Karl G. wrote:Although item crafting will be possible in PV, I'm taking it in a slightly different direction. I can't say too much more because the design is still in the works
Item gathering and crafting is one of the first things I look for when I try new mmorpgs. Have random trees spawn for lodging, random rocks for mining, and random herbs for herb collecting. Trees can give out randomly sap/logs, rocks can give out mineral dust/ores/gems,and herbs give out plants/seeds. I feel that it is very important that all crafts can be leveled, and that you can lodge/mine/herb the very low level base material right at the start. Now that you have lodging, mining, and herb collecting for material gathering you can create the actual crafts. Three crafts come to mind after you have lodging/mining/herbing that can use all 3.
Alchemy: Uses mostly plants/seeds but a small mix of sap and some logs(paper) for pots and scrolls.
Blacksmithing: Use Logs(for weapon handles and full staves) and ores, and use ores/gems for armor I guess.
Goldsmithing: Use sap(lets say its hard sap) with ores and gems for rings/amulets/etc.
The actual crafting part can go a million ways and you have already thought about it from your quote, but a correct item gathering system can more or less make a second game inside your mmorpg. Leveling item gathering would just be you need a certain lvl of whatever gathering for a certain lvl area, or you need a certain lvl of 2 gatherings for 1 craft, whatever it can go a million ways as long as you make lvls for them.