Useful crafting in MMORPGs, a dead art?

Kyleran

I care less about what mechanics are developed for gathering or crafting and more about finally finding a game where such activities result in creating something useful, valuable or sellable to other players at my present skill level.

Almost every MMORPG I've ever played has been designed so that lower level players can only gather low level materials of small value or craft low level, almost junk items which are not even useful to me, so one just ends up vendoring them to get some small amount of cash back, usually at a loss.

Another big sin, making in game drops superior to crafted items, especially gear better than crafted items in every way. 

Outside of survival games, it's been many, many years, if ever that I crafted something and found it useful outside of say utility items such as potions.

Almost every time buying what I need from higher level crafters is always the faster, more efficient way to go rather than build something for my personal use at my current level.

Are there any MMORPGS today or in flight where the crafting might be actually useful and not just an endless cycle of building and scrapping or vendoring most of what is created? (Outside of utility items like potions or whatnot of course) 

Kyleran

Long ago and far away DAOC found a decent balance between crafted/dropped  items and while drops could be great in order to properly optimize your build it often required a spreadsheet to calculate and track what crafted items one needed to get every skill and trait to their "cap" without going over or under.

Playing New World now and they they've done a great job in making gathered materials of every level very necessary to skill up one of the 6 or so crafting skills like cooking, arcania, engineering, woodworking etc. 

Even high level gear craft might require a lot of charcoal, which can easily be created from almost any level of gathered wood, and it is just as efficient to smelt it from the lowest level greenwood that a level one can gather as from ironwood which would be stupid to actually use for such.

Yet, despite the great job they did in intertwining gathering materials and making all of them useful at every level (probably due to the games original design as more of a survival title) they've totally screwed up on the crafting side as almost everything one makes isn't very useful or very sellable, especially on level.

Some few items are good, crafted bags, storage chests, ammo, trophies and higher end items sell for decent money, but by and large the crafter will have to create dozens if not hundreds of useless rifles or swords and scrap them for parts as there aren't even any vendors who will buy them, nevermind the players.

Iselin

ESO doesn't get enough credit for a crafting feature that should become standard in all MMO crafting.

Sure they have the same problem as any other MMO of keeping crafted item sets competitive with those that drop. It's something that needs to be balanced carefully so that crafted gear can compete.

But it's not nearly as annoying in ESO when the best stuff comes from drops because through your crafting you can improve the quality of those drops be they BOE or BOP

Did you get a green sword drop for the set you're building? No problem. You can improve it to blue and then purple all the way to gold quality and the higher your crafting expertise, the fewer materials it takes to do those upgrades.

It's not a great crafting system but that bandaid makes a difference and doesn't make the system feel totally useless like in many other MMOs. 

Darkhawke

UO crating systems extremely viable, necessary,and useful , at all tiers of play ..

Scot

I am like, "where is has this thread been hiding...oh its new!"

This is an age old chestnut, I will mention Vanguard and their astonishing "complete a standard quest (you could also go there and kill some mobs etc) by crafting while you level up your craft skill". Problem was that was just for lowbie levels.

The interaction between drops, crafted and quest rewards is a headache. If one of these is not good enough a studio is seen as being dismissive of a style of gameplay, when really it is a hard balance.

As for crating endless stuff which you have no use for, here is one for you. In AC2 you had to fire up forges found in cities to higher levels to craft higher level gear. Now we did a public event "come and fire up the forges", you would go out and kill mobs and dump the drops in the forge. You could add to that crafted items as well (from memory you couldn't do that in AC2) to use those crafting discards up.

Once the "forges" (all professions if I remember aright) had enough "gear" they would stay at that higher tier for a few hours. Cue crafting festival!

Dibdabs

I haven't tried ESO's crafting system but in every game I have played since the late 90's Crafting has been shite.  Making low-level crap to sell at a loss to an NPC vendor is a waste of my time and effort.  I never bother learning how to Craft stuff in any game I have ever played. I'd be better off selling the raw materials to Crafting noobs on an Auction House. 

I sometimes buy some decent crafted weapon/armour off the Auction House, but that kind of stuff is outgrown so fast in modern games.  It's not unusual to wear a piece of new equipment for a level or two and then some better drop comes along.

ChildoftheShadows

I can't believe no one mentioned Eve Online's crafting.

Everything you "gather" is always useful.

Most crafted items are often still used even by high level players depending on the task, and even if not a task just as a way to get something quickly.

NPC dropped items are better, typically, than most standard crafted items, but the rarest and hardest items to craft are typically better than those. (those who know about load-outs will understand why that's not always the case).

