First I'd like to say thank you very much for taking a look at crafting. To me it's simple and easy to use and have always loved the Lotro crafting system, that is until we hit Anorien and up. Anorien just wasn't that much fun. Felt like a skeleton of a crafting tier with no guild and when it comes to Ironfold and up I am hoping you guys are planning to look at the massive mat bloat. It jumped from 5 brushed hides or ingots to 50 and 3 shards or more over night which basically shot crafting in the spine as far as I and many I've spoken with are concerned. With 1 brushed hide/ingot equaling 2 hide/ore each that's a lot of poor boars, bears and wolves hides and hours in the shard mines just for a pair of gloves it seems. Doomfold wasn't as bad though the cd items made it so it took a week just to craft a friend a set of purple base gear, not to mention even the base set purp recipes are gated behind a ton of barter tokens which meant you had to do 100's of dailies in order to get all crafters decked out with just base purp gear recipes. Over the years I've seen the amount of gear posted on AH tank and prices skyrocket because no one wants to do it with such a mat bloat and dailies grind just for base recipes. I get it with teal recipes and single uses but not base gear needing all those base mats and then shards and cd items and a bizillion barter tokens. So in the end all that i think really hurt crafting and I hope that wasn't done on purpose just to get people to give up on crafting and just spend $ on Adventure gear. Mat bloat killed supply which drove prices way up and with few people posting the lack of competition drove it up even more. That all being said I am still very glad you guys are tackling crafting and interested to see what ya all do.

My thoughts after all that blabbering i just did and some more blabbering...

#1 Awesome you guys are revisiting it and how you're aiming it and and hope to see it get it's deserved place. Saw someone tier the gear like this Quest < Low craft < Low Instance < Low Raid < Delvings < Delvings + Crafting < High Instance < High Raids which sounded about right tho I think to get the most out the instances it should tier 1-2=low gear, 3=med gear and 4-5=much better gear. Tier 3 is way to easy to be any where near tier 4-5 and should have classic dungeon style roll/pass and or individual loot tables. Personally always liked at least a few roll/pass items like Hilt of Earnil tho wished it was a selection box so you couldv've picked what class it's for. One can dream right haha

#2 Glad guilds are being looked at tho not seeing much point in guilds for Prospecting, Foresting, Farming but would have to know more. How would Scholar work? break it up and create a base Research to go with Scholar? I think people would freak but would make sense. Also when it comes to guilds it would be nice to see other ways to gain rep though I wouldn't make all the guild rep items useless. Do that and it would be punishing everyone that has been putting in the work early to store rep for the next tier. People freak again.

#3 Crafting Events and influences on the housing system sound interesting and would like to see where you go with that though we do have a significant amount of events already. Maybe they could go with current festival events or something. Whatever happens it will be interesting to hear more about it.

#4 Endgame gear drops being tied to crafting in some way concerns me. Not saying there shouldn't be any at all but most people that put in all that work to do instances/raids don't want to have to then put in all kinds of work just to get it made, use it, or whatever. Doesn't mean can't have a piece or something as i already said ofc...

#5 NPC's that gather materials for you hmmm.. not sure how i feel about that one though would perhaps be nice for say fishing and farming. Cast a net and come back to haul in your fishies and round up your crops the next day would be cool. All kinds of things you guys can do with fishing from different poles for ocean, lake, river to boats, bait, boat skins for $$$/LP, heck even charter boats that take you around lakes to see the view and give ya a bonus to fishing. Loved the fish addition to food. I can go on and on but I'll save it for a another post.

#6 Looks like you guys already figured out what a lot of people thought about the whole access by continued activity or it will decay slowly over time thingy. Yeah I wouldn't.

#7 Misc. UNLEASH the Lotro ingame economy!! by making most items NOT BOUND and I mean most except instance/raid gear. Unbind everything from barter items at barterers, all essences in existence, not a single one should be bound whether landscape, instance or crafted. Since Black Keys don't drop anymore then let gold Sturdy Steel Keys drop again, I was always stoked when i got one. Let us trade and sell most our hard earned items we get thru currencies. Anyways, I've taken up enough space.

In the end thanks for all the work you all have done over the years and hope lotro is around for another 16. (sorry for miss spells and grammar) Cheers!