Played the last two betas and have really enjoyed learning this new game.  I laugh now when they say there is only two starter zones, for instance...a honest newbie mistake, when there's really 20 starting zone instances.  Gliding makes having a 'mount' fun(they need a guide on gliding, sometimes i can glide 30 seconds, sometimes .5 seconds).  Swimming gets your wings wet, etc.  Anyways, thought I'd post my thoughts on crafting.

I love the harvesting, anyone can harvest.  There's lots to harvest.  Blah blah, yeah, its a great system, no complaints.

They have an auction house, thank goodness.  The NPC is called a Broker.  There's good things and bad things about it.  I wanted to buy materials for sewing but although the armor and weapons have a nice breakdown/search ability, crafter materials are all lumped together; you have to go through like 40 pages of stuff which is not in any kind of order.  Now, you can type the item you want to look for BUT, you need to type it exactly, i.e. Crafting Refined Armor Stone.  You have to use upper case and the search cannot be shortened to find anything starting with craf, for instance.  Admittedly, the items are pretty much lumped together by name, but again, the order is not alpha or numerical.

The crafting is a super time and money sink.  I don't enjoy it as much as EQ2.  Its not as robust as SWG.  Its not as diverse as Eve.  But, you get exp while working semi-afk.  You have work orders to keep things changing.  There's risk of failure.  Making crafted items has a chance to make a masterpiece.  All good, all normal stuff.  The best thing about it is, there are many different crafts, you can do them all, and it is enough of a money and time sink to keep everyone and their mama from doing it.  If everyone can and does max a craft, you end up with materials on the auction house selling for more than the price of the item you want to make.

This past beta, I crafted Sewing.  I went to the auction house and to put up a lesser armor refining stone, the default price was 50.  If you try to sell it to a merchant, you get 20% of that price.  If you can find a merchant to buy the item, it sells at 112% of the default price, so it'd be 56 kinah.  Half the people sold them at 50 and half sold them at 500.  I figured the cost of a white item that nobody wants, 995 kinah at the 'normal' pricing.  At the level of crafting and the level of the item, lvl 15ish, people have about 60k kinah to spend.  I made a green masterpiece on my second try but it could be 1 every 10 tries, lets try that.  Means to sell an item of good quality that people 'want' to buy, you'd spend 9,950 kinah.  People should be able to buy consumables and maybe TWO green items while having looted off mobs most of their other peices.   Selling the item for 15k kinah X 2 items = 30k kinah which leaves them 30k for potions, food, guild fees, stupid quests(yes, I paid the krall language quest giver on the Elyos side 10k kinah to complete the quest, doh!). 

Now, if you buy materials at 10 times the normal price, you're an idiot, cause you'd be spending 99,500 kinah to make an item that you should be able to buy for 15k kinah.  So, think on that when buying.  I think the prices will be crazy up and down at first but will become more 'honest' and affordable as the crafting level and material needs become more obvious.  Unlike WoW, not everyone and their mother will be willing to spend the equal amount of time needed to max level a char, to spend that same time maxing a craft.

Nice post, i agree that the current crafting system isn't any major breakthrough, but enjoyable nevertheless. In my opinion, the market should settle out within 2 weeks after release. A major reason for all the closed and open betas is to get a core market going. The beta testers will most likely set some reasonable prices, so  the first time players will be able to understand what things are worth.

I agree that the brokerage menus are a pain to navigate.  The search feature is great, but NCSoft has *really* got to improve how they divide goods and classify them.  A working method would be something like FFXI's AH, with the multiple tabs, but that system had it's problems too.

Still, unless I know the exact spelling and capitalize things correctly, it's just utterly ridiculous to navigate through 300 pages of goods because NCSoft was too lazy to create specific categories for the different items.  I mean, if they can do it for the different types of armor (chain, cloth, leather, plate, etc.), why can't they have "cooking, alchemy, etc." choices that allow for a little bit more specificity?

I like most everything else about this game, but the AH menus are pretty bad.  For as much polish as the game has, this are needs some major improvement.  I haven't seen anything in the patch notes about it, but I haven't been looking all that closely either.

I'm just really glad they did away with the "key item" system from Lineage2.  that was the worst part of the crafting system there.  overall I'm enjoying the crafting system.  some items from killing mobs, some items from harvesting, its a good mix and the items are for the most part very good.

