The Daily Grind: How difficult do you like your crafting?
Once, long ago, when you wanted to craft in EverQuest, you had to know precisely what it was you wanted to put into your crafting box/bag/spit/etc. - or you could sit there swapping things in and out in combination for hours. Once you'd hit upon a combination that would create something, you then had the potential chance to lose your materials if you didn't manage to craft it. While this wasn't such a big deal when you were sitting around cranking out Batwing Crunchies, if you were making items that required hard to get materials, you can imagine the frustration when your combine whiffed.
On the opposite side of things, we have the extreme ease of World of Warcraft, which allows you to pop to the auction house, buy everything if you have enough gold, and then craft piles and piles of items with those mats by pressing one button on a handy menu that shows you everything you can make. The crafting system there has no failures, nor does it have the chance of making a greater or lesser item; all of the items are exactly the same on the basic level. While many felt this was a great improvement, some others prefer at least some small risk for reward - making it more like a mini-game - and thus we still have at least marginally harder crafting scenarios in several MMOs.
This morning we thought we'd ask you; do you feel that crafting should be easy, guaranteeing a successful combination every single time? Do you think there's something to be said for slightly harder crafting, where you may risk commonly-gathered materials, but not rare ones? Do you think we need a return to extremely hard crafting? Or do you just not really care, and would rather pay someone else gold to craft things for you?
