Do ANY games have worthwhile crafting?

[Nija]

http://www.homedepot.com

They just ignore us. I thought people played games to do things they otherwise couldn't in real life? I mean, I could drive my car into a farmer's market one weekend morning, but it's probably a better idea if I did it in a video game.

Spend 200 hours making furniture for space houses in SWG.... or spend 200 hours making real furniture. That's not a hard choice for me.

[Yegolev]

The biggest difference to me is that if I buy up a lot of commodities in EVE and am not able to unload them, any loss I take isn't real.  If I decide to do some work on my house, the end-result costs me real money and will look like shit if I do it wrong, or worse.  I have managed to accumulate some tools and am getting better at home improvement, but the real risk involved in doing some things can really take the fun out of it.  If I lose a hauler full of goods in EVE, it makes me angry but it doesn't really matter and I can have fun with it.

Also, I would not have this conversation with my son in EVE:
"Daddy, there's a screw hangin' out!"
*points at a crawlspace door I made and installed*
"Yeah... that's the door handle."

I am, however, really proud of that door.

[climbjtree]

Well, if you're a mudder, you really need to check out Dartmud's crafting system. I've played there on and off for a good while now, and it's hands down the best mud I've played.

All crafting begins with resource gathering. Smithing, for instance. The ore needs to be mined out of a mine that you actually tunnel yourself(mining skill), melted into ingots (metallurgy), and then smithed into whatever it is that you're going to make(smithing skill). The range of things you can make is huge, and you actually have to put some thought into it. A breastplate that's crafted for a size 13 gnome certainly won't fit an ogre, or you may need a special type of breastplate for the mud's spider-like race.

This goes for farming, tailoring, woodworking, alchemy - all of it. In addition, you can learn to do the whole process yourself, though that will take some time. That's actually one of the downfalls in my mind - it doesn't really promote player cooperation if you can master everything. It is nice though, since your skills develop based on how much you use them.

At any rate: www.dartmud.com - and don't let the pretty anime-ish drawings fool you. They completely misrepresent the gritty, harsh medieval world that DM is.

[Kitsune]

The problem with the 'online crafting lets you become a starship-building mogul' is that it lets EVERYONE be a starship-building mogul.  No one person will ever, ever come to stand out from the pack.  Schild Corp-brand starships won't become a household name in EVE.  Crafting works in the real world because crafters are a limited commodity.  You can't just run up to some random guy in the street, ask, "Hey, can you build me a television?" and expect an affirmative response.

Even if a game tried to make crafting realistic in requiring a huge amount of starting capital and research and design before a person could even start on building something, eventually there'd still be tons of crafters.  There's no way to pull away from the pack, and if there was, only giant catass guilds would have it.

[geldonyetich]

Well, if you're a mudder, you really need to check out Dartmud's crafting system. I've played there on and off for a good while now, and it's hands down the best mud I've played.

Personally, I recommend Dwarf Fortress for a good take on the crafting mechanics.  Build the neccessary smelters and forges, mine the necessary metals, assign the jobs, and away those busy little dwarves go.  It's a good approach because it takes all the unneccessary busywork out of the players' hands and assigns it to AI.  Although, it's not very user friendly yet, and it's offline.

[Venkman]

The problem with the 'online crafting lets you become a starship-building mogul' is that it lets EVERYONE be a starship-building mogul.  No one person will ever, ever come to stand out from the pack.  Schild Corp-brand starships won't become a household name in EVE.  Crafting works in the real world because crafters are a limited commodity.  You can't just run up to some random guy in the street, ask, "Hey, can you build me a television?" and expect an affirmative response.

This is often the argument, but when does this actually happen in practice?

SWG is a good example. A lot of players started out wanting to be a Weapon- or Armorsmith. How many ended up though? And why?

It's not because everyone was squeezed out of the market because of unfair game mechanics. It's because "Crafting" is not the function of clicking buttons. It's a holistic role in a game more like running a business. Yea, people can run businesses in real life. They can do it in games with far less risk. Am I ever going to run Enron? No. But I did in SWG and made buckets of cash doing it. It was a fulltime job though, both ingame and out.

It's not the game that makes it fulltime though. It's the other players. It's like anything, be it skill in FPS games, skill on a Soccer/Football field, skill in any competitive activity. Do it all the time or cede to others who do it all the time.