The only way to acquire most items are through crafting or trading.

This could easily be translated to other style of MMOs, even without pvp and looting.

AlBQuirky

That'd be nice!

I recall EQ 1 was "interesting" for me way back when. Unfortunately, the crafting levels were tied to character levels. You had to progress by fighting in order to reach higher crafting levels.

Crafting in EQ 1 did allow me to craft armor and weapons good enough for my starting levels with leather working and smithing. Once I got to level 10 or so, some creatures needed magic weapons to hit (like will-o-wisps) and I was unable to craft those.

Another aspect i the buying/selling of items. EQ 1 had "trade chat" and "special congregating places" that players decided to frequent, like the East Commons tunnels, where player vendors hung out and "shoppers" could to vendor to vendor asking for what each had available. Then "The Nexus" was implemented with Luclin and centralized the shopping experience and eventually an auction house appeared.

I did like WoW's auction house from when I played. The ease of use was good for me. Some did not like it as they preferred the "haggling aspect" better. I'm just not a haggler

I do enjoy crafting. It would nice if MMORPGs could find that sweet spot balance between drops/loot and crafted like Iselin pointed out. It would be nice if my journey through crafting rewarded me with usable items

olepi

I've played two MMO's where basically everything is crafted by players, Ryzom and Pirates of the Burning Sea. In Ryzom, everything is player crafted, there are no drops except mats for crafting.

In PoTBS, all the best ships are player crafted.

Alas, those are old now. Vanguard's crafting was pretty good, but it's gone. ESO's crafting is decent, drops are usually better.

So no, I'm not aware of any new MMO that makes crafting an important part of the game.

Kyleran

ChildoftheShadows said:

I can't believe no one mentioned Eve Online's crafting.

Everything you "gather" is always useful.

Most crafted items are often still used even by high level players depending on the task, and even if not a task just as a way to get something quickly.

NPC dropped items are better, typically, than most standard crafted items, but the rarest and hardest items to craft are typically better than those. (those who know about load-outs will understand why that's not always the case).

The only way to acquire most items are through crafting or trading.

This could easily be translated to other style of MMOs, even without pvp and looting.

In all fairness you are only the 5th poster on the thread, but a better question is why I, a 10 year EVE veteran didn't use it as an example? (Well, for one thing, EVE needed a post of its own to explain)

Aside from the fact I never did much beyond dabble in EVE'S industry model, I did stay more than few nights at a Holiday Inn Express.

I knew many industrialists in my day who by and large did it as more of a labor of love, or to help their corporation rather than make any significant income from it or use the items they created for personal use.

Starting with a brand new character, they can't build a properly fitted frigate until they train up the necessary skills to make it. 

So what to do while they wait first to complete their skill training? Go out and buy a frigate hull and fit it with store bought Tier 1 ship fittings.

Oh wait, did they want to fly their frigate?  Have to train up the combat skills first to properly fit everything at anything less than a total sh!t fit.

There's the big flaw or limitation, they have to wait hours, maybe days before they can build the frigate, then train up the combat skills to fly it even at a minimum level of competency.

Wait, hold up, where did they get the mining materials to build the frigate?  Oh, they had to first build a mining ship,  (whoops, additional set of skill trains) ....as you can see it's a circular death trap.

Which is why for quite awhile now (but not in the early days when I started) new pilots who completed all of the story arc trainings came away with enough free ships, skill training boosts and ISK to actually play the game rather than sit around waiting for the "fun" to start.

Remember the 6 plus months of learning skill training one had to do in order to skill train at max efficiency. (Which they wisely got rid of long ago, talk about being a total fun killer)

After my first character I literally would buy another new account and set them training learning skills exclusively which is why 2 of them got all learning skills to level 5 a year or so ahead of my first character who had to fund and be the focus of my game play in the first few years.

So at days end, most people who want a fully rounded game experience will set up another account or three to efficiently skill up their industrial skills to a level where it can eventually become viable in multiple areas.

While an interesting design, was far too much for me, so I never did it.

But I did spend years of skill training including standing up 3 more accounts to set up a proper ore mining operation managed by all six of my 6 accounts/main characters.

I think these days there is a way to train different skills up on multiple pilots on the same account if one is willing to pay extra to do so but that seems useless to me, better off to purchase a new account....
 
Oh yeah, and pay another $20 a month for it.....

Those folks at CCP have always well known how to keep players paying more and more the longer they stick with the game.