Originally posted by Kryptlin

Nice post, i agree that the current crafting system isn't any major breakthrough, but enjoyable nevertheless. In my opinion, the market should settle out within 2 weeks after release. A major reason for all the closed and open betas is to get a core market going. The beta testers will most likely set some reasonable prices, so  the first time players will be able to understand what things are worth.

Wow, optimistic.

I'm more inclined to think we will see a fairly unstable market that experiences out of control price inflation/gouging for the first 1-3 months.   Since crafters are going to be racing to level their craft, mat prices will be high and it will probably be more profitable to gather and sell mats than to craft (in the beginning). Also, since the whole population is leveling and starting from scratch, all armors and weapons will be much rarer and there will be much less competition when selling them (higher prices again).

That with the fact that the start up = people are racing to progress, so they tend to act impatiently and will pay any price for whatever they need inorder to keep moving forward.  But, as with the real world economy, both of our predictions could come true and it's an imperfect science to try to figure it all out.

What's more, there's always the third option that things are stable and reasonbly priced at the beginning (ha....!  That's rich).

Originally posted by MustaphaMond

Originally posted by Kryptlin

Nice post, i agree that the current crafting system isn't any major breakthrough, but enjoyable nevertheless. In my opinion, the market should settle out within 2 weeks after release. A major reason for all the closed and open betas is to get a core market going. The beta testers will most likely set some reasonable prices, so  the first time players will be able to understand what things are worth.

 

Wow, optimistic.

I'm more inclined to think we will see a fairly unstable market that experiences out of control price inflation/gouging for the first 1-3 months.   Since crafters are going to be racing to level their craft, mat prices will be high and it will probably be more profitable to gather and sell mats than to craft (in the beginning). Also, since the whole population is leveling and starting from scratch, all armors and weapons will be much rarer and there will be much less competition when selling them (higher prices again).

That with the fact that the start up = people are racing to progress, so they tend to act impatiently and will pay any price for whatever they need inorder to keep moving forward.  But, as with the real world economy, both of our predictions could come true and it's an imperfect science to try to figure it all out.

What's more, there's always the third option that things are stable and reasonbly priced at the beginning (ha....!  That's rich).

Why do you think material prices are in anyway related to leveling your crafting skill? This is mostly done via work orders (repeatable quests), that only require NPC materials. I personally loved this, because it won't be like in many other games, that the market is flooded by a certain equipment just because it is the best one to repeatedly make at that crafting level, and not because the person wanted to fill the demand for that equipment.

And so far, up to level 25, crafting gives the 2nd, if not the best (because usually the best are a named boss drop or a lottery chance unique drop) gear for the level. At level 30 there are Abyss gears, but it still should be a great option to craft your gear and save up your Abyss Points for a later level, unless you wish to level up by PvPing, but the version with PvP kill experience isn't on beta servers yet, so we can only speculate about this viability. Anyway, your crafted gear price on the Broker must be competitive, otherwise people will just purchase dropped gear, get some from exchanging coins in Coin repeatable quests or simply stick with the gear they get from important quests.

Originally posted by MustaphaMond

I agree that the brokerage menus are a pain to navigate.  The search feature is great, but NCSoft has *really* got to improve how they divide goods and classify them.  A working method would be something like FFXI's AH, with the multiple tabs, but that system had it's problems too.

Still, unless I know the exact spelling and capitalize things correctly, it's just utterly ridiculous to navigate through 300 pages of goods because NCSoft was too lazy to create specific categories for the different items.  I mean, if they can do it for the different types of armor (chain, cloth, leather, plate, etc.), why can't they have "cooking, alchemy, etc." choices that allow for a little bit more specificity?

I like most everything else about this game, but the AH menus are pretty bad.  For as much polish as the game has, this are needs some major improvement.  I haven't seen anything in the patch notes about it, but I haven't been looking all that closely either.

the auction house was fixed in one of the patches, maybe 1.2? one that stands out was being able to search the Stigmas and drop spells by class. where before the patch they was just thrown in there at random.i really wish they'd atleast patch to 1.2,this having us play the 1.0 is stupid. just checked it was the 1.2 patch they updated the auction house window. can look things up by material your craft uses same with designs

 About the Broker in 1.0, you should be fine as long as you know some part of the item name.

