by sabinati » Wed Dec 09, 2009 6:21 am
a more flexible crafting system like the one you suggest would be great, and would go along well with another suggestion, or maybe it was something loftar said, about learning recipes. you could start out with the most basic crafting recipes, like "dough" or "axe" and a few various others necessary for starting out. others, like swords or something, could be learned through the quest system loftar and jorb have mentioned wanting to do.
even more recipes, and variations on the basic recipes could be learned via experimentation, with a chance to fail, possibly based on a relevant skill or something. if you succeeded you would learn the recipe, and could teach it to other players, possibly with a chance to learn it or not. and even if someone told you a recipe on the forums/irc/wiki, you would still have to experiment until you succeeded in actually producing it. we'd end up with a much wider variety of craftable goods, possibly with some of the localization j&l have talked about, as i'm sure most people would guard their secret crafting recipes closely.
it would be nice to have more tradable items that not everyone can produce. one of the problems with trade right now is that you're basically just trading labor for the most part. with the exception of extremely high quality goods, or things that require semi-rare resources (jewelry), pretty much everyone can make everything.