Sovrath

Iselin said:

ESO doesn't get enough credit for a crafting feature that should become standard in all MMO crafting.

Sure they have the same problem as any other MMO of keeping crafted item sets competitive with those that drop. It's something that needs to be balanced carefully so that crafted gear can compete.

But it's not nearly as annoying in ESO when the best stuff comes from drops because through your crafting you can improve the quality of those drops be they BOE or BOP

Did you get a green sword drop for the set you're building? No problem. You can improve it to blue and then purple all the way to gold quality and the higher your crafting expertise, the fewer materials it takes to do those upgrades.

It's not a great crafting system but that bandaid makes a difference and doesn't make the system feel totally useless like in many other MMOs. 

Elder Scrolls Online is the only game that I've ever routinely used the crafting system. I also think it's better than the single player games.

The single player games make it so that various weapon/armor designs are tied to quality.

Ebony is better than Elven which is better than orcish, etc.

I like how the aesthetics in Elder Scrolls Onlie is one thing and the materials define what is good or bad.

I've generally not like crafting or gathering in games. Especially when I need a certain skill to pick one plant but the next plan "no no no!" I don't have the skill to pick it. Or to gather ore.

Just silly.

ChildoftheShadows

Kyleran said:

ChildoftheShadows said:

I can't believe no one mentioned Eve Online's crafting.

Everything you "gather" is always useful.

Most crafted items are often still used even by high level players depending on the task, and even if not a task just as a way to get something quickly.

NPC dropped items are better, typically, than most standard crafted items, but the rarest and hardest items to craft are typically better than those. (those who know about load-outs will understand why that's not always the case).

The only way to acquire most items are through crafting or trading.

This could easily be translated to other style of MMOs, even without pvp and looting.

In all fairness you are only the 5th poster on the thread, but a better question is why I, a 10 year EVE veteran didn't use it as an example? (Well, for one thing, EVE needed a post of its own to explain)

Aside from the fact I never did much beyond dabble in EVE'S industry model, I did stay more than few nights at a Holiday Inn Express.

I knew many industrialists in my day who by and large did it as more of a labor of love, or to help their corporation rather than make any significant income from it or use the items they created for personal use.

Starting with a brand new character, they can't build a properly fitted frigate until they train up the necessary skills to make it. 

So what to do while they wait first to complete their skill training? Go out and buy a frigate hull and fit it with store bought Tier 1 ship fittings.

Oh wait, did they want to fly their frigate?  Have to train up the combat skills first to properly fit everything at anything less than a total sh!t fit.

There's the big flaw or limitation, they have to wait hours, maybe days before they can build the frigate, then train up the combat skills to fly it even at a minimum level of competency.

Wait, hold up, where did they get the mining materials to build the frigate?  Oh, they had to first build a mining ship,  (whoops, additional set of skill trains) ....as you can see it's a circular death trap.

Which is why for quite awhile now (but not in the early days when I started) new pilots who completed all of the story arc trainings came away with enough free ships, skill training boosts and ISK to actually play the game rather than sit around waiting for the "fun" to start.

Remember the 6 plus months of learning skill training one had to do in order to skill train at max efficiency. (Which they wisely got rid of long ago, talk about being a total fun killer)

After my first character I literally would buy another new account and set them training learning skills exclusively which is why 2 of them got all learning skills to level 5 a year or so ahead of my first character who had to fund and be the focus of my game play in the first few years.

So at days end, most people who want a fully rounded game experience will set up another account or three to efficiently skill up their industrial skills to a level where it can eventually become viable in multiple areas.

While an interesting design, was far too much for me, so I never did it.

But I did spend years of skill training including standing up 3 more accounts to set up a proper ore mining operation managed by all six of my 6 accounts/main characters.

I think these days there is a way to train different skills up on multiple pilots on the same account if one is willing to pay extra to do so but that seems useless to me, better off to purchase a new account....
 
Oh yeah, and pay another $20 a month for it.....

Those folks at CCP have always well known how to keep players paying more and more the longer they stick with the game.

I was thinking of you when I said I couldn't believe it

To be fair, you are correct that it is time consuming, but it does fit your criteria for the original question of being able to mine/craft something useful from the beginning

I can see this system adapted to fit it even better without a lot of huge changes. A simple example could be something like the very first weapon you create is actually a base component for every other in that line of weapons.

Mendel

Crafting in games is a bit of an odd duck.  There are rarely prerequisites, everyone can do it.  Nor are they any substantial costs.  Everyone makes identical items; there are rarely unique items.  Crafting doesn't take special knowledge, aptitude, or training.

