[Spiffspoff]

As someone who has been an avid crafter (By proxy, or directly) through my playtime here in Eternia, the process has always been a tad ambiguous, and not always for the better. With the introduction of the archive, it can be a fun experiment to look through the ages, and see what sort of silly stat-lines were permitted in the past.

I've personally had my own share of quite powerful items approved, some of which I've been squinted at a few times for even being allowed to make in the first place. Let me provide examples of such:

A pendant-slot, pre-enchanted.



A weapon-slot, pre-enchanted.

Both of these items were essentially the singular culmination of the characters that made them. They poured their everything into seeing them brought to reality. Created dev materials themselves. Consulted a multitude of people to assist in the matter. In the latter's case, fought some of the most powerful beings in Meranthe at the time.

Disregarding the rather absurd number of logs each project took (We're probably looking at a combined total of over 30 for both, accounting for dev materials specifically created for these projects), the stat-blocks are very, very powerful as far as my understanding go.

And I think it's these older uniques with substantial numbers that people are most afraid of, and why the application-process has been thoroughly touched up on since then. You could reliably poop out a slew of decent equipment before, always better than the average stuff you could create without going through the hassle of making a thread. The hassle was worth it though. And it showed. The funny term we coined for 'Unique piñata' when an established character died, and exploded into a Final Fantasy-esque shower of cool gear was very real, and there were very real concerns about when Jokul initially died, that the next person in line would just collect all his gear to immediately become overpowered.

I haven't made many things yet on my new character. I'm going to, naturally, since that's my character's main drive, but I've certainly noticed a shift already: Things are much more difficult. Where 2-3 crafting logs could get you a low-tier, but still beneficial upgrade, that's seemingly no longer a thing. Materials are weighed much less, and so is pure crafting logs, essentially forcing crafting characters into doing extremes if they want to truly want to make a wonder.

This is both a good, and a bad thing.

it ensures the product made is good, and that you can't half-ass uniques. So that they are, in fact, unique.

But I believe, at present, there's a strange disconnect about what crafters want to do, and what they're actually allowed to do, and even less understanding of what is an appropriate amount of effort to place into an application.

From all previous rejections of my own applications, or cases where alterations to the outcome was made, I was never informed why besides in a single instance. Beyond that I was never provided with a potential way to get to where I wanted to be with the result. I know most of the reasons, because I asked afterwards, at which point I obviously tried to meet expectations, but I feel a lot dissatisfaction stems from the decisions made beyond the veil, never to actually reach our ears in any way unless specifically sought out.

So I think a lot of the perceived gripes could be fixed if the reason for these alterations, or denials were provided in greater detail. 

There were approvals which I weren't satisfied with, so I returned with more logs later, but nothing in these logs were requested, or really did much more than pad out the total number put into the project. So with the advent of the new application standards, it feels, to me, that more is better even if it isn't necessarily all that interesting to RP, or document.

Creating a unique can be an extraordinarily time-consuming thing. A crafting scene can easily last three hours depending on the quality, and the amount of people in the scene. But let's be generous, and say our crafting scenes are two hours long on the dot.

The ideal crafting application has three stages:
- The planning: Simply planning out what you'd like to do.
- The crafting: The actual creation of your thing.
- The polish: Finishing up, regular testing, or whatever else you might fit here.

That's six hours, for three scenes. 
But, you potentially these add onto:
- Crafting scene 2: You need another person whose expertise is useful in this scenario.
- Event trip: These can be exceedingly long, but we'll be nice, and say six hours because it was a specific one for crafting things. We'll cut that in half because it was enjoyable to do, so it only felt like three hours of actual crafting. The forge tried to eat someone, it was a good time.
- Related interaction: You met your rival in the wild, and had an epic fight, or perhaps you need to ask a dragon's handler for permission to use dragon fire to forge with. Or you could simply be spewing crafting jargon at someone else. And oh boy you could have a lot of relevant scenes in these.

Now we're at 13 hours of trying to make this application. Again, we're being generous with the time. Especially since this isn't accounting for any dev materials you might need to attain, or make yourself. The latter of which is this entire process doubled up.

As someone who works a full-time job, it can be extremely difficult to make something stellar. If only due to the time-sink, and involved process. Will I still do it? Naturally, because I enjoy this kind of roleplay, and I'd hope anyone who embarks on this bureaucratic nightmare does as well. But when the outcome of a week's worth of active game-time for some of us is mediocre at best, it kind of stings.


TL;DR:
- It's understandable the staff is afraid of powercreep, but...
- We're not always told of why we're denied, or why core parts of our apps are changed, and it sucks.
- It takes a ton of time to make even a low-grade unique which you might not like.

Suggestions:
- Give us more detailed explanations of the process behind denials/alterations. What we can do better, etc.
- Make it more transparent what sort of development is needed for items, the archives are not useful for this because old items are god-tier.
- 10+ relevant logs is too much oh god please.