I was one of the top crafters in the game in EQ2 and either the first or second person worldwide to hit 50 in spell crafting and made every spell upgrade that a sage could make for FoH in the early game, so I do feel I have some sort of perspective on crafting there.
At first glance, it was a pretty amazing system, but very , very flawed. The interdependency was probably one of the best aspects of crafting, as there were a small contigent of crafters that worked together to progress and funded the way on up to 50. What did suck was that it was extremely time intensive and for the longest time, missing a craft icon meant you took a small amount of damage and would regen it before it made any difference, so you could just brute force your crafts using a repeated 1,2,3,1,2,3,1,2,3 for days on end.
When I started to notice my alchy supplier start to pull away in levels seemingly overnight, it made me wonder just how it was possible that he gained so many levels overnight. I reached out to him and since he relied on me buying all his supplies since no one else was close, he let me in on the secret. Welcome to my very first Nostromo N52 pad.
Here I could take all his mats, go into my personal house and lock it so no one could enter, and have it hit 1,2,3 with a mouse click in there for it to reset when it was finished and I could wake up to 1000s of crafted items. Every top crafter did this. There may have been a more indepth way to make items, but this worked and then folks found out you could actually bot overnight and just dump items on the vendors for massive plat. After this was discovered, the vendor prices dropped like a rock and shortly after interdependecy was removed and the crafting community fell apart overnight.
The gathering was busted too. One of my guildies would zone in somewhere as a level 50 and I could zone in as a level 15 and all the mobs would be greyed out to me as well, so I could run around and harvest worry free while he was afk in the zone.
