Greedy Goblin Gevlon has a great post on inscription up, in which he realizes that he is making lots of money with that tradeskill because it is completely borked. Quote: "I start to realize that when I say "go sell glyphs", it's like Kungen saying "farm Mimiron hard mode". Trivial for someone who has the skills and the infrastructure, impossible for others."
While I do agree that inscription is probably the worst designed tradeskill in World of Warcraft, I don't rate the others very highly either. That is because unlike Gevlon I don't just consider the ability to make money to evaluate the design of a tradeskill, although I *do* consider that to be an essential part. But another essential part for me is that a tradeskill in an MMORPG has to be entertaining. WoW tradeskills fall short in this respect. If you have the money, you can get any tradeskill from 0 to skill cap in less than one hour. It'll cost you a fortune for mats from the auction house, but there is no skill, and no game, involved in actually crafting things and leveling up. Thus being a master crafter is no achievement at all, and they all have the same recipes; except for recipes that only drop in raids, which is even worse, because instead of offering an *alternative* mode of gameplay, it just links being a master crafter to being a master raider.
For me a good crafting system would allow people to choose between various careers in the game, mastering either an adventuring career or a crafting career. Crafting your way up to the skill cap should not require significantly less effort than adventuring up to the level cap, but one should be possible without the other. A virtual world which has both heroes and crafters feels so much more real than a world in which everybody is a dragonslayer.
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