What squeezed players out, ultimately, is the same self-balancing mechanism that exists in any game, diku or not. You either focus on it or you won't be as successful. That's not terrible. Dabblers can be successful. Or folks who just do one specific thing occasionally, like emptying resource harvesters (I had a few people doing that) for the business owner who makes the Contracts and deliveries (me). The former group did this once a week and the rest of their time was spent hunting.

The hardest part of crafting is not the resource gathering nor the act of building something. It's making a successful and rewarding business out of it. That can require as much time as Raiding, so you better like it alot. The fact that there are many times more raiders/hunters than crafters indicates just how many prefer what.

[Akkori]

That's true. I never put in the effort to be one of the "top sellers" in my preferred markets. I was not known to the server in general. I never, well ony one or two times, got stopped at the starport by someone who had bought something I made and loved it. Brands on my server like Asia Brothers, FelKel, and others did have that. They were Arch and WS, respectively. They were more active than me, and trafficed in more popular goods. My success was due to being known by those big guys, and getting their business, and the business of the people in their large guilds. Not to mention that I was a resource mogul for a while too. I would have made much more doing that if I had not kept most of the really good stuff to myself, lol.
I don't get to do, in real life, what I did in SWG, fantasy game notwithstanding. I'll never be known as the first player city Mayor IRL. It seems to me that the biggest problem with games with an interesting and useful craftign game is that the combat-centric folks don't like it, even though the crafters like the combat folk. I mean, come on, what else will you spend your money on? They will pay millions for some decorative loot, but bitch if someone makes a 30% profit on somthing that took hours to make and they have entire business infrastructure to support!?

[eldaec]

On the Good Crafting vs. Diku model topic, I want to point out that in EQ2 there's a very good balance between the loot and the crafted stuff.
Basically the Mastercrafted items in EQ2 are the BEST equipment you can get save the Legendary/Fabled stuff.

Meaning that of course you will keep on looking for the best loot, but until you can get those you will definitely want to buy Mastercrafted Weapons, Armours and Jewellery.

The idea was, tiering the equipment:

- Common stuff (crap)
- Uncommon Stuff (crap/useful)
- Crafted Stuff, common materials (useful/useful)
- Mastercrafted Stuff, rare materials (Good)
- Legendary [Rare Loot] stuff (Good)
- Mastercrafted Stuff Imbued, rare materials + rare materials (Very Good)
- Legendary with Proc [Rare Loot] (Very Good)
- Fabled Stuff [Very Rare Loot] (Uber)

Which is fine, except players whine when equipment has any form of decay (even decay which takes longer than one player could concievably use the item for), so it gets nerfed out of any game 6 months after launch, and this combined with loot mudflation means today's uber loot is tomorrows almost-uber hand-me-down guild loot. The handmedown stuff accumulates in game because the only sink is players quitting and taking it with them, and before long everyone considers themselves to 'need' legendary+ gear to compete, and crafting goes to hell for all purposes bar twinking. Again.

[Falconeer]

By the way: today November 14th 2006 the third EQ2 expansion launches (the fae one, Echoes of Faydwer), and it has tinkering and adorning added to the crafting job.
That's exclusive to crafters and higly desirable by players, so basically crafters are getting a sweet bone with this expansion, adding to an already pretty good diku-oriented crafting model.

[Viin]

Which is fine, except players whine when equipment has any form of decay (even decay which takes longer than one player could concievably use the item for), so it gets nerfed out of any game 6 months after launch, and this combined with loot mudflation means today's uber loot is tomorrows almost-uber hand-me-down guild loot. The handmedown stuff accumulates in game because the only sink is players quitting and taking it with them, and before long everyone considers themselves to 'need' legendary+ gear to compete, and crafting goes to hell for all purposes bar twinking. Again.

That's why you don't give in to whiners. That's one of the reasons I like CCP - otherwise we'd be playing PvE-only Astroids.

[Soln]

I think to have a game with worthwhile crafting, which doesn't bork the core game for fighters etc. it needs its own advancement path.  Old SWG did that.  It stumbled over the same inbalances in combat .  Although could be argued that the imbalances were partly caused from itmes crafted drops of high end mats.

[eldaec]

By the way: today November 14th 2006 the third EQ2 expansion launches (the fae one, Echoes of Faydwer), and it has tinkering and adorning added to the crafting job.
That's exclusive to crafters and higly desirable by players, so basically crafters are getting a sweet bone with this expansion, adding to an already pretty good diku-oriented crafting model.

