I just did a bit of research on World of Warcraft tailoring gaining. It says it costs up to and over 1,750 gold if you need to buy the materials. I went and price checked some WOW gold and that came out to $40. If UO gold is under $1 per million, that is about 40 million UO gold to gain 1 skill to maximum.
World of Warcraft uses a different system where rare materials are required, which is why it is so expensive or time consuming to gather. But the gains are faster because the work goes into resource gathering.
So you can't point to WOW's crafting system and say it is easier when the actual work goes into gathering items, which in UO is trivial.
Unattended macroing still goes on in World of Warcraft despite whatever system they have setup for crafting.
I already admitted that materials become more difficult as you raise in skill. However, it is not inconceivable whatsoever to have the required materials set aside BEFORE HAND, and you can gather them in NORMAL COMBAT (i.e. imagine 3 bolts of cloth being on typical humanoid NPC corpses) before attempting to max out a skill.
Besides, short of spending money (in game or out), you have to spend time farming materials in UO as well. I'm not sure what kind of imaginary difference you're drawing as if in UO you don't need thousands of resources for many of the crafting skills, which, unless you go and blow a very large amount of in-game currency, you have to spend a great deal of time harvesting or earning money for.
2) Maxing a skill is far far far far far less tedious in WOW than it is for UO, in large part because of the enormous curve depression skillgains go through as you approach 100. In WOW you may spend half an hour farming a specific cloth, and turning right around and getting 12 points out of it right in a row. In UO you may already have the raw material laying around (or, spend an equal amount of time gathering it.... be it through working up reagent spawns, shearing sheep, or chopping wood, or mining for specific ores.. in fact you might well spend more time at gathering in UO for basic skill-up materials unless you are simply buying it all!) and then spend another 20, 30, 40 minutes for... 0.3. Or 0.2. Or 0.4.
Saying the comparison is "useless" because some materials are harder to get in WOW is a ridiculous attempt to dismiss my answer to your post when you don't know anything about the system other than what you've read in the span of 3 minutes. The misleading thing about placing emphasis on the rareness or time intensiveness of mats in WOW is that rare mats are not typically needed for basic skill ups. That's like saying you could 'Only' get skillgains in UO by making academic bookcases. There are at virtually any skill level of any prof, items that just require relatively "generic" materials to create, which will raise your skill just as effectively, but perhaps are not as nice of a finished item as other alternatives at the same skill level which DO require rarer materials.
Example (just making it up in UO terms)
Plain Shirt
Required Tailoring 15
Ingredients 10 yards of cloth
Mystic Shirt
Required Tailoring 15
Ingredients 10 yards of cloth, 20 black pearl, four human ears
Adds Night Sight
You'll still get skill just as fast by making the plain shirts. It's just that you'll end up having to dump it as vendor trash cause you won't want to wear it and neither will anyone else. There are superior alternatives at the same requirement level, but you can still make the item and still gain skill points off it just as fast as if you were crafting better objects.
Please do not make some ignorant, uninformed universal statement about how "all mmos out there do the same thing" if you have to run and do a quickstudy on other mmo's to learn about their crafting professions, and then come back and claim people who've actually played them are wrong about them, okay? It makes you look pretty foolish.
Saying that UM happens in WOW is totally off the topic. People do not macro in WOW because skillgains take days/weeks and slow down to the point of intolerably slow. They macro for entirely different reasons such as farming rares or money. Moral of the story? Anything you make take huge lengths of tedious unfun gameplay to do, people are probably going to be inclined to find some illicit way to skip sinking dozens of hours of unfun in an online game. In UO's case, my question stands, and you haven't answered it other than making uninformed claims about other mmo's, which aren't under discussion. That question being, what is the benefit, or rationale, or reasoning, or Good Thing, about making skill gain drop off a cliff over 85 or 90, other than making finishing off a skill really not fun, really resource intensive, and people very inclined to unattended macro it to GM?
It doesn't make GM status exclusive or "more of an accomplishment", because all the lazy people will actually have it FASTER by buying materials and unattended macroing a skill up to max. It just penalizes everyone else who grinds through dozens of hours of trying to farm petered out skillgains burning thousands of resources and not feeling like they are accomplishing much, just grinding something out meaninglessly.
P.S., care for a Gnarled staff? I made about 348 of them for my last 0.2 skill points.
