Due to the casino called crafting, many crafters are literally clogged with tons of crappy unsellable items. They either hopelessly clog the market with price tags 200-300-500 gold and yet no one is buying themor they just gather dust in the crafter’s storages.
The FED-style inflation you have implemented in the game (gold bags, increased gold drop from dungeons etc) and the current crafting system makes everything in the range 500-595 GS literally useless and undesirable. From the range 595-599 the sellable items are the ones with two top perks or weapon perk + top perk (Resilient, Freedom, Refresh/refreshing evasion). Items with weapon perk and T2 perks (Vigor, Invigorated, Elem. aversion, Luck, wards) are already hard to impossible sale. If you get a T3 perk on such item (farming perks and all the rest) you can consider this item as forever yours.
And here comes the salvaging issue. Considering the price of the craft with high end mats - Asmo, Runic and Phoenix, salvaging e.g. a heavy chest and getting 1-2-3-4 Orichalcum ingots in return of the invested 20 Asmo etc is blatant mockery.
The reality of the crafting system is that you get one or two top or near top pieces out of 200ish crafts plus several averages. All the rest is more or less trash.
The above issue with the recycling is really painful especially with the jewel crafting where you receive after salvaging 1 uncut T4 gem out of the invested 13 Asmo, 1 timeless shard, T5 cut gem, 10 stats craft mods and 1 (usually expensive) perk mod.
E.g. crafting a ring with Sacred perk using the extremely rare and expensive Sliver of Consecrated Iron costs around 20k averaged between servers and in 90% of the crafts ends up in equivalent of the Instrumentality ring (Focus, Sacred, random useless perk), that every player doing Mutated Lazarus gets with buckets on each run.
The current reality of the game is that if you are after BiS (Best in Slot) gear, you have to invest around 2-3M gold averaged - an amount that 99.99% of the players cannot imagine to posses even in their wildest dreams. I hope you to understand that such severely punishing system is one of the key reasons to have a constant decrement of active players in the game. And what is worse for you - it is pushing away your core of dedicated players with 1500+ hours that are definitely not Butterfly Johnny boys, jumping from game to game after 20-30 hours.
So here is my proposal:
Change the type of recourse received upon salvaging of the crafted items only to match the invested tier of mats and as well - return 25% of the invested mats and craft mods of ALL types (rounded).
Benefits:
Having such recycling rate would not force the crafters to set prices of 300-500K of the BiS items in order to cover their investment in resources as they would be more eager simply to salvage the trash and get a cashback. Such change will make BiS or near BiS pieces accessible to more of players and will increase their will to stay with the game as the fair recycling will allow more craft attempts and bigger offering of good items. The increased offering will push the prices down and this will add to the gear balance between the players. It is not a secret that the top-PvP companies pay their members weekly salary from the income of the towns they own. That way they can afford obtaining better gear that adds a gear gap to the existing skill difference. Closing that gap will make the wars more competitive and this I hope will maintain the interest into the game among more players.
I really hope that my feedback will be taken into consideration.
P.S. I have used as an example the armor crafting as the situation with the weapon crafting is even worse due to the amount of good named ones from the dungeons.
