Make crafting accessible.

The crafting system in this game is one of the most tedious, unfun experiences in this game and it needs attention if the game wants to bring in and hold on to new players.

Why the current system is bad

1. Zero interaction with drops: kill a mob, get crafting items to then directly deposit in storage or sell on TP. How is this okay? I get the world and the quests are fun enough to keep people engaged, but encourage us to find use for these drops.
2. A painful way to level up crafting: any player who wants to level up crafting needs at least two screens! One where they need to log into gw2, copy a bunch of text to paste in another website, then go through a list of things they need to buy On the TP and tick them off. This is unfun, tedious, and quite frankly elitist where the crafting system is min-maxed. I leveled up a weaponsmith and an armorsmith to 500 and I spent more time looking at the tiny screen on my phone to make sure I was buying the right amount of items from the TP than actually enjoying the experience.

Fixes: some sort of daily system where you craft items that levels you up. This is all that is needed. Getting to 500 need not be done in an hour. There are multiple crafting professions in the game, and it’s a shame and a loss if it’s not accessible to most players.

I didn't use any external sites to level crafting. To me, it wasn't that difficult once you learn the method that is used for all crafting disciplines, sans Chef and Scribe.
There are items you can craft each day that are profitable.Leveling crafting does award XP, as well as crafting XP.

How hard is it make 1 of each inscription at your level (colored ones) then 3-7 however many different inscriptions you have for example sword hilts+sword blade combine 3-7 of the different blade hilt+sword blade+inscription in the discovery tab one time each.Move over to the next weapon or armor with all the colored inscriptions/insignas you can use.Repeate untill you get to the next insigna/inscription tier

I never needed to use external sites for lvling crafting. Once you get through first tier of any discipline except chef its straightforward.I would just like an increase of refining speed for all higher tier mats. Iron for example is super fast while mithril is much slower. And youll be refining much more mithril in general.

The crafting in this game in regards to leveling it up is certainly trash. Everything you have to know and learn to level it up is completely useless information for end game crafting.

it is actually quite sad to be completing events, only to then store or sell most drops. This experience can be expected for a player who has finished most of the content in game. But for a new player to have a similar experience is not a good thing.

The personal story does give you some useful items, especially at later lvls when it starts to give you rares and exotics.This is not really related to crafting though.
I am a bit confused with your post though, don't really know what you are aiming for. You don't really like lvling crafting and that I get. But I don't get the part about drops. Most drops are actually useful for crafting. Salvage - mats - craft. From my experience, you get almost enough mats to lvl crafting naturally during lvling your character. At least up to 400. And there is enough useful gear between drops, story rewards and hearth vendors to update gear while you lvl.The gear you craft is mostly useless though if that is what you were aiming for.

@Cuks.8241 said:The personal story does give you some useful items, especially at later lvls when it starts to give you rares and exotics.This is not really related to crafting though.

I am a bit confused with your post though, don't really know what you are aiming for. You don't really like lvling crafting and that I get. But I don't get the part about drops. Most drops are actually useful for crafting. Salvage - mats - craft. From my experience, you get almost enough mats to lvl crafting naturally during lvling your character. At least up to 400. And there is enough useful gear between drops, story rewards and hearth vendors to update gear while you lvl.The gear you craft is mostly useless though if that is what you were aiming for.

I want a system where crafting is more enjoyable and accessible.The game never really encourages you to craft items, it never introduces you to crafting and it doesn’t make an attempt to even guide you through it.

All the mats I got while leveling up went directly to my storage. And when my storage was full, I sold them on the tp or discarded them. This is not a good reward/drop system for new players. Rewards/drops needs to be something a player can use. Why kill a world boss or even complete map events in the core game when all you get is something you put in storage and forget about?

A good daily crafting system would be like: you need to craft this item that needs materials that drop from a particular boss/mob. Take it down, craft the item, turn it in to either the vigil/ priory/ order of whispers guild and gain some gold, achievement points or cosmetics. For a new player this adds an extra motivation to explore the world and it gives players a sense of progression.These can be dailies or a part of a longer quest.

