While making a sword blade is cliche, there are many other examples of crafting systems that appeal to enthusiasts of other types of activities. A good contrasting example is salvaging in EVE Online. After a battle is over, there are wrecked ships drifting about. A character with the right combination of ship, equipment and skills can salvage items from those wrecks.
How does EVE Online implement that? Point and shoot, unfortunately. As with fantasy MMO crafting, EVE Online eliminates the actual process of salvaging. The real fun of salvaging is left to targeting the many wrecks, tractoring them close, then firing up an automated salvager on the wreck. There's a modest skill to it all, which is good, but enthusiasts who see Salvaging in the game are likely to want to actually do some salvaging.
I made a proposal in the EVE Online forums to introduce a new item to the things returned by the automatic salvagers: Salvage Clusters. These boil down to being puzzles that are of the kind where there are many individual pieces that move in limited ways and the goal is to tease the puzzle apart to get to the special pieces. This is very much what a salvager does when he enters a wreck. He cuts this, he opens that, he pushes there, he pulls here, and out comes the item he was after. That is an example of using a puzzle to entertain a crafter.
This is far less involved than the near-simulator that would be required for the sword blade crafting example. It's not necessary that all crafting systems designed for Artisans be complex or overwhelmingly sophisticated. The goal is to entertain, and different people can be entertained by different things. This is why a simple puzzle could suffice for a salvager while those interested in crafting their own sword would look to a more sophisticated form of entertainment.
MMORPG.com writes:
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