I could find manastones by searching "attack", "physical", "evasion", etc.

I could find materials by searcing "titanium" (finds both Titanium Ore and Titanium Ore of High Quality), "aether crystal" (finds both the regular and the high quality version).

I could find gear by searching "leather of the dead" (finds all leather PARTX of the dead avaialable), "leather of revenge", "craftsman's thick leather", etc.

One of the major patches not implemented in the beta server features a lot of improvement on the broker though.

---

Originally posted by EricDanie
 About the Broker in 1.0, you should be fine as long as you know some part of the item name.
I could find manastones by searching "attack", "physical", "evasion", etc.
I could find materials by searcing "titanium" (finds both Titanium Ore and Titanium Ore of High Quality), "aether crystal" (finds both the regular and the high quality version).
I could find gear by searching "leather of the dead" (finds all leather PARTX of the dead avaialable), "leather of revenge", "craftsman's thick leather", etc.
One of the major patches not implemented in the beta server features a lot of improvement on the broker though.

---

Does it? That is really good to hear. The broker is quite annoying in 1.0 Aion, especially once you hit a mid level to where you have to sort through a ton of pages to get to gear that is for your level.

Relieved to hear the sorting was addressed.

One thing to remember about gathering.  There are quite a few "normal" quests that require gathereed materials.  In The CBT  Iwould sya maybe 1/5 or 1/6 of the total quests I found up to level 21 involved gatherting stuff.

So in other words gathering is in fact a significant source of Xp and money.  At least temporarily.

Originally posted by MustaphaMond

Originally posted by Kryptlin

Nice post, i agree that the current crafting system isn't any major breakthrough, but enjoyable nevertheless. In my opinion, the market should settle out within 2 weeks after release. A major reason for all the closed and open betas is to get a core market going. The beta testers will most likely set some reasonable prices, so  the first time players will be able to understand what things are worth.

 

Wow, optimistic.

I'm more inclined to think we will see a fairly unstable market that experiences out of control price inflation/gouging for the first 1-3 months.   Since crafters are going to be racing to level their craft, mat prices will be high and it will probably be more profitable to gather and sell mats than to craft (in the beginning). Also, since the whole population is leveling and starting from scratch, all armors and weapons will be much rarer and there will be much less competition when selling them (higher prices again).

That with the fact that the start up = people are racing to progress, so they tend to act impatiently and will pay any price for whatever they need inorder to keep moving forward.  But, as with the real world economy, both of our predictions could come true and it's an imperfect science to try to figure it all out.

What's more, there's always the third option that things are stable and reasonbly priced at the beginning (ha....!  That's rich).

This is probably somehwat accurate but also most likely flawed to some degree.

You see any character can learn all the crafts up to 399.  But you may only learn one to 400, then once you have mastered that one you may master one more and no more than that.

Getting 399 in a craft is fairly expensive and time consuming.  Most people will not do all of them, but most people could definitely get alchemy to 399.  Mastering (400+) a craft is far far worse and much more restrictive.

But leveling past 400 is a completely different kettle of fish it is MUCH harder and requires instance grinding and als osome pretty nasty quests.  Also while the initial easy craft recipes are useful once you hit 25 the quest reward stuff is far more useful.  So the initial market will be saturated because anyone can do it, but useful.  The middle market will be non-existant.  And the mastery level market is highly desirable but incredibly hard to master.

Many people who try to max out a craft will probably give up.  The final level is where most people fail to grasp the real nature of Aion crafting.  Up until then it is basically similar to WoW with slight differences.  At the mastery level you start needing to get consecutive crits and some pretty crazy resource requirements.  You need to crit a lower item use it as material and then crit the top tier item.  This means the very best crafted stuff will involve multiple failures. 

But the final level is also the only real long term useful stuff.

Edit: 

as a measure for people; in CBT4 I played a chanter and did a moderate amount of gathering and with a 2hour investment using just normal funds was able to craft a lvl 15 staff (at lvl 15) I am still using at lvl 21.  And staves are harder to make because they are two handed.  A decent one-handed sword only needed like 20 points in the craft that staff needed 55.  So anyone can make lower level stuff with only a modest investment.  Making the level 20 staff would require 99 in handicraft and that would get expensive and boring.  Also resources are not the real limiter, for weapons you need special drops from creatures called weapon refining stones.  You will not raise a weapon crafting skill through gathering.  You will use work orders.  UNless they change the drop rates its simply not feasible.