This is not about gear through completing the story. Crafting is a part of the game and the game doesn’t give it the attention it needs.

@"Tazer.2157" said:All the mats I got while leveling up went directly to my storage. And when my storage was full, I sold them on the tp or discarded them. This is not a good reward/drop system for new players. Rewards/drops needs to be something a player can use. Why kill a world boss or even complete map events in the core game when all you get is something you put in storage and forget about?

Wait wait wait what? So you sold them after being full for money but it's not rewarding? If they were bloodstone dust, the blue star fragment, round yellow thing then there are items that can eat them for loot bags, if they are wood log, ore, leather section you should refine them, and if they are vial of blood, totem, claw etc..etc.. believe me, you can't forget about these because sooner or later You will have use them for exotic, achievement, legendary craftingAnd if they are mithril ore, elder wood log, blue T5 silk and T5 leather section, you can create a ascended mats per day for stuffs like grandmaster mark, crafting ascended armor or precursor craftingYou think crafting in gw2 was tedious and unfun? Wohoho, wait till you try SwtorYah.....crafting is very important if you want to get great stuff so i don't see how "the game doesn’t give it the attention it needs" Do you want the game to pester the player to make ascended gear every time they log in?

@Tazer.2157 said:The crafting system in this game is one of the most tedious, unfun experiences in this game and it needs attention if the game wants to bring in and hold on to new players.

Why the current system is bad

1. Zero interaction with drops: kill a mob, get crafting items to then directly deposit in storage or sell on TP. How is this okay? I get the world and the quests are fun enough to keep people engaged, but encourage us to find use for these drops.
2. A painful way to level up crafting: any player who wants to level up crafting needs at least two screens! One where they need to log into gw2, copy a bunch of text to paste in another website, then go through a list of things they need to buy On the TP and tick them off. This is unfun, tedious, and quite frankly elitist where the crafting system is min-maxed. I leveled up a weaponsmith and an armorsmith to 500 and I spent more time looking at the tiny screen on my phone to make sure I was buying the right amount of items from the TP than actually enjoying the experience.

Fixes: some sort of daily system where you craft items that levels you up. This is all that is needed. Getting to 500 need not be done in an hour. There are multiple crafting professions in the game, and it’s a shame and a loss if it’s not accessible to most players.

I leveled all crafts to 500 without using that website in vanilla, I just leveled another craft to 450 a few days ago in less than an hour.not sure what this complaint is about, are you just complaining that you don't understand something so therefor call it bad and unaccesible?

This games crafting is accessible and easy, but not as brainless as WoW's and can't be 1 button macrod like FF14's. Is this the point we're at in video games, where everything needs to be completely automated, not needing to use our brain or outside sources for min/maxing? lol

So much junk in crafting in GW2. Far too many tiers of armors and weapons that you will never ever use because leveling is so breathtakingly fast, that by the time you could craft them, they are long obsolete.

After leveling all crafts to 500.. If i were a new customer today no way would i go through that again.. I pity these new Steam customers coming in at this economy point.

And that daily ascended trash lol that never gets better.

@Ultramex.1506 said:

@"Tazer.2157" said:All the mats I got while leveling up went directly to my storage. And when my storage was full, I sold them on the tp or discarded them. This is not a good reward/drop system for new players. Rewards/drops needs to be something a player can use. Why kill a world boss or even complete map events in the core game when all you get is something you put in storage and forget about?

If you just stick to exotics you can ignore crafting completely.. You aren't very good but you can ignore that grind.

I want the crafting experience to be more fun. Questing together and communicating with other new players for crafting resources and recipes would be fun. I made a new character today and I already came across many players who were interested in crafting professions. Sadly the game never lays out a path those players can take.

Thank the Six Gods we don't have the crafting criers, anymore.

@"Dante.1508" said:If you just stick to exotics you can ignore crafting completely.. You aren't very good but you can ignore that grind.What do you mean "you aren't very good"?

