Taking the production out of itemcrafting

Here's an interesting suggestion from Mystic Worlds: take the production process out of crafting.

When I used to play Dark Age of Camelot, the crafting setup was my least favorite part of the game-- it seemed like crafting materials were expensive, the crafting process took way too much time (I having long conversations with others standing around the crafting area), and the stuff you made (at the early levels anyway) just wasn't that great. So WoW's system may not be perfect, but it seemed like a breath of fresh air after that-- materials come from actually playing the game, and putting things together is something you can generally do as an afterthought rather than as, well, a profession. The gathering is the important part.

So Mystic Worlds says, why not make the gathering the whole thing? You still go out and get mats from the world, crafters turn those raw mats into usable mats, and then you'd actually take the bolts and gems and tanned leather that crafters made to NPC crafters, who would turn them into items. That way, if you want a Robe of the Void but you aren't a tailor, you just take the mats to an NPC tailor who can hammer one out for you.

That kind of system would open up crafting to many more options, since the devs wouldn't have to worry about whether tailor sets were overpowered, since everyone who wears cloth could wear them as long as they got the mats from somewhere. No more BOP items, and no more problems with a certain profession having abilities the other players don't.

Would it work? Frankly, I think it's too late at this stage of the game to make a sweeping change like this-- for the most part, the crafting system works for players, and it's the devs who'd have to deal with this kind of change, by reevaluating the costs of all crafting items and recoding the economy accordingly. They'd rather nerf BOP crafting items (or just make them BOE) than rebuild the whole system. But it's an interesting idea-- crafting production has hit a strange minimum in WoW (you can go the whole game without producing anything), and it would be interesting to see a system where production wasn't a factor at all.