New World - how to fix crafting

Advancing crafting skills require too much gathering and too many materials

This can literally eat up days of gameplay for very little net return.

For example, trying to level Engineering or Furnishing: These can use up materials needed for other crafts that are not reliably / quickly obtained in vast amounts, such as iron. Or require extremely tedious amounts of gathering such as hundreds of Flint to process Gunpowder only to throw away the vast amounts of Gunpowder.

And yet making Gunpowder is one of the better ways of levelling Engineering because the materials are plentiful and do not take away materials for other crafting/refinement.

Solution: Town Board Missions

• More Town Board missions for Crafting and representing all crafts.
• Currently Jewelry, Engineering, and Furnishing are not represented at all, for example.
• These missions should be of the template similar to “Craft Armaments” missions, where you get a special quest item and a special formula to craft, which awards a sizable amount of crafting skill. Typically they use low-tier materials in limited quantities.
• A wider array of materials should be used whenever possible, e.g., for Provisioning and Alchemy. Right now for instance, Alchemy town board missions just ask for only either healing or magic. This stresses the quantities available for those types of potions and a lot of other reagents go unused.
• Change Town Board missions to time spent instead of materials spent.
• For example, instead of being asked to turn in Starmetal Ingots (which currently reward a ludicrously small amount compared to, say, turning in Iron Ingots), instead change the task to one where the player processes Starmetal Ore.
• They would receive a quest item, e.g., "Crate of Starmetal Ore", and require the ability to work Starmetal Ore in order to process it into ingots at a forge.
• When the craft is started, the player is locked in a two-minute animation. At the end of this time spent, they receive crafting XP for the craft and a quest turn-in item, "Stack of Starmetal Ingots". They then take that to the Town Board and turn it in for their reward (i.e., their pay for professional services).

The cost to craft involves too much repetition

The cost of repetition is too high because the randomness of the results means repeated attempts. At low tiers this is moderate, but once you get to Tier IV, each attempt has a “hidden cost” of all the refinement materials required to produce the Tier IV+ materials.

Further, some crafts require much more time in gathering. Iron and Sand Flux for example are not as quickly obtainable in the vast quantities required as Wood or Fiber, and therefore presents another chokepoint.

However, simply reducing randomness will flood the market with too much “good” gear and the the game becomes too easily “pay to win” because non-crafters can completely skip crafting and just make money (or buy RMT money or bot and sell materials for money) to simply buy off the Trading Post.

Solution: Bound to Player Retrofitting

To reward crafters for pursuing crafting, a Retrofitting mechanic can be used to steadily reduce the randomness of results, but the item becomes Bound to the person doing it.

• When you get an item, either a world drop or crafted, you can attempt to Retrofit it.
• During a Retrofit, you can adjust upward the core materials. Each time you can at least match all the materials, you are guaranteed a Gear Score increase amount toward the maximum allowed during that crafting attempt.
• During a Retrofit, you can separately choose what to do with each Perk slot:
• Keep the Perk
• Change it with a Charm
• Randomize it with Azoth

Your crafting skill determines what Tier of materials you can work with, so you have to level your crafting in order to Retrofit. Retrofitting therefore involves a lot of repetition, but less so and the player can steadily work toward the item they want.

Too much botting and Real Money Transactions (RMT)

The tediousness of the crafting mechanics encourage players to bot or buy botted materials, and in quantities that encourage them to buy RMT gold in order to buy those materials.

Solution: Reduce the amount of materials required for crafting AND Bind most harvested materials AND Bind anything made with bound harvested materials

• Make most gathered items Bound on Pickup. Only a fraction randomly found will be unbound and therefore tradeable. Keep reducing the amount that is unbound until botting is no longer feasible.
• Anything made with Bound materials also becomes Bound.
• Since this makes most materials and goods untradeable, a trade-off would be to allow materials and goods from an Expedition be tradeable -- including the materials that can be harvested there. Here we assume Expeditions will not really be botted for excessive amounts of saleable mateials.