@Cuks.8241 said:From my experience, you get almost enough mats to lvl crafting naturally during lvling your character. At least up to 400.

Not even close. You leave the level 1-15 area sooner than you could possibly get enough materials in armor crafting to get to 75. Weapons crafting at least lets you mine and cut wood at your leisure. Of course, then you need those materials you need for inscription and insignia crafting, which you won't get unless you start farming them on purpose.It won't be even close enough just by playing, so how did you get them if that is actually your experience? I want some pointers.

@Tazer.2157 said:I want the crafting experience to be more fun. Questing together and communicating with other new players for crafting resources and recipes would be fun. I made a new character today and I already came across many players who were interested in crafting professions. Sadly the game never lays out a path those players can take.

OK ... but Anet doesn't change an 8 year old game specific to what a single player wants on these kinds of subjective terms. And you are wrong ... we were ALL new players once, so claiming the game doesn't lay out a path new players can take for crafting is preposterous.

I've been playing for a while, but still consider myself fairly new as I am still piecing together how to play. I started looking into crafting fairly recently, like a month ago or so, and while I'm not power leveling I have made fairly decent progress chipping away at leveling my Huntsman and Weaponsmithing. The former almost hitting level 200 today and I think I stopped the other around 115?

Only thing I found difficult was when I exhausted the EXP I could gain from recipes because I wasn't discovering other recipes, didn't know how to work that tab until a friend told me what it was for. It's been fun since learning how it worked, but I can't say that this is tedious or unfriendly to newer players.

@Yggranya.5201 said:

@Cuks.8241 said:From my experience, you get almost enough mats to lvl crafting naturally during lvling your character. At least up to 400.

Well I don't remember so well now but I know this. I started crafting (armor smithing) when I hit 80 on my first character on a F2P account at the time. So no TP. I was dead broke because as a F2P you can't sell on TP and can only buy very limited stuff (which you can't because on a new F2P account you are dead broke anyway, also I thought at the time Tp is 100 % not accessible to F2P). So I had to farm everything. I didn't use guides, never do unless I hit a brick wall.First tier was actually the hardest because as you said you out level tier 1 super fast and as a new player you don't really salvage or know much at all. So my bank was pretty much empty of tier 1. Later tiers as I recall were much easier. I remember that up to ~ 450 it was really smooth without much farming. After 450 it got hard and about there I bought the game.I do lvl slowly and like to explore though. Especially my first character. I am not in a rush to max lvls and rather learn and explore.

@"Tazer.2157" said:

2. A painful way to level up crafting: any player who wants to level up crafting needs at least two screens! One where they need to log into gw2, copy a bunch of text to paste in another website, then go through a list of things they need to buy On the TP and tick them off. This is unfun, tedious, and quite frankly elitist where the crafting system is min-maxed. I leveled up a weaponsmith and an armorsmith to 500 and I spent more time looking at the tiny screen on my phone to make sure I was buying the right amount of items from the TP than actually enjoying the experience.

or you could just learn how the incredibly simple system works ...weaponsmithing, armorsmith, leatherworker, artificier, tailoring, and jewelcrafter are basically 1+1+1=3, inscription/insignia/jewel/gem + part A + part B = item, you get some extra crafting exp for discoveries and that is about it and it is the same for the nearly the entirety of the leveling process. The only change that occurs is that you need to buy the recipe sheets to learn the recipes for the inscription/insignia/jewel starting at exotics

min-maxing is a pain players choose to inflict upon themselves. I sometimes do it but that is because I enjoy the process of optimizing things. When I am not doing that I just use whatever I happen to have on hand. Nothing needs to be referred except your own supplies.

Hmm, while I agree that crafting can be tedious, I also have to disagree with your points beyond that. As a new player almost three years ago, I found the crafting system to be initially confusing but that didn't stop me from enjoying the overall game and sticking with it, not to mention learning how to craft stuff.

Your point about interactions with drops has me a bit puzzled. I regularly stop, salvage the gear I've picked up, store all the craftable materials, sell the trash, and move on from there. When a craftable material hits my max inventory storage, I sell 250 of it on the TP, which brings in small amounts of gold on a steady basis. What other interaction do you want to have with dropped stuff?

