Recently we lowered the amount of trade skill XP provided by lower tiered items when a player reaches a new tier of crafting bases per skill. To use metal as an example, when a player unlocks Steel recipes they earn less from crafting iron recipes. We did this to emphasize crafting higher tiered items as you progress through trade skills and to also improve the value of higher tiered materials. Our intention behind this change is to reward players for crafting higher tiered items as they progress through the ranks of each trade skill. Before this change, we found players were spending too much time crafting low tier items as opposed to pushing their crafting skill up crafting items that they may actually use at their current level.
Yeah, that might be a good idea if you didn’t need the lower tier stuff as ingredients for the higher tier recipes.
But what it really is, is punishing players for levelling.
One more on the “stupid things this game is doing” pile.
If they were capable of basic arithmetic, they wouldn’t have needed to make the change this way. What they needed to do was increase the xp rewards for crafting higher tier items, so it wasn’t so much more efficient to craft items using base level materials. This way you would you know, actually be rewarded for crafting higher tier items. Then they could adjust the xp curve if they wanted to stretch it out a bit.
it doesn’t really matter what kind of tweaking they do, the crafting system is fundamentally broken because of the stupid ass decision to require exponentially more base level materials through every tier of crafting.
Using higher tier mats, crafting mods, azoth, and tier of item created should contribute to overal XP of a crafted item.
Take JC for example, while leveling this I exclusively used silver for Settings/etc. since it was a waste of time, money to use anything of a higher tier.