For the most part, games have managed to take the 'craftsmanship' out of crafting.

ChildoftheShadows

Mendel said:

Crafting in games is a bit of an odd duck.  There are rarely prerequisites, everyone can do it.  Nor are they any substantial costs.  Everyone makes identical items; there are rarely unique items.  Crafting doesn't take special knowledge, aptitude, or training.

For the most part, games have managed to take the 'craftsmanship' out of crafting.

I would argue that they didn't take it out, but find it rather difficult to replicate.

[Deleted User]

The user and all related content has been deleted.

Nilden

Someone already mentioned UO and really crafting hasn't gotten much better since. It's honestly mundane, boring, and downright uninspired in most games. Gathering is right there at it's side hand in hand like a partner in one of the worst crimes in gaming.

They really should take a page out of survival games and make crafting and gathering better.

I would love something like a blacksmith simulator or even some cooking mama mini games at this point. It's so pathetic in most games it's literally click button to harvest node click button to combine.

Personally I would love it if the best items were crafted items.

Let's say we kill the Red Dragon then get some dragon meat, red dragon scales, horns, claws, bones, all that stuff. Then using the stuff people harvest from the dragon an armorsmith or blacksmith would make red dragon scale armor or dragon claw or tooth weapons which could be further enchanted by a wizard. Instead the dragon drops a purple epic. It's always bothered me.

cameltosis

This is a question of market segments: are you designing your game for buyers or sellers?

If you design your game around crafting, where the best items are crafted, then there are a bunch of other things you also need to do to make it worthwhile.

Item decay is one - if items don't break, then players don't need to buy much, which means the crafters won't be able to sell much. In other words, you've just made a crafting game that can't support that many crafters.

Player shops are another. If you have a global auction house, then buyers have access to all the information about the market. That means they can just buy the cheapest listed item very easily. Such a system benefits the hardcore players who can most benefit from economies of scale. For a real world example, just look at the effects of Amazon / the internet on your local high street.

Now, if you've done that, if you've designed a game around good crafting and a full player economy, well done! You've done a good thing for the crafters out there.

But what about the buyers? The people who don't like to craft? Now their gear is gonna break a lot. Now they have to travel around to a bunch of different shops looking for replacement gear.

Thats a lot of inconvenience.

And thats why most MMOs don't bother. Crafters make up a relatively small part of the market, and devs don't feel like inconveniencing everyone else.

For the record, im all in favour of proper crafting / player economies. I'll happily accept a small amount of inconvenience in return for a better community and a more worldy feel to the game. One of the biggest benefits imo is that all gear is reduced to a monetary value and is tradable. That means if im a filthy casual, I can just buy top-tier gear. That means if I'm a PvPer, I don't need to grind raids for months to get what I want.

That freedom is well worth the cost of a little running to-and-from player shops.

Scot

cameltosis said:

This is a question of market segments: are you designing your game for buyers or sellers?

If you design your game around crafting, where the best items are crafted, then there are a bunch of other things you also need to do to make it worthwhile.

Item decay is one - if items don't break, then players don't need to buy much, which means the crafters won't be able to sell much. In other words, you've just made a crafting game that can't support that many crafters.

Player shops are another. If you have a global auction house, then buyers have access to all the information about the market. That means they can just buy the cheapest listed item very easily. Such a system benefits the hardcore players who can most benefit from economies of scale. For a real world example, just look at the effects of Amazon / the internet on your local high street.

Now, if you've done that, if you've designed a game around good crafting and a full player economy, well done! You've done a good thing for the crafters out there.

But what about the buyers? The people who don't like to craft? Now their gear is gonna break a lot. Now they have to travel around to a bunch of different shops looking for replacement gear.

Thats a lot of inconvenience.

And thats why most MMOs don't bother. Crafters make up a relatively small part of the market, and devs don't feel like inconveniencing everyone else.

For the record, im all in favour of proper crafting / player economies. I'll happily accept a small amount of inconvenience in return for a better community and a more worldy feel to the game. One of the biggest benefits imo is that all gear is reduced to a monetary value and is tradable. That means if im a filthy casual, I can just buy top-tier gear. That means if I'm a PvPer, I don't need to grind raids for months to get what I want.

That freedom is well worth the cost of a little running to-and-from player shops.

This is a huge problem, 'designing to not inconvenience the majority'. It is why there is too much fast travel, swiss army knife player classes and so on. MMORPGs are only the best genre because they meld together the many different play styles of players who like different gameplay.

