Master crafter in one hour

I am not a big fan of the World of Warcraft tradeskill system, because it involves only trade, and no skill. The only difficulty in the non-gathering tradeskills is getting all the recipes and the materials. Thus about one hour after the Burning Crusade expansion goes live, we will have the first master jewelcrafters. It is easy enough, you just need to have all the materials ready in your bank, and a couple of clicks later you hit 300 in jewelcrafting, or even a bit beyond.

I have a growing suspicion that because it is so easy, and because you can hoard all the materials already before the expansion comes out, there will be a *lot* of jewelcrafters. Far more than there is demand for. Of course some of them won't be properly prepared, and will get stuck half of the way, because they underestimated (and didn't look up) the huge amount of materials needed to reach master jewelcrafter. But even those who make it to 300 will find that after having blown hundreds of gold worth of materials on reaching master jewelcrafter, there isn't much money to be made with that tradeskill. I'm not even sure that a cut gem will sell for more than what the ore is worth from which the gem was prospected.

Mastering tradeskills takes a lot longer in other games. But it is rare that it needs any skill. I still remember with horror Star Wars Galaxies, where I made 1680 Mabari chest plates to reach master armorsmith. Now gathering resources in SWG was fun, but the actual crafting was really bad. In Everquest 2 they tried to slightly improve the act of crafting by turning it into a simple mini-game. But again the amount of skill needed was very low, and the amount of items you needed to grind was very high.

The best tradeskill I have seen in any MMORPG is smithing a blade in A Tale in the Desert. Because there are no "skill points" or anything involved. You start with a block of metal, a choice of different hammers, and clicking on the metal with your mouse simulates a hit with the hammer, and deforms the metal. You can switch at any time between a view of how the blade should look, and how it actually looks. The quality of your blade is simply given by how close your shaped metal block comes to the target. It is an interesting game, and smithing a good blade is a skill the player has, not his character. A high-quality blade is valuable, because it needs either a lot of skill, or endless patience and tries from a less skilled smith.

Another good game for tradeskills is Puzzle Pirates, where every tradeskill is a different puzzle. Again your own skill with solving that particular puzzle determines the quality of the outcome, there is no grind through a stack of materials to gain skill points.

Of course World of Warcraft won't change their way how tradeskills are handled any more. And I must say that the gathering portion of the crafting isn't that bad. But when mastering a tradeskill is a simple matter of consuming a large amount of resources, with no effort or skill involved, being a master in anything doesn't count for much. People tend to value a crafter by the amount of rare recipes that he has found or bought. I would have preferred if the act of crafting involved some sort of game, and playing the game well would have given you some crafting advantage. But as it is I will be just one among many master jewelcrafters, with not much of a business.