Originally posted by EricDanie

Originally posted by MustaphaMond

Originally posted by Kryptlin

Nice post, i agree that the current crafting system isn't any major breakthrough, but enjoyable nevertheless. In my opinion, the market should settle out within 2 weeks after release. A major reason for all the closed and open betas is to get a core market going. The beta testers will most likely set some reasonable prices, so  the first time players will be able to understand what things are worth.

 

Wow, optimistic.

I'm more inclined to think we will see a fairly unstable market that experiences out of control price inflation/gouging for the first 1-3 months.   Since crafters are going to be racing to level their craft, mat prices will be high and it will probably be more profitable to gather and sell mats than to craft (in the beginning). Also, since the whole population is leveling and starting from scratch, all armors and weapons will be much rarer and there will be much less competition when selling them (higher prices again).

That with the fact that the start up = people are racing to progress, so they tend to act impatiently and will pay any price for whatever they need inorder to keep moving forward.  But, as with the real world economy, both of our predictions could come true and it's an imperfect science to try to figure it all out.

What's more, there's always the third option that things are stable and reasonbly priced at the beginning (ha....!  That's rich).

Why do you think material prices are in anyway related to leveling your crafting skill? This is mostly done via work orders (repeatable quests), that only require NPC materials. I personally loved this, because it won't be like in many other games, that the market is flooded by a certain equipment just because it is the best one to repeatedly make at that crafting level, and not because the person wanted to fill the demand for that equipment.

And so far, up to level 25, crafting gives the 2nd, if not the best (because usually the best are a named boss drop or a lottery chance unique drop) gear for the level. At level 30 there are Abyss gears, but it still should be a great option to craft your gear and save up your Abyss Points for a later level, unless you wish to level up by PvPing, but the version with PvP kill experience isn't on beta servers yet, so we can only speculate about this viability. Anyway, your crafted gear price on the Broker must be competitive, otherwise people will just purchase dropped gear, get some from exchanging coins in Coin repeatable quests or simply stick with the gear they get from important quests.

For those who do not know there are repeatable Coin quests all throughout Aion.  These are not real "quests" they are simply kill counts that give crap XP compared to the xp you get from the actuall kills.

In Asmodian Altgard the Coin quest is to kill I bleive its something on the order of 15 or so wind spirits (two types) for one coin.

You can exchange 2 coins or 5 I bleive for a random reward of a certain quality.  I exchanged two coins and recieved a pair of leather boots of green quality that were of lvl 18 or 19 (ie. the level of the zone).  Since my character was a chanter I was annoyed that they gave me leather, since they wear chain.  But sine my current boots were lvl 7 from the starter zone they were an upgrade and they were pretty good for leather.  I am assuming the 5 coins trade in would be a blue.

Doing these quest solo is quite boring and basically a grind like any other with very little extra XP,  Iwould say the trade in give you roughtly 1/16 the exp you got from killing the creatures.  Doing them in a group of six could convievable outfit you pretty decently in a reasonable amount of time.  Doing them solo would be pretty crappy.

The later zones uped the trade in to 3 and 6 and changed the kill quests to drop quests.  In Brus it was getting 13 drop item from frightcorn and 13 drop items from vespine.  That usually translated in killing about 30-32 total things.  However the way things drop in a group in Aion seems screwed up.  I am not sure your entire group gets the quest drops, or at least there was some kind of delay before I could loot.  I dunno it is messed up.  So grinding these in a group kind of sucks frankly.

However the ones in Morhiem were striaght up kil 10/10/10 of three differente creatures for the same level.

Anyway that is what the crafted items would compete with as far non-drop gear.  You many do each coin quest a total of 100 times.  At level 20ish the lower one gives greens similar to crafted item (lvl 20 crafted is green).  But convievably you can easily get blues which would be a crit for crafting.  i would say it is much easier to saturate the market with blue via coind grinds.  Especailly considering the limit on rafter of getting refining stones.