Great, so crafted gear will be considered cool for 2-3 months, then the "Supreme Spirit of Monkey Balls [Heroic Legendary ^^^+++]" will arise from the Death Pits of Antonia's Ass, and the magic of the Grand High Mouthbreather will bind the spirit in such a way that it can be repeatedly killed and made to vomit up special-plus-plus Hero lesuire wear in a variety of sizes and colours to suit every adventurer. Crafted gear becomes hand-me-downs, and so the cycle of Catass continues.

See also: DAoC spellcrafting.

You bite the bullet and make some or all categories of gear craftable only (possibly using dropped components) AND add item decay, or you give up on the idea of viable crafting - take your pick.
 

[Krakrok]

Or you just don't do uber items. Or if you do you make them only slightly more effective but much flashier like Guild Wars did.

[eldaec]

I think to have a game with worthwhile crafting, which doesn't bork the core game for fighters etc. it needs its own advancement path.  Old SWG did that.  It stumbled over the same inbalances in combat .  Although could be argued that the imbalances were partly caused from itmes crafted drops of high end mats.

Among other things, having one armour type be strictly better than all the others by a huge margin, doctor buffs giving out perma+400% to everything, Rancor-in-my-pocket pets, and the 'master box' skill tree structure contributed far more problems than anything sourced from the crafting system.

Or maybe I'm just being cranky.

[eldaec]

Or you just don't do uber items. Or if you do you make them only slightly more effective but much flashier like Guild Wars did.

A laudable strategy in general (see also: CoX), but if items don't matter, nor do crafters.

[Xanthippe]

I tried the crafting minigame thingie in EQ2 and didn't enjoy it.  DAOC's crafting system was pure tedium.  CoX has - what now?  Runescape's crafting is very rudimentary.  I don't mind WoW crafting.  I tend to enjoy resource gathering/trading more than the actual crafting itself.

Crafting consumables makes sense.  Player crafted loot in a loot-based game doesn't, so much.

I'm not sure with the OP is looking for, in particular, with regard to "worthwhile."

[eldaec]

CoX has - what now? 

CoX has no loot, hence no crafting.



You'll be happy to know they are patching it in though.

Salavge (dropped components) will be crafted into synthetic power enchancers (that is power enchancers that are better than the SO power enhancers everyone currently uses and which are practically free from stores). It remains to be seen how that works out.

[El Gallo]

The problem with the 'online crafting lets you become a starship-building mogul' is that it lets EVERYONE be a starship-building mogul.  No one person will ever, ever come to stand out from the pack.  Schild Corp-brand starships won't become a household name in EVE.  Crafting works in the real world because crafters are a limited commodity.  You can't just run up to some random guy in the street, ask, "Hey, can you build me a television?" and expect an affirmative response.

This is often the argument, but when does this actually happen in practice?

SWG is a good example. A lot of players started out wanting to be a Weapon- or Armorsmith. How many ended up though? And why?

It's not because everyone was squeezed out of the market because of unfair game mechanics. It's because "Crafting" is not the function of clicking buttons. It's a holistic role in a game more like running a business. Yea, people can run businesses in real life. They can do it in games with far less risk. Am I ever going to run Enron? No. But I did in SWG and made buckets of cash doing it. It was a fulltime job though, both ingame and out.

SWG is a bit of a special case, because it had a large number of players who signed up to blast stormtroopers or chop off limbs with lightsabers.  When they found themselves in a world run by craftards like SmithnWessin, their choices were to sumbit to the craftards, become a craftard or quit and never get to shoot stromtroopers or chop off limbs with lightsabers in a MMO again.

A big part of why you could stand out as a crafter in SWG was that so many people had no desire to craft.  This raises the question of why people who don't like to craft would play a carftard-dominated game unless the allure of the IP was so strong that combat players would stick to a game where they are second-class citizens.  And, if you have a game of all craftards, I think you'll have serious issues with Kitsune's "when everyone is a mogol nobody is a mogol" problem (if your game allows everyone to "win") or with the general competitive game problem of losers becoming perma-losers and quitting (if you can craft to crush).

[Morat20]

SWG is a bit of a special case, because it had a large number of players who signed up to blast stormtroopers or chop off limbs with lightsabers.  When they found themselves in a world run by craftards like SmithnWessin, their choices were to sumbit to the craftards, become a craftard or quit and never get to shoot stromtroopers or chop off limbs with lightsabers in a MMO again.

