Horizons and Vanguard are built like that. You can start crafting with your level 0 character, skill-up and get money from NPCs, with zero investment.

Vanguard took it even further, you don’t even have to harvest resources in order to skillup, you take so-called work orders, craft the item with the materials provided, give it back to the task giver for crafting exp, good money (better that the regular loot adventurers were getting) and a chance to get some nice crafting item (tool, clothing, rare).

And none of these two games tie your crafting level to your adventuring level. Crafting is its own sphere as it should be.

Ahh well, just make up something sharp and witty with a bit of caustic humour about how, even with a high end system you still can’t play due to memory leaks.

Yep, crash within 5-7 minutes of play time in Tursh. Built in addiction control – yay!

No; crafters in EQ2 can take NPC tasks which provide a modest profit while advancing in crafting levels. I haven’t really looked at costs/profits in LOTRO crafting.

Here’s the two reasons I hear most often regarding buying in-game gold: 1)I want my mount, at the level available (not 10 levels later) and I don’t want to spend my limited time farming for it.

2) I want to be a crafter, and it looks interesting/fun, but as usual it is a total money sink, and doesn’t make sense to embark on until max (adventurer) level.

Sound familiar? Is DaoC the only game out there that made it possible to actually make coin (albeit small) while skilling up crafting?

(PS. I support the idea you mentioned, I just don’t think your justification is quite right.)

That’s why I hung the L60 thing out there. This crap bothers me to no end, but I really wouldn’t have a problem with someone buying a 60 from Blizzard with only the basest of equipment. The new content isn’t trivialized and you still have to PvP/Raid/Level in Outland to accomplish anything useful.

I think of it as a more WoWified version of the /level command. Hell, if they wanted to REALLY spice things up Let anyone with a 70 /level a character to 60 for free. Cap it out at one usage per month and credit people 1 credit per year of subscription? Voila! You just hamstrung a big chunk of the power-level business without major harm to your economy AND with a revenue stream that should pay for any labor investment over the first 6-12 months!

Now if only someone would pay me for this genius!

Blizzard does make some coin on transfer services, and nobody resents that because it’s something only they could do, and it isn’t achievable in the game. It seems reasonable to pay $50 to transfer your character between servers. Realistically, they probably spent a week coding up a quick database script that copied some stuff from this server to that one, and pay a junior developer peanuts to oversee it. Brilliant!

Take 3 or 4 staffers in the trenches at Blizzard and code up section to their online storefront. 49.99 for a level 60 character of any race/class on any unlocked server or server which you have a current 60+ character.

Drop them in the appropriate dungeon-2 set for their character and default-bind them to Shattrath. Throw in 1-200g to cover the first levels worth of nominal fees and voila, instant revenue stream that doesn’t rape the end-game/economy and gives players a great boost. Those toons still have to play TBC and pre-60 stuff has no real value beyond a solid base for TBC leveling so no harm, no foul.

That’s actually something I’d take advantage of, honestly. I have no problems playing the 10 levels of TBC stuff, but I just have zero desire to grind out 55 levels in the old world. Been there, done that, no thanks.

Of course a system like that for other games would be very, VERY bad before the first “major” content push. No “buy-in” system should ever exceed the majority of the players that “earned” their stripes.

… how far off topic did I get there?

–matt