Maybe i can contribute some good ideas to the discussion(and eliminate some problems with those). What if unique/rare/magical items (or however you want to call those) can only be made by players. In many games there are certain creatures who drop (by a certain chance) a rare item - this results in camping the location of the mob spawn most of the time. Furthermore the crafter could have his name embeded in the sword (so that its recogniseable). To make it more complex (and to prevent one geek from crafting his whole life to have other people beg on their knees to get special items) players would have to decide in what category they want to specialise. For instance you could only do ranged weapons or close combat weapons (etc.) Also if you specialise in a category you are already skilled in (for instance an archer would do bow crafting) you would get better results.
