I'm probably ignoring the bulk of this thread, as I started reading it this morning and then got dragged away, and thus have forgotten most of it - but this stuck out at me:
Ryzom's crafting is an incredibly complex system, of course, but there are complexities which aren't covered by crafting guides. In particular I'm thinking of how one gets one's stuff.Zhaxor wrote:by that stage most players are guilded up and get their gear from the guild.
You're right, in that only newbies tend to buy gear - but this isn't because guilds craft their own stuff. It's because once you join a guild, you're in the company of older players who know that if you need new gear, unless it's something special like Freddy's PvP gear or uber-stuff like my yelkoo maga amps, it's free. All you have to do is ask a crafter, and if they have the time and mats most will do it straight away - sometimes it takes a few days or more to get mats, but either way it's as simple as asking. And if you don't know who to ask, you just ask in faction or uni - this applies just as much to q50 gear as q250.
And another reason good stuff doesn't go on vendors, is that most vendor stuff times out. That's a waste of your good, crafting mats, when you could just use up your grind mats and no loss. Why risk seeing sup zun go into oblivion when you could ensure that someone gets the benefit from it by only using it for requests?
But, of course, newbies don't know this... and they also tend to have come from games with a currency economy, and so feel that getting Yet More Free Stuff is "leeching" and should be looked down on. There's no easy way to convey to the majority of newbies that this isn't the case, unfortunately. If there were, we should certainly do it...
And, yes, Ryzom doesn't have much of an economy. For exceptional craft requests, mats are the currency; but for general grind gear most crafters are quite happy to arrange that themselves - after all, most people who need a set of q150 LA can't dig q150 excels topside, let alone sups. It'd be pointless asking them to pay when you know they can't, and when you can get the mats yourself with relatively little trouble (hence your having to provide your own bossmats
).I suppose having really good mats on the vendor for insane prices could counter this... maybe with sups if we get kitin patrols back; actually putting some value into the dapper. But then, when you have jool crafters who earn hundreds of mil from mastery, how do the rest of us keep up? At lvl 200-ish in most MA pieces I only have 30mil (technically 40...); so that would need to be balanced before selling mats becomes realistic.
Ofc you can always hope some f00 puts their sups on storage. Not that I've ever stolen storage sups or anything.
Now this is hard to explain, but, for example, I think it should always be relatively easy to make a reasonably decent sword, just shell+shaft+grip+cw and you have a sword, but I would like to see optional extras also that could be added once you each a decent mastery. I guess what I am getting at is, it should be possible for a Master Crafter to make a unique weapon that is almost impossible to reproduce unless you know the exact combo of vital and optional extras. Something that would make a newbie go "ooooooooh shiny!" 
