realized i was missing the major document section for the crafting systems and how material acquisition and crafting recipes should be written, in general.

i'm a more and more firm believer in respecting a player's time and finding a reasonable metric to compare a player's time to their money. it's important for a company to evaluate what kinds of trade-offs they expect players to make when they decide to spend time on the game instead of money. i think a lot of existing MMORPGs will make a number of dollars worth an insane number of gameplay hours, sometimes even on the order of days to a single dollar.

free-to-play MMOs are notorious for this as they want to avoid any risk of having players decide to spend time instead of money. so crafting requirements go up, drop rates go down, and the ceiling that is the amount of money it takes to simply pay for those things is lowered.

i'm frustrated by these decisions, but maybe even further frustrated by the fact that the MMO space probably requires it to be like this for these projects to stay afloat.