Why did the developers make in virtually impossible to craft above T-10?

[Woodlink54]

I started playing LOTRO about 10 years ago and took a break for about 7 years, but when Covid hit I began playing again and have been playing consistently for the past three years with a small fellowship of two other players. We play every Thursday for three hours and I play solo most of the time in between. I play many characters and my main character is a Hunter LV 127 and a Champion LV 130.
One of the things that I love about LOTRO is the diversity of activities that is available. You can play Solo or with a fellowship. You can play Landscape, Skirmishes, Instances, PvP, etc. and you can Craft Items that will enhance your gameplay. The variety of activities keeps the game from getting monotonous and also gives you things to do if you have limited time or are waiting to play with your Kinship. If I didn’t feel like doing Landscape Quests, or Instances and I would spend hours in the Crafting Hall making items to enhance my play, or I would spend my day harvesting, ore, wood, or hides in order to be able to craft the items that I needed.
I really enjoyed Crafting. I have spent many hours in the Crafting Hall, as I leveled up, I would craft new and better, Jewelry, armor, weapons, food, and buffs for me and my Kinship members. If I were doing Landscape Quests and joined a random player to work on some quests and I saw that their, armor, Jewelry, or weapons were below level, I would frequently send them the upgraded Items as a gesture of gratitude for questing together. Crafting was a major part of my LOTRO gameplay; however, all of that came to a screeching halt once I reached Tire 10 (T-10). Starting at T-10 you can no longer obtain recipes from drops, and they are not available for purchase from Suppliers, or from the Crafting Halls. The only way to obtain them is to barter for them from a Quartermaster. If you are going to require players to barter for the recipes, you should make it possible for the players to obtain the required barter items. I have done the calculations and in order to craft a complete set of light, medium and heavy armor for my three characters plus a full set of jewelry it will require 2,100 Silver Signets of the Thandrim. Is that even possible? How many hours, days, and weeks of questing would it require to gather that many Signets? To acquire that many Signets is virtually impossible, meaning crafting T-10 items is impossible, and I do not want to spend all my valuable gameplay time doing daily repeatable quests. The answer is NO! By the time I got through all those areas I was well past LV 115 and wanted to move on to more challenging areas, but still didn’t have enough Signets to purchase more than a few recipes.
The next barrier to crafting above T-10 is the inability to obtain the resources needed to craft any of the items from the recipes you have spent hours obtaining. For example, to craft a full set of medium armor the following resources are required:
• 700 Ironfold Hides are required to make the 350 Brushed Ironfold Leather needed. That is doable.
• 21 Dwarrowgleam Shards are required and are rare, after completing most of the quests in the area I have only collected 5 and I can’t see any reasonable way to acquire more.
Here is what the Wiki says about acquiring Dearrowgleams.
• While a single Dwarrowgleam Shard is available as a quest reward for the Quest: Reclaiming the Grey in the Resource Instances, they can also be accumulated on Landscape – via Corpses, backpacks, and similar lootable. Both Ironfold Skarn and Thornholt Branches may also drop a shard, but not as frequently as the former.
The quest is supposed to be automatically bestowed upon acceptance of any of the four ‘Resource Instance Daily quests’ from Stráhek the Stout in Skarháld; however, I am standing next to him and there is no ring over him to start the quests. Why do you have resources available in Instances that players can’t access? Standing Stone has made every aspect of trying to craft at T-10 and above ridiculously complicated and impossible to accomplish.
• 7- Dwarf-iron Fragments are required and the only way I have found that Dwarf-iron Fragments are available is through the following quests and only have a “chance to drop”. Again, this is an absolutely ludicrous way to expect players to acquire these resources.
Here is what the wiki has to say about these items. (This item has a chance to drop from the following Instances)
• Caverns of Thrumfall (I can’t even access this instance and I am at L-129.
• Glimmerdeep
• Thikil-gundu (I am too frustrated to even attempt these quests.)
• The Anvil of Winterstith (I am too frustrated to even attempt these quests.)
I have completed Glimmerdeep half a dozen times and have not received any Dwarf-iron Fragments. This is extremely frustrating to the point I gave up on wasting my time trying to get a reward that, so far, has never materialized. I would like to emphasize that this does not make the game fun and challenging. It makes it frustrating and annoying, especially since I can’t even access the Instances I need to acquire the resources.
• 14- Dwarrowmarks are required and again they are almost impossible to acquire. These Items are rewards for the following repeatable quests; however, I am unable to access any of them.
o Reclaiming the Grey
o Reclaiming the Grey (Advanced)
o Reclaiming the Grey (Final)
Are you trying to make this so impossibly difficult that players will give up? Well, you are succeeding; because I have spoken with many players who simply give up on attempting to craft above T-10. I have spent countless hours doing research on how to obtain the recipes and resources I need to craft T-10 items and above. Time is that I would rather spend in the game playing rather than wasting time trying to decipher the confusing LOTRO-wiki, and doing quests, instances, and other things where I end up with nothing to show for my time. Again, it seems like your developers have worked very hard to frustrate any attempt by players to craft anything above T-10. If that is your goal, you have succeeded.
I have been extremely frustrated by LOTRO-Wiki.com. It needs to be updated to give better information on how and where to obtain the specific barter items necessary to purchase the crafting items. I have literally spent dozens of hours searching for information on how to obtain the necessary barter items and have found LOTRO-Wiki.com to be of little help. There is a specific “Crafting Changes in Update 17” on the crafting page of the wiki that refers to update 17 in October of 2015 which is confusing and does not seem to conform to the current process and does not refer to being required to purchase recipes from Quartermasters. In addition, the link that is provided to Tier 10 Crafting Development Diaries: https://www.lotro.com/en/game/articl...eveloper-diary is broken. I really don’t enjoy spending hours doing fruitless research on the wiki trying to find out how to obtain the required items I need to Craft T-10 and above items when I could be enjoying my limited gaming time playing the game.
I would like to know if anyone has done the analytics on what is required to successfully craft T-10 Items and above. Here are some metrics you should investigate.
1. How many hours of gameplay would it take to acquire the recipes?
a. T-10 recipes?
b. T-11 recipes?
c. T-12 recipes?
d. T-13 recipes?
2. How many hours of gameplay would it take to acquire the resources to craft the Items?
a. T-10 resources?
b. T-11 resources?
c. T-12 resources?
d. T-13 resources?
3. What is the number and percentage of players crafting?
a. T-1 through T-9?
b. T-10 through T-13?
If you do the analytics on those questions, I believe that you will find that there is no way a player can reasonably craft items in T-10 and above and that there is little if any crafting in T-10 and above.
Here are my recommendations. As a person who truly loves all aspects of LOTRO I would like to see you revamp the T-10 and above crafting requirements so that I can again enjoy the art of Crafting now that I am playing T-10 and above.
1. Reinstitute recipe drops in the T-10 and above areas.
2. Make T10 and above recipes available from the Guild Halls.
3. Increase the Signets earned during Landscape Questing.
4. Lower the cost of the recipes from the Quartermasters.
5. Lower the number of resources necessary to craft the items.
6. Make resources available in ways that players can reasonably achieve.
7. Improve the wiki to provide better information on how to obtain recipes and the items required to buy them.
I hope you will take this opportunity to rethink the T-10 and above crafting requirements and make appropriate changes to the game so that those of us who really enjoy crafting can again participate in that activity.
Thank you for your consideration of this request.