"Submit to the craftards"? Did armorsmiths force them to make ritual genuflections before selling them goods? WTF was the difference between an SWG's player-place NPC vendor and WoW NPC vendor? Or using the WoW AH?

Yes, you actually had to purchase your goods from a vendor as opposed to waiting for a fucking rat to cough up a suit of armor. Heaven forbids, the godawful SUFFERING that the poor combat players had to endure! Clicking an NPC vendor rather than killing a million foozles until he got the lucky one that ate a fucking lightsaber.

Seriously, how is Star Wars a special case? Basically speaking, the players ran the NPC vendors instead of them having static inventories and the mobs dropped less armor and weapons than most MMORPGs. That was about it. You didn't have to fucking submit to the craftards. You had to buy shit off their NPC, but I've played few MMORPGS where I didn't have to buy things off an NPC on a regular basis -- or from other players.

[El Gallo]

Seriously, how is Star Wars a special case? Basically speaking, the players ran the NPC vendors instead of them having static inventories and the mobs dropped less armor and weapons than most MMORPGs.

It was a game focused on crafting where a huge portion of the playerbase had no interest in crafting.  That makes it easier for crafters to feel like mogols, but it it's pretty hard to pull off without an IP like that because otherwise non-crafters will go to non-crafting-focused games.

The rest was just the usual f13 jackassery    I actually thought SmithnWessin was a nice guy.

[Akkori]

Here it is again. For some reason, any time crafting exists in a game... ANY game... of any consequence, the combatards have a hissy fit. We don't bitch and whine that they can kill a 10-story tall lizard with a tiny little hammer. We don't complain about their existence in OUR game. But the combatards can't seem to acept that we deserve to have just as much fun as they do in the games we pay to play.

Like Morat said, they bitch if thay have to pay a player money to get armor, but are fine if they have to pay an NPC for it. Bite me. I admit that at the very top of the pyramid of bank account balances there are usually crafters. But there are a HELL of a lot more wealthy combatards than crafters.

The game wasn't focused on crafting. If it was, we wouldn't have had 9 publishes focused exclusively on COMBAT and 1.5 focused on crafting (Chef one was good, the DE one sucked). Jedi would not have dominated the publish notes in almost every "Publish" up until the changed to a new "Chapter" system. Thats why the crafting game has suffered.... the fact that the Dev's never paid any reall attention to all the problems crfting had.

Even in the new system, the crafters had to wait until all the combat prof's got their new systems in place.

[palmer_eldritch]

I enjoyed crafting back in the original SWG. I was a tailor and people would come to my shop and try on clothes, try different combinations and haggle over the price. They seemed to enjoy it too. Of course, they could just buy the stuff from the NPC vendor if they preferred.

However, I remember what a pain it was buying something. I think I knew of four decent gun shops on my server and two on the planet I was on, and those took some effort to get to.

Is it possible player crafting would work for both crafters and combat people (and I was both in any case) if it was easier? In almost every game I have tried, being a good crafter involved lots of clicking - to grind up to master tailor in SWG meant lots and lots of boringness. Also, you have to either spend huge amounts of cash on buying ingredients to grind with or spend a long time gathering respources, which is often boring too. SWG made resource gathering a little easier with harvesters but it still took a lot of time. WoW doesn't make you click, but you still have to gather the stuff . . . (Eve is different but as far as I can make out it depends partly on winning lotteries for rare blueprints).

If it was easy . . . more people might do it, and there might be more shops and the combatants could buy what they wanted far more easily.

I know some people will say you should work to be good at something in an MMORPG but I am not talking about everyone become a succesful merchant instantly. I mean a system where being succesful depended on spotting a gap in the market, desiging a product to meet people's needs (you could alter the stats on the product to an extent, maybe choose to use better materials if you thought there was a market for expensive uber stuff or go the cheap and cheerful route instead), give your items cool names, design what they looked like and what colour they were to an extent and advertise them well.

I know this does happen in games already to an extent, but it is limited and nearly always has to involve a lot of grinding too. I'd like to play something which was more like a business sim as far as the crafting went. Some merchants I suspect would still become uber rich but others would fail. The amount of money you could make would still depend on the amount others would have, and be willing to spend, so not everyone could be hugely succesful. If the market was flooded with merchants then some would leave (but put in a huge variety of goods and different versions of those goods to be made, and let people try to find a niche). And it would still take time, but that time would be spent making decisions, not clicking on ore in the wilderness repeatedly or putting items into slots and hitting the combine button over and over.

