Discussion about Future Crafting Updates

[BRaymarK]

Crafting Guilds:

There are three omissions for crafting professions and associated guilds: Forester, Prospector, and Farmer. We want to address this. We know that the length of time
needed in order to increase standing with guilds is prohibitive. We want to address that by making enrollment in the guild a more active experience. (Already enough consternation about what was deleted from here that we will not discuss it further.)

What is the point to guild for the resource collection vocations? Already, there seems really no point to get Gold level mastery for forester and prospector. At present, it only seems valuable to fulfill Copper mastery to advance availability to the next tier. What am I missing here? Basically, getting Gold level mastery just consumes large amounts of resources one might use to level up other Forester/Prospector alts.

Also, the disparity between Forester and Prospector feels ... annoying or a symptom of not having thought out the system ahead of time. Advancing Forester is "trivial" compared to advancing "Prospector". Since Forester can advance via hides dropped from hunting landscape creatures, it is much easier to get resources to advance with. It seems that this likely drives up the price for ores and ingots because it takes a LOT more work to collect raw material.

What makes this even more unbalanced is that forester supplies two professions with two sources, but prospector feeds three professions with one source. I don't see this bizarre imbalance addressed in the introduction.

Edit: Historian was left out above, but it also seems to exhibit some imbalance in the sense that basically profession can collect scholar raw material through mob kills.

Further, we want to make new recipes that allow crafters to make objects for home and hearth.

All well and good, except that the number of hooks already means it is highly impractical to use many items one might like to have on display. The hooks and storage to available items ratio already seems to discourage decorating to some extent.

Edit: Oh, and as to the social interaction bit, would people craft more and put up for auction more if longer auction times were possible. This player probably would. It is understandable that very long "auction" sales probably are self-defeating in that people don't want to wait an eon to see if they win an auction, so perhaps longer listing times could gate on having a buy-it-now price set.