Greetings, crafters!

It's been a week since the new tradeskill developer was announced, and I'd like to thank you all for the warm welcome and the positive attitudes.  There have been a ton of good ideas in the stickied suggestion thread, and I can assure you that I've read every post in there, although I haven't answered every single one (usually because it's gone into the "need to think about more" pile, which is now very large). 

There are quite a lot of bug fixes on the way to test already, and some fun RP instruments for woodworkers too, with lots of credit and thanks to dev Feconix.

Some of you had asked for a statement as to the "vision" for tradeskills going forward.  I didn't answer that immediately, as I wanted to think about it some more, and I'm still getting my head wrapped around what is realistic to accomplish, and what is not. 

Here are a few of the ideas we’re considering, to give you an idea of the types of things that you might see in the future.

Please keep in mind that this is not an implementation schedule.  Some of these may arrive in EQ2, some may not.  They are here to serve as examples of improvements that we would very much enjoy making.

We all know there are classes that have historically been short of recipes.  Making sure that they have some more is something we would like to treat as a priority.  Ideally, we would like to add more food for provisioners (including dessert type and possibly even special event themed food).  We will also be looking into the possibility of adding more furniture for carpenters as time and patch sizes permit. 

Woodworkers, armorers, weaponsmiths, and tailors are not forgotten either, but it will take a bit more work to add new recipes for these, and there are also some ideas for new types items I'm considering, so those might need to follow a little later. 

We all know (and if we forget, the sages will remind us) that the flat number of recipes is not enough to consider in and of itself.  While other tradeskill work is going on, we plan on keeping an eye on the desirability and usefulness of the crafted items that each class gets.  To be clear, we are not planning any large-scale profession revamps at this time, but utility is something that is always under constant evaluation.

After thinking about the suggestion of merging a couple of the tradeskill professions that was discussed a while back, I'd prefer to try and find an alternate solution first.  If we can find enough desirable items to give to the classes in question, and end up with professions that feel distinct enough as a result, perhaps we don't need to merge.  I'll leave it as a last resort anyway, but I'd like to try other things first.

We would like to to give crafters reasons (relevant, interesting ones) to leave the crafting dungeons and get out of the cities.  This may involve doing writs in other locations besides the city, it will hopefully involve crafting-related quests, that are still dangerous elements and have a degree of risk.  There are a number of different things we could do here – there’s the possibility for solo quests that are finishable with a less-than-level-10 adventurer, or quests where part of the goal is to find an adventurer escort to complete the objective, and many other ideas.  Our goal with these would first and foremost be to make them fun and interesting.

We would also like to see more reasons for adventurers and crafters to interact, such as the group and raid dropped recipes and components that were added to Emerald Halls and Unrest recently, though this is just one way and I hope there will be others.  The main goal here would be to create interesting and fun ways for these interactions to occur, not to create artificial dependencies.

Letting crafters change their profession is something that we’d like to look into, as well as giving crafters some mark of distinction to identify them as crafters, though whether this would be a title, an outfit, or something else is still to be considered.

There are plenty of other hopes which are too numerous to mention, and/or I'm not sure enough yet if they're realistic. I don't want to raise anyone’s hopes yet; but rest assured the main problem is going to be lack of time in the day, not lack of ideas. 

Thanks for your support and feedback, and happy crafting!

Domino

Domino is taking feedback in several threads in the Official Everquest 2 Tradeskill forums, so be sure to chime in!