Some combat people might hate the whole idea, but they wouldn't need to pay any attention to it - they'd hopefully just have a good range of well-stocked shops, and be happy.

[Nyght]

Ya know, Sky has got it right. Virtual crafting can never live up to 'real life' crafting for the same amount of effort/time spent. The only thing I can see is a cost/convenience advantage.

Want meaningful crafting? Try home brewing beer, amateur pyrotechnics (where legal .. or not  ), musical instrument making.. etc etc etc.

That was one of my big bitches with ATTID pyro.. it was actually faster to go roll some stars in RL then to go through all the BS in the game, although the risk of personal injury was likely lower.

[UnSub]

CoX has no loot, hence no crafting.

You'll be happy to know they are patching it in though.

Just to slightly correct that statement that "CoX has no loot" - it has loot, as all Enhancements are loot. What it doesn't have much of is uber-rare uber loot. For 99% of Enhancements, you can walk into a store and buy them. That other 1% (the Hami-Os and SHOEs) are gained through either (hero-side) a raid on the Hamidon - infamous for the number of players who hang around just for the Hami-O drop - and (villainside) the Lord Recluse Strike Force - a difficult mission where you get two (?) SHOEs on completion. Obviously, Hami-Os and SHOEs are the most desirable loot in the game since they offer multiple bonuses to character powers.

The availability of Hami-Os and SHOEs (Synthetic Hamdon Origin Enhancements) will be further increased in I9 as well, with villains gaining access to the Hamidon raid and heroes getting a Statesman Strike Force.

Inventions will be interesting - the sneak peak seems to show that players will be able to craft enhancements that provide multiple bonuses and effects way outside what your character could normally do. We'll have to wait and see to know how it works in reality, but it would appear to have all the same issues of MMOG crafting - getting the right resources (ie salvage, which will be all-new types for crafting) of which some will be very rare.

Given that CoH/V has a lousy in-game economy (no need to buy and sell to other players - most stuff is either horded, deleted or just given away) it will be interesting to see if inventions will improve CoH/V or just cause problems.

[Rasix]

No one really cares about non-visible loot.  Sorry.

[Falconeer]

In my opinion crafting IS boring. I mean in real life. As long as it's not artistical stuff, I don't think that handcrafting 100 copies of the same pair of shoes, or tailoring scarves, or carving figurines and so on can be fun at all. Sure it can be relaxing, and so is for lots of people crafting in EQ2, SWG, UO, WoW and other games where you just have to click the same buttons for hours and hours to get shitloads of identical items.
This doesn't mean I would despise a fun and entertaining minigame, but that to me the craft part was crappy in all the MMO I tried. Even the one where I actually enjoyed it. It's the business/management part that's fun.

Crafting is THE grind, equivalent to killing green mobs for hour. What needs to be well done and fun is the part where you promote your wares, where you build your connections and credit, where you buy low and sell high and where you have you grow your clientbase and get rewarded and satisfied for doing your job right. Warring for prices, advertising your stuff, doing clearance sales, thinking about marketing strategies and things like that are what makes the "tradeskills" (not the mere crafting) fun in a MMO.

SWG, and UO, were the best at that in my opinion but then again to me it's not the diku part the kills tradeskilling, but the diku playerbase that want it all and want it now. Yes, they can stand having to look for a npv everywhere to get a sword; but can't stand to look for a player crafter/trader to do that. It'S not the diku model that kills tradeskilling, just the way developers adapt to the majority of paying players. Exactly as it happened for harsh PvP, something completely pulled out from game designing as the paying whiners were morer than the paying praisers.

No matter if the game is a diku or not, as long as it has:

a) auction houses - where you don't get to know your crafters.
b) lack of item decay - where you don't really need crafters.

...then the tradeskilling part will probably be pretty bland, dull and boring.

On the contrary, give me a game where items decay with use and where you have to browse vendors to look for stuff (as it was in REAL WORLD until 10 years ago, just before the internet boom), and I will be a pretty happy trader. What? You said crafter? Not sure about that but as I explained before I can't think of mass-crafting lots of similar item being fun in any way.