 So after going to http://www.aionarmory.com/ and looking at all the crafted Armor and weapons , it would seem as if the Abyss stuff is alot better at the same lvl. Now there are no mana stone slots in the abyss as far as i can see so this just might make crafted gear worth a shot or 2. The only thing i can see being really good would be cooking and maybe alchemy. Now that being said i know in CB that the HQ ore and aether was over priced and very had to get. I was able to get my gathering up to lvl 170 and Armor smithing up to lvl 150's. I was able to HQ a few itmes and were really nice  i gave them to guild mates but was nice gear pre lvl 30 abyss stuff. Would really like to see what happenes with the economy when the game does go live and ppl start to hit lvl 30 and get the Abyss gear.

2 Points i like to add.

Alchemy and Food will be in my opinion the real money makers in the game. Because you need the food - and there is no other source to get the good ones beside crafters. So the mats with the highest prices are the ones you will need for instant HP and MP pots.

The crafting of weapons and armors is like some of you already feared mot really a gold mine. You need cash and time to level it and it gives next to nothing back. The simple reason is that looted gear is often better by far. But i hope for better recipes.

Originally posted by Sioned

2 Points i like to add.

Alchemy and Food will be in my opinion the real money makers in the game. Because you need the food - and there is no other source to get the good ones beside crafters. So the mats with the highest prices are the ones you will need for instant HP and MP pots.

 

The crafting of weapons and armors is like some of you already feared mot really a gold mine. You need cash and time to level it and it gives next to nothing back. The simple reason is that looted gear is often better by far. But i hope for better recipes.

i'm lvl 37 atm and i find that the crafted armor is better than *most* drops and *most* quest rewards.

i just finished a lvl40 group quest and the reward i got for it is worse than the lvl 33 player made gear i already had.
the crafters i know ingame are making a good income not matter what profession they have. this game is very young mind you. -things a year from now will be different.

considering the difficulty in gatting some materials i would expect those materials to be way over priced....

someone mentioned crafting quests.....yep you can get an order to craft 3 things....but which is easier....

crafting three things constantly meesing with stuff or making 100 of things with no muss and fuss.....i dont htink i even need to answer

I site as an example of this all other games that feature crafting....you will notice prime materials needed always are sold for big amounts....farmers look for those items constantly....

Players are not stupid...they know very quickly if the most important material is silk thread they will make sure there is not only a shortage to find the materials...but also the only ones available will cost you alot.....becasue you need them to level.

Originally posted by Plageron

considering the difficulty in gatting some materials i would expect those materials to be way over priced....

 

someone mentioned crafting quests.....yep you can get an order to craft 3 things....but which is easier....

crafting three things constantly meesing with stuff or making 100 of things with no muss and fuss.....i dont htink i even need to answer

 

I site as an example of this all other games that feature crafting....you will notice prime materials needed always are sold for big amounts....farmers look for those items constantly....

Players are not stupid...they know very quickly if the most important material is silk thread they will make sure there is not only a shortage to find the materials...but also the only ones available will cost you alot.....becasue you need them to level.

 

I hear ya and know where you're coming from but thankfully, you've got it all wrong!  And, I'm sure you'll be happy to hear this so, let me explain a few things about crafting in Aion.

When you go see the crafting trainer, you pay some kinah(game gold) to the trainer and he allows you to start learning the craft.  Basically, every 100 points, you pay again for the next tier in crafting.

Now, here's how Aion differs from WoW and other games; you can buy a recipe and make 100 things, like you were suggesting but that'd be incredibly expensive.  No, Aion came up with another method which keeps crap items from popping up on the Broker (auction house) AND allows a crafter to train without having to buy materials from other players.  Its called crafting orders. 

You get an order for 6 fictional items.  The trainer gives you 8 of a material item plus the quest recipe for a fictional item.  You buy some items that are needed to add with the matieral item given by the trainer, for a minimal amount to the npc merchant in the area.  You make 6 of the item needed and if you fail, you still have two more chances which is why you get 8 material instead of the 6 needed.  When you turn in the 6 fictional items, you also turn in the extra 1 or 2 material item originally given to you by the trainer plus the fictional recipe.

I've tried both ways, and because you need refining stones and other things to make an item, well, I doubt you could come up with the material needed to go afk and make 100 gloves.  Even if it was sold on the Broker, it'd probably cost about 30 times the price of doing crafting orders.