[YamydeAragon]

I like to craft & i am not dissapointed by the crafting of the tiers after level 100. Crafting have become more accesible to all nowdaws then when i started playing LOTRO. Here are some facts of what really stayed the same & what changed for good:

• To raise crafting proficiency is easy enough with the processing recipes.
• You can be on 2 guilds at same time in 1 toon.
• The newest guild token grant a lot reputation & can be crafted, some crafting quest rewards & from missions crafting box.
• There are full crafted gear sets on all tiers, also for house decorations.
• Of those some recipes that are autogranted, others are traded with the corresponding area landscape traders & there are guild
• Like have always being, there are recipes that can be done with common ingredients that don't require doing group content, good enough to solo quest.
• Other recipes of higher quality that require special ingredients, can get you a step further to help you on group content but not better than raid gear.
• The recipes are way more simple nowdays, don't require you to swap between multiple alts to acquire all the components.
• There are soloable crafting instances on all tiers where you can get all ingredients that you may need.
• Disenchanting some dropped gear from instances, reward crafting ingredients too.
• Occasionally the rare crafting ingredients also drop from lootboxes & hobbit gift.
• On the last 2 tiers the special ingredients can even be crafted too.

*Only tier where some of the gear recipes are screwed is Ironfold (level 120), where they require some special ingredient that only drop on 1 raid, but i think the devs could fix those recipes easy if they want to, since that isn't level cap anymore. It is anyways easy to bypass that set since there are many other none crafted gear sets around that level.

[SkyWarpPro]

I think in general crafting has become less fun and less rewarding than it was before recipes stopped dropping on landscape.

But each crafting vocation is a little different in its changes over the years. Things I really miss in the upper crafting tiers:

1) Dyes. I really thought these were something cool to look forward to each crafting tier. Perhaps a lot of money is made with the festival purchasable dyes, but if not, can we move those into the Scholar's crafting abilities at various levels above T10. Allow them to be made from new landscape drops that are also missing from the Cooking/Farming vocations.

2) Landscape food nodes. We had various berries, vegetables, dye plants that could be harvested across middle earth until it all disappeared from the newer landscape regions. Finding that rare dye plant was always something that added that special small excitement to the game.

3) Cosmetic and Decoration recipes. Although non-consumable recipes are less desirable since you can get the produced item more easily from others since there is a limited demand for them, these were still cool to get and use. We use to be able to craft flowers. There are so many new flowers around the landscape now, it would be wonderful to be able to craft more vases or pots full of these new flowers. Even if these are account based and instead of being tradeable, I would be grateful to be able to craft my own cosmetic outfits instead of having to have every character try to get all these crazy tokens just to get a decoration or cosmetic.

4) Recipe drops from landscape. We don't need to be able to get ALL recipes from landscape drops, but it would be fun if we at least could get some cool random drops every once and awhile. Drops from landscape are now mostly just to sell for gold coins so we can pay for our houses. I miss the days where we would get more drops of all kinds of things (maps, weapons, armor, instructions for instruments, keys, recipes, etc).

Other than to simply upgrade my crafting abilities, I don't see the need to craft anymore (unless you love to spend a TON of time to get all the crazy expensive/rare items in bartering to craft legendary item stuff, UGH). Boring. Crafting should be more than a way to increase legendary items.