As for needing two screens, I actually have two desk tops right next to each other and thus have two large screens readily available. However, as others have mentioned, I didn't need a second screen to level up basic crafting. Even as a beginning player, I realized that all I needed to do was to refine the materials appropriate to each level, to craft new insignias as they became available, and to craft the gear to put the insignias on, earning the discovery exp. For advanced crafting, two screens are helpful. I'm working on legendary gear now and that crafting can get intricate enough that I very much use my second screen. The second screen is not essential though, merely convenient. Without one, I'd only have to switch back and forth between the game and my browser. In Windows 10, that's merely a matter of hitting one key then making one mouse click.

All in all, crafting was accessible to me when I was a new player. It is tedious though. These days I have one alt account that I use for dailies. The chars on that account are all outfitted with exotic gear because I don't want to go through the tedium of maxing the crafting skills a second time. The exotic gear works just fine for that account so there's no need for those chars to learn crafting at all. :)

@LucianDK.8615 said:So much junk in crafting in GW2. Far too many tiers of armors and weapons that you will never ever use because leveling is so breathtakingly fast, that by the time you could craft them, they are long obsolete.

This is very true and my main problem with GW2 crafting.

@Tazer.2157 said:A good daily crafting system would be like: you need to craft this item that needs materials that drop from a particular boss/mob. Take it down, craft the item, turn it in to either the vigil/ priory/ order of whispers guild and gain some gold, achievement points or cosmetics. For a new player this adds an extra motivation to explore the world and it gives players a sense of progression.These can be dailies or a part of a longer quest.

This is actually a really good idea. Put in quests in the world that rewards you for crafting an item while simultaneously teaching you how the crafting system works. I think some of your arguments above are kind of questionable, but I like this idea a lot. And if you do it with specific NPCs such as Orders or certain people in a city, it also adds just a taste of traditional questing to the game which would be very nice to see.

@Cuks.8241 said:

@Yggranya.5201 said:

@Cuks.8241 said:From my experience, you get almost enough mats to lvl crafting naturally during lvling your character. At least up to 400.

So farming? Yeah, i thought so. Then what was this?

@Cuks.8241 said:From my experience, you get almost enough mats to lvl crafting naturally during lvling your character. At least up to 400.

Also at 400-500 you need hardened leather, lots and lots of it, the rarest of the rare materials. You must have had a lucky star shining during your birth. It must be a miracle! Yes, i don't believe you as i have all crafting at 500. It was horrible. And i only started crafting ascended stuff year(s) after i had started playing, and i still didn't have even close enough to get even one crafting to 500 without the black lion trading post.

Maybe you started years ago when it wasn't so bad? (i don't actually know if it was or wasn't) Because in that case things have changed for the worse. Way worse.

@Jokuc.3478 said:

@LucianDK.8615 said:So much junk in crafting in GW2. Far too many tiers of armors and weapons that you will never ever use because leveling is so breathtakingly fast, that by the time you could craft them, they are long obsolete.

This is my experience in other games, though, so not unique to GW2. The main difference I can think of is that, in GW2, the xp you get from gathering mats is counted towards leveling xp, and not crafting xp.

@kharmin.7683 said:

@"Dante.1508" said:If you just stick to exotics you can ignore crafting completely.. You aren't very good but you can ignore that grind.What do you mean "you aren't very good"?

Ascended are far better than exotics, i know people suggest otherwise but Ascended blow exotics out of the water in stats.. and no its not 5% you add weapons and armor up and Ascended are like 30% or something better..

@Obtena.7952 said:

@Tazer.2157 said:I want the crafting experience to be more fun. Questing together and communicating with other new players for crafting resources and recipes would be fun. I made a new character today and I already came across many players who were interested in crafting professions. Sadly the game never lays out a path those players can take.

Crafting is not 8 years old its been upgraded multiple times.. Crafting is about as new player friendly as World vs World is and PvP is, which is its not at all.