zhangxiubo

I chose option #2. I personally agree that the crafting skill (or any other team-benefitting skills) should be designed in a way that would encourage the player to pick the skill for more than one of his/her characters. My understanding of the rationale here is that the designer wants to make the impression that choosing crafting skill for one of your characters, in addition to the benefit of being able to craft, is rewarding because it saves you money which would otherwise be spent on purchasing repair services. However, I feel the introduction of item durability and repairing mechanisms and how they will be implemented require further contemplation. First of all, the fact that one character with crafting skill is able to repair all the equipment in your party already defeats the purpose of introducing repairing – according to the update, it appears you need one and only one craftsman in your party to achieve the saving from repairs. So it is the additional benefit where characters with crafting skills wear down their equipment slower that contributes to the goal of the design. Now, this idea of “the more craftsman/craftswoman you have, the more money you save” is only attractive when the total amount of currency the player could gather in the game is capped, or acquiring money is extremely difficult – only then would a player prefer to invest his/her hard-earned cash on repairing rather than replacing broken items. So boil down to the bottom, the formula is really: Choose Crafting => Save More Money => Buy Better Stuff All looks good until two questions are asked: Is there much stuff one wants to buy in the game? How is this money saving different from that provided by “merchant” skills (if any)? Well, for the first question, it seems that J.E. Sawyer had pointed out that many players “have a preference for finding, rather than buying, rare/unique items in the world”. So unless the designers stock the shops/quests with a lot of interesting, expensive and "unlootable" stuff for the players to spend money on, introducing durability and repairing might only serve as an extra “burden” on the players. As for the second question, if acquiring money in the game is very hard, players would almost certainly prioritise skills that are explicitly designed to save money (if they really want to save money of course). So in case the skill points in the game are scare, it might not be a good idea to introduce durability and repairing mechanisms as it currently stands.