If studios lose sight of that, they are heading for the featureless MMOs we so often see today. Striped bare and called "streamlined", without that full feature set they are lesser games.

Kyleran

Truth be told I'm not a fan of crafting much, preferring the roles of explorer, adventurer, murder hobo or most anything else really.

As mentioned by @cameltosis, too often some earlier games resulted in a lot of inconvenience or economic disadvantage even to players who didn't participate in crafting.

I recall laboriously grinding out gems used for Spell crafting armor and weapons in DAOC's early days, even became the 4th highest level on my server at the time.

I did it while multi boxing an account or three, while adventuring on one, a second served as a buff bot and a 3rd parked in town next to the Spellcrafting bench endless creating mostly useless jewels which were vendored for small amounts of cash, but always at a loss.

I didn't do it to make money, while at highest levels Spellcrafters commanded high fees, it was a bit of real effort consuming lots of time to make perfect gems and a full set could take a few evenings of efforts.

No, I did it so I would not have to deal with the inconvenience of finding a Spell crafter willing to take a commission to make me a set of gems when I wanted to slot them.

Otherwise I usually only performed my services as a favor to friends, guildmates or when I took pity on some pour soul who had been begging in local for hours seeking a gem crafters help.

Of course, all of my Spellcrafting was done after I had several level 50s, never was of much use nor could I have afforded to level it up if not for my alts feeding it gold to sit endlessly crafting.

Scot

Kyleran said:

Truth be told I'm not a fan of crafting much, preferring the roles of explorer, adventurer, murder hobo or most anything else really.

As mentioned by @cameltosis, too often some earlier games resulted in a lot of inconvenience or even economic disadvantage even to players who didn't participate in crafting.

I recall laboriously grinding out jewel (or was it gems?) crafting in DAOC's early days, even became the 4th highest level on my server at the time.

I did it while multi boxing an account or three, while adventuring on one, a second served as a buff bot and a 3rd parked in town next to the jewel crafting bench endless creating mostly useless jewels which were vendored for small amounts of cash, but always at a loss.

I didn't do it to make money, while at highest levels jewel crafters commanded high fees, it was a bit of real effort consuming lots of time to make perfect gems and a full set could take a few evenings of efforts.

No, I did it so I would have to deal with the inconvenience of finding a gem crafter willing to take a commission to make me a set of gems when I wanted to slot them.

Otherwise I usually in performed my services as a favor to friends, guildmates or when I took pity on some pour soul who had been begging in local for hours seeking a gem crafters help.

I was surprised you focused the thread around crafting as I know you are not a fan, you may remember neither am I, but we see its importance. We get way too many posters on here saying they don't like this or that gameplay in a a MMO, they don't seem to realise that all the components are needed for a great MMO, regardless of whether we play them.

Crafting is an essential part of a MMOs economy, even if you are a "Strictly Solo" player you can't somehow stay out of the games economy. It will effect what you buy and how much it costs, it will determine if there are repair bills and how much they are. Even if a MMO has no crafting that effects you because the game will change to accommodate that and be somewhat lackluster in my eyes.

There are ways of making things easier in regard to what Camel mentioned, it is just a matter of how far you take them. It is a fine balance, you can't have players think they are balancing a spreadsheet just to sell some gear, but 'one button push does everything' goes too far.

Brainy

As others have already said, UO crafting was the best I seen.

Relevant at all levels, lower levels could make money while skilling.  Tradeskills were the same way.  Plenty of different items to sell, many different useful professoins.  With a working thriving economy.

Why games are not replicating UO's crafting/tradeskill/economy is crazy.

cameltosis

Another problem with full player economies is inflation.

Every time a player completes a quest, the game is effectively printing more money to add to the economy. Even if the quests are one time only, each new player to the game is going to be printing a bunch of gold.

In a player economy, that new gold is going to drift to the crafters or gatherers. Gold only leaves the system if a player quits (their money is effectively burned) or through any gold-sinks the devs have added - like travel costs, repair fees etc.

So, inflation is inevitable.

That wouldn't be too much of a problem, except the inflation only occurs within the community. The game still gives out the same hard-coded gold rewards as it's always done. The result is that new players then have a really tough time trying to join in with the economy: they can't afford the now ludicrous prices for gear due to a few years of rapid inflation.

I remember this happening in SWG a lot. I remember buying power hammers for my swordmaster, to begin with they were about 50k-150k depending on stats, but 6 months later they were costing 500k-1m for the top stuff. That's exactly the same stats as before, they weren't any better, just more expensive.

