The crafted weapons should not be significantly better than looted ones, in my opinion. Looting weapons as it is now, is not much fun anymore anyway, since most good weapons come from the crafters. The chance of finding a good weapon is near zero, which is why looting is only interesting, if you happen to find some stuff that goes for a decent amount of money to NPCs.
Looted weapons should be better or at least equal to crafted ones. The only advantage of crafted ones should be the much higher availability. However, there are no good crafters yet, due do several reasons.
1) Some crafting skills are currently maxed with an insufficient level, IE: axe crafting -> maxed with level 20 (Can't make anything decent with such a 'low' level).
2) Training the crafting skills takes AGES. If you happen to constantly hammer a cold blade, you get 1 (!) practice point in weapon making and blacksmithing after every 30 seconds. However, a combat skill, swords for example, will give you 1 practice point after every 2 seconds when using shortswords, 2 practice points even, if you use 2 shortswords at the same time. That's 30 practice points in 30 seconds, so training sword skill is 30X faster than training any crafting related skill, or in other words, you can max sword skill with 30 different characters, before you max swordmaking for example with just one character. That's got to change. It took me months to get my axemaking to level 20, and even with powerleveling (which is awfully boring), it still takes way too long.
3) Due to the economical issues, many people gave up crafting or didn't even start at it, since it's not much of a business, and training is just not worth the effort. People don't buy weapons of inferior quality plus they wouldn't have the trias, even if crafters could produce weapons of superior quality.
My suggestions on how to fix the current situation.
a) Make more trainer available, so people can continue their crafting training.
b) Increase the amount of practice points given for any action during crafting, or decrease the amount of practice points needed to rank up a level. Training should be atleast twice as 'fast' as it currently is.
c) To ease the economical issue, make looted weapons equivalant to crafted ones, but with a certain rarity. Example from the past: silverweave weapons and stuff were not rare enough, which is why way too many people had them. The iron heavy dagger on the other hand, existed only a handful of exemplars of, which is how I'd like the rarity of good lootable weapons to be. However, going on a 'hunt' (fighting mobs) needs to be more rewarding altogether.
c2) Somewhat offtopic, but the main reason for the economical issue are the NPC trainers consuming millions of trias for their training. You have made the first step in lowering the tria amounts to a reasonable level, the next and required step is lowering the costs for training. That would bring more purchasing power for player-to-player transactions. It doesn't help the economy if 80% or more of the earned tria just vanish in the pockets of NPCs.
All in all, the current situation is out of control, but I'm most confident the devs are able to fix that. Nevertheless, I consider the points above valid, and hope some work will be going their way.
PS: The recent crafting changes were good, nontheless. It only needs more tweaking. However, nice work
so far.
