One of our goals is to revitalize the crafter profession so that even if you don't want to get into the nitty gritty of suit building, there is someone else who will. Another player pointed out that some time ago it seemed like crafters were all but extinct and now that isn't the case. That gives me a warm fuzzy.
So this is the very first time in the course of this debate that any of our developers have condescended to explain one of their design goals to us, and I for one find it extraordinarily illuminating.
We aren't supposed to understand WTF is going on here.
Think about it. If you decide to refine your armor, your first inclination will be to just log onto your mule and do it. (It's 2013, almost everyone has a mule, and if they don't then they're easy enough to make.) But if everyone is just hopping onto their mules, then they're not doing their part to "revitalize the crafting profession" are they?
So how do you separate the "crafting professionals" from every other slob with a mule?
You make the process so heinously overcomplicated that the masses will give up and pay a "crafting professional" to figure it out rather than even deal with it themselves. That's why this whole proposal is such a tortured boondoggle.
It's also why reforging was a poorly-documented mess.
It's why firing a single shot from a ship cannon requires four or five different crafted widgets that all take three or four steps to make each.
It's why we're reading a bunch of hooey about how Kyronix thinks it's just such scrumptious fun to have to pore over reams of player-researched documentation, and how he used to keep a book next to his computer.
It's why he's using that clumsy "Pandora's Box" metaphor to tell us that this is just how it's going to be from now on.
I will say it now,
and absolutely defy any developer to disagree with me, that if you don't like seeing the game get orders of magnitude more complicated every time they add something, then you are just plain out of luck from now on. (At least until EA fires everyone again.) This development team is committed on a fundamental level to overwhelming complexity as a means of guiding economic behavior.
They may still tweak it a bit, but we will get Refinement whether anyone ever has a good word to say about it or not. We will get it, and most of us will not come anywhere close to understanding it, because if we did then we wouldn't have to "revitalize the crafting profession" by finding someone who knows "the nitty gritty."
They don't seem to have considered the fact that, if at all possible, most people will just ignore something they don't understand. Nor do they seem to care about the demoralizing effect of a player realizing that they just plain need to give up on fully understanding what's good and what isn't. Most of all, they don't seem to have considered the fact that
a player needs to understand what's possible before he knows what to ask a crafter for.
People aren't just going to walk up and go "Hur hur, here's mah suit mister craftin' professhnul, do some kinda magic on it! I don't have a spreadsheet installed so I don't even know what you're doing or if it's good for me!"
TLDR: If you think this game is too complicated as it is, or even if you think it's currently just the right amount of complicated and should stay at that level, bend over because you're ****ed.
