafting is a puzzle, and the better items you want to craft, the more perfect you have to solve the puzzle. But while WoW does everything by killing monsters, Puzzle Pirates does everything with puzzles, and both gets boring after lots of repetition. A better game would have different challenges for the different sub-games. You can simply keep players in your virtual world longer if you offer them different types of activities, and don't reduce everything to the same combat mechanism.