Thinking about this subject just makes me eager to hear more about Raph's new MMO. One of the few details we've been told about the game is that players will be able to form contracts between each other, as a way of building trust between strangers. So, they're aiming for things like "Pay me 10 gold and I'll carry you through this dungeon", or "Give me 2 gold and I'll repair your gear".

I'm curious about whether those contract will genuinely help build trust, but more importantly such a thing is basically formalising "services" as an economic activity.

As a combat-focused player myself, I am excited about the idea of pimping out my killing ability for money. You can formally hire me as a bodyguard, or exploration guide. We'll have a contract, so if you try to screw me over, or if I lead you into a trap, there should be some repercussions.

Definitely curious to see how that would affect a player economy. I'm hoping it would be a way to help distribute money throughout the community.

For example:

A gatherer hires me as a bodyguard - killer earns money

Gatherer then sells stuff to crafters - gatherer earns money

Crafter makes a sword, sells for profit to killer - crafter earns money

The money then just goes in a circle, we all benefit each time it does the rounds, rather than the money just pooling in a crafters coffers.

Oh, and whilst I remember, another downside to full player economies: the first few months suck! Whilst everyone is still leveling up, unlocking recipes, learning where mats come from, you just can't buy what you want. Pretty hard to complete a raid when no-one on the server is making endgame armour!

Still worth it tho.....

Kyleran

Inflation is an interesting problem to deal with which I think devs have to actively manage or it can quickly wreck a virtual economy.

For example, I pretty much suck at earning money in games, just not willing to put in the effort to optimize my income.

So in New World I have about 30K gold after 3 months of playing and own one badly outfitted tier 4 house which I got on the 15K 1st time homebuilders deal.

My wealth is a rounding error to some players despite this being a fresh start server that opened just a few months back.

Top tier gear sells for triple or more of my entire fortune..and no real shortage of those able to buy at that level.

Fortunately, 2nd tier gear is almost as good as the best so I have no problem buying what I need to complete the content that I care about.

Tenth level mutation dungeons or PVP territory wars?  Not for me so doesn't matter but I know the situation is very frustrating to those who can't run the top content and be competitive at it due to extreme costs.

Speaking of costs, of course like many MMORPGS the highest tier crafting is reserved for the wealthy. 

One has to spend exorbitant amounts of materials, gold or mixture of both just to get their skills up to 180 plus, pretty much paying dearly one way or another on their way up.

I've leveled up engineering and alchemy enough to finally make my own top end  ammo and potions, but as I joke with my clan mates, I could have bought years worth of both for probably far less than I spent leveling my skills high enough to make them.

Sovrath

cameltosis said:

Another problem with full player economies is inflation.

Every time a player completes a quest, the game is effectively printing more money to add to the economy. Even if the quests are one time only, each new player to the game is going to be printing a bunch of gold.

In a player economy, that new gold is going to drift to the crafters or gatherers. Gold only leaves the system if a player quits (their money is effectively burned) or through any gold-sinks the devs have added - like travel costs, repair fees etc.

So, inflation is inevitable.

I think the problem is that developers aren't willing to add things that remove gold from everyone.

In Lineage 2 you could lose gold by "blowing up" an item if the enchanting failed.

Players, whether crafters or "non-crafters" could lose  gold.

All developers have to do is add some sort of gold sink for everyone. Doesn't have to be the same thing for everyone though.

Hengist

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned it, especially since I see it get brought up quite often when people talk about the best experiences people have had while crafting. Star Wars Galaxies. 

For me, that was one of the finest crafting experiences ever, because you spent time looking for the best materials, and while you were leveling you still had items to sell, even if it was raw materials. I remember the days of going to hunt Krayt Dragons for pearls for a gunsmith who needed them to build top level guns.  All hail Beer VonRockerfeller (I laugh that I still remember that name)

Crafting was deep enough, but not a time sink it enhanced the game, and never really felt like a separate endeavor. It was, to me, one of the finest examples of crafting done right in a game.

To the original point, it does seem like a dead art, because from the titles mentioned nobody seems to find that level of use, utility, and enjoyment from current titles. That isn't to say that there aren't some that are decent, but the best, that seemed to have universal acclaim are years old, or long since passed.

Theocritus

I cant remember which game it was but it was one where crafting mattered and the best items were crafted.....Unfortunately, they also decided teh best crafted materials would drop off very high level raid bosses and it made the game a nightmare as only a handful of players had access to them.

In general though, crafting is usually just a waste of time.