[WindupAtheist]

Here it is again. For some reason, any time crafting exists in a game... ANY game... of any consequence, the combatards have a hissy fit. We don't bitch and whine that they can kill a 10-story tall lizard with a tiny little hammer. We don't complain about their existence in OUR game. But the combatards can't seem to acept that we deserve to have just as much fun as they do in the games we pay to play.

Seriously, combatards?  You mean that demographic most people refer to as 99.8% of the motherfucking population of every single MMO in the entire universe?  You don't complain about them in "your" game because without them there wouldn't be any game.

[eldaec]

Seriously, combatards?  You mean that demographic most people refer to as 99.8% of the motherfucking population of every single MMO in the entire universe? 

Are you suggesting that 99.8% of the population of any MMOG don't deserve the suffix '-tards'?

[stray]

I wouldn't even give them the credit of calling them "combat-tards", because, well.....1) Half of that shit doesn't deserve to be called combat and 2) Very few of them are playing for the sake of combat.

But whatever. Even if there was good combat, this shouldn't have to be an either/or situation. If you make a world, then you can fit anything inside of it. Combat, crafting, whatever. Nothing has to be so one dimensional.

[Slyfeind]

This sounds like it's boiling down to the question "What's fun about MMOs?" Apparently crafting, socialization, looting, harvesting, PvP, raiding, questing, exploring, and, well, everything sucks. So why bother?

So there are one or two people out there who think PvP is fun in EverQuest. There are a couple people who like socializing in Meridian 59. There are even some people who like resource-gathering in A Tale in the Desert. The verdict is, every game has worthwhile crafting, if you're into that sort of thing.

[Yegolev]

No one really cares about non-visible loot.  Sorry.

This is why I really want ship decals in EVE.  That is somewhat different from obtaining a rare faction ship since you'd be a fool to fly the faction ship in hostile space.  But I can imagine that even being able to tint a hull would add a lot to desirability of basic equipment.  The lack of customability in EVE is occasionally bothersome... but then everything looks the same after it explodes.

Something that is sort of funny, my wife does crafting in real-life.  Lately she has been working glass.  It's rather similar to a MOG crafting system where you always have a chance of failure, you lose your materials on failure, have to buy supplies and craft tools, sometimes your tools break, and you gain skill the more you do it.  She could probably sell her end-products on ebay, but she doesn't want to do that.

[stray]

She could probably sell her end-products on ebay, but she doesn't want to do that.

She should give it a try. My mom used to make floral arrangements. She shipped them off to various stores in a 50-ish mile radius (Texas Craft Works is a chain that gives arts and crafts people their own booths to sell stuff. I'm sure other states have similar things).

Anyways, she was pulling in about $700-$1000 dollars from each store every month. Must have been at least 5 stores. She'd also make cash from private orders.

[geldonyetich]

No one really cares about non-visible loot.  Sorry.

Enhancements are visible, they're just overly generic.  Given a 10 slot inventory, do you care more if it is filled with "Vorpal Greatswords" capable of increasing one's damage potential by 33%, or do you care more if it is filled with "Damage Enhancements" with an identical function?  Smoke and mirrors.

[Yegolev]

Hell, I think it is a great idea to sell the jewelry she makes.  I mean, the woman makes her own glass beads, then necklaces, earrings and so on.  She's even straining to get the equipment to work with metallic clay.  She doesn't want to sell anything she makes, though, although she has no problem making gifts for people.  I considered taking it up for the profits, but then I remembered I would rather slam a door on my nuts than grind skill to make jewelry.

[Akkori]

Seriously, combatards?  You mean that demographic most people refer to as 99.8% of the motherfucking population of every single MMO in the entire universe? 

Are you suggesting that 99.8% of the population of any MMOG don't deserve the suffix '-tards'?

Well said! The point I was making is that anyone can throw around catchy words ending in "tard", but it doesn't excuse one segment of the game stamping out another PAYING segment of the game. WHy is it that crafters are fine with combatards being in the game, but combatards are not okay with crafters being in game? From what I have read on F13, it seems there are very few games where crafted things are measurably better than loot. So it stands to reason then that there are a lot of games out there where you can kill and loot all day long and never give a red nickel to another player. And yet you are still bashing any game where crafters have a viable market?

I agree with Falconeer though, that for me, its not the clicking to make stuff that's fun... it's the gathering of resources and running of the business that's fun. I'd love to have an AI team of employee's who would do all the clicking for me, under my direction, and let me run the business.