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Originally posted by Cailieg

....I just haven't found a game to fit my inner crafter.

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This is what inspired me to create a survey :-)

I have to admit reading all your posts have made me regret not picking up SWG, Vanguard had it right in so far as creating a whole sphere of game play just for crafting but sadly the engine lets that game down.

I think wherever I posted the link the respondants would still be those who enjoy crafting while the majority who feel 'meh' about it would simply pass it by, so yes it is very likely that the results will reflect the crafting community rather than the gaming community, perhaps a series of simple yes/no polls across forums would reflect more accurately the importance of crafting amongst the wider game population ?

Nevertheless the results make for some interesting (if slightly predictable) reading, the current tally stands at just over 130, I'm surprised how fast the numbers have risen, I would guess I will be able to post the results from 200 responses mid week.

Thankyou all again for the support and for the interesting thoughts you've shared about crafting.

I guess I would be a 'hardcore' crafter in my perfect MMO, multi stage processes that require skill rather than the ability to just click craft while you watch TV, long involved crafting sopecific quests, materials gathered in hard to reach places with an element of risk and the finished result should reflect the effort, I'd like to create items that would let me sit back, with a big smile and a sense of pride in what I've achieved, crafting should offer a whole world of experience, it's a shame it so rarely does.
 

I don't think you will get the full picture in this survey.

People that enjoy crafting will probably do your survey, while anyone without any interest in it won't participate.

I am one of them, my first thought was uninteresting and wanted to move on but well i wanted to give you my impression.

liked the survey hope to see the result soon

What's the current count of survey responses?

Current count is very good, I'm quietly optimistic I'll reach 200 replies within the next couple of days :) 

Crafting is a good way to take a break from questing/grinding or if you're on off peak hours.  Making money is always nice too!

Very nice and fun to do survey. I think crafting should be an imporant part to any MMO. It gives players with little time something to do. Aion has a nice system as you get XP for crafting =))

A few things that bug me about crafting (mostly WoW):

Everybody can do it, and everybody does do it. In Lotro the AH was swamped with identical armor and items, tens of each.

You need to do MANY to skill up. Makes for even more crap floating around the game, or money lost when sold to vendors.

The process in itself is boring, just push and wait.

To be able to continue crafting you need to level up your skill to fight. Does that make any sense?

The materials are more valuable than the finished product, with a very few exceptions.

I want a game where crafters are crafters and fighters are fighters. Make crafters 30% faster at running and they won't have to be able to fight at all. Keep the crowd from crafting crap and let the genuine crafters enjoy a crafting system that needs brains. There you have my perfect MMORPG.

Vanguard dealt with most of these issues. You can be whatever level crafter and lvl 1 adventurer. You pick up "work orders" from crafting npc's and make a few items and hand them back to the order giver for some rewards/coin, no need to try and sell your junk. There is a sort of "mini-game" for making an item, not just push one button and wait. It's pretty fun, but it's also Vanguard... you might want to check it out though.

Surprising no one mentioned EVE crafting.

In EVE there's more than just crafting. You can build ships, you can build components for ships, you can be a miner, you can be a freighter. Hauling is always fun, you can be a trader on the market. There were people who just gathered, there were people who made ammo or who set up player owned station.

What EVE has is regional markets, where you can't see what is in one market unless you have an Alt there, and this allowed for people to harvest mats cheaply (I did) and move them to the main central hub and sell them for more expensive (I did).

I used to purchase billions of refinables/minerals from my 0.0 space and sell it in the main central hub. It was great.

EVE's crafting is pretty straightforward, have X + Y + Z and blueprint and bam there you go. I liked how people made copies of blueprints to sell. I used to buy them and i even had a vendor that I went to specifically for blueprint copies. People also would order ships from me tier 1 only. I used to also take orders for tier 2 ships and then just ship them down from the main central hub. A corp mate ran a business of shipping from main central hub down to our region. He'd make 81 million isk each voyage (1 way) not bad. Too bad the cost of each jump may have been 10m and the time investment and the ship he used cost 6 billion isk. Lots of investment there.

About 3 or 4 people made capital ships in my alliance and I was the first or second person to make "a new ship" down in my 0.0 space when it first came out :).

The problem in EVE was that every crafter was the same, however, it was so regional, it didn't really matter. Lots of corps had in-corp crafters that would make things cheaply for them, while I sold to everyone.

I do wish I had played SWG when it first came out, I think i would have loved it. I tried the trial a few weeks back but something about it prevented me from subbing. However, I am hooked to Runes of Magic . . . go figure. I figured early on crafting was stupid, the way it is setup mandates that it can't possibly function and be efficient.

Cryomatrix

Having gathered 204 responses I have now closed the survey.

The results can be found:

Summary and Comments

Full Spreadsheet

I will probably evaluate everything I've learned and launch a new version of the survey at a later date.

I hope you find the results interesting and i want to add my thanks again for taking the time to take part!