There has been a trend in recent years of trying to streamline the MMO experience and get rid of outdated mechanics that only serve to annoy players (see my rant on WoW tapping in the previous post). It’s usually associated with “casualising” games, though I don’t think convenient and hardcore are necessarily mutually exclusive. In any case, there has been a lot of talk about reducing and/or eliminating the “gear treadmill,” that is, the end game mechanic of getting good gear so you can do dungeons and raids so you can get better gear so you can do harder dungeons and raids so you can get better gear so you can… you get the point. Debating the pros and cons of dungeon gear treadmills is beyond the scope of this post. But there’s one MMO mechanic that hasn’t been talked about as much that has me somewhat puzzled: crafting.

My first MMO was RuneScape. Crafting in RuneScape is what combat is in most other MMOs; it’s basically all your character lives for, and everything else is secondary. So when I started playing other MMOs like LotRO and SWTOR, I was a little confused as to why I had to choose just one crafting profession per character. But as I played those games I eventually came to realize the difference. In RuneScape, the whole game, most notably the economy, was centered primarily around player-made items or things that require non-combat skill levels; magic runes, potions, ores, weapons, armor, even most of the quests required high skill levels. In other MMOs, all of those things can be crafted, but you can just as easily get them from drops. In virtually every other MMO, you can get decent gear simply by killing things, anything from rats (where was this rat hiding these platemail pants?) all the way up to fire-breathing wyverns. True, the longer RuneScape goes on the more certain weapon and armor sets come from enemy drops, but there has generally been little to no bind on pickup/equip gear in RuneScape, so once an item has been out for a year or so the exchange is swimming in them.

So back to the original thesis: outside of RuneScape and probably a few other cases where the game is built around it, what’s the point of crafting? Take Guild Wars 2 for example. Aside from endgame crafting which is bind on pickup (which was added post launch), I could easily sell a handfull of materials for the price of a piece of rare (yellow) gear on the trading post, and get exotics for only a little more. Why should I burn hundreds of these mats for the right to make it myself? Better yet, I could simply kill things and get drops that are similar to, if not better than, crafted gear. I know all of the hardcore crafters are screaming at their monitors right now, but really, in a game where I get bags full of good quality drops, what’s the point? Isn’t this just a single player version of that gear treadmill everyone seems to hate so much these days? “Gather mats so you can make gear so you can gather better mats to make better gear, so you can make the best gear, which you have to craft for yourself.” I’m not a crafting hater–I’m just as responsible for the deforestation of Tyria and Middle-Earth as the next guy–and I do get the appeal of being self-sufficient when it comes to gear, but looking at it objectively, I’m not really sure why every game still feels the need to have an extensive crafting system, especially those with a dungeon gear treadmill in place.

Am I missing something?