EQ2 had its flaws, or did when I was playing it a year ago. While it has (had?) the
appearance of complexity and challenge, ultimately once you knew how to use the system and the reactions, it became little more than whack-a-mole. Making pristine items was a 100% thing once you'd worked it out and had your skills worked up, which made pristine the de facto standard and anything else sub-par - in which case, why bother with grades lower than pristine (that's a rhetorical question
).
Another thing that bothered me at the time was that each tier was, essentially, a repeat of the one before it. The only difference was in the names of the ingredients used. (I suspect this will bother me in VG too, but we'll see.) This was visible to different degrees in different professions, but in weaponsmithing for example, you'd use bronze at tier 1 and then have the same recipes using iron in tier 2 - and that was the only difference. (I've forgotten the actual names, but you know what I mean.) Granted, a shortsword is a shortsword is a shortsword, in most cases, but still... in the end, I found it tediously repetitive and with very little to look forward to from levelling other than being able to charge more for my wares.
Before you ask, I had a 70 Provisioner, 50 Weaponsmith (or whatever they were called), 50 Tailor, and all of the other profs in the 30-40s. Yeah, I'm a crafting junkie.
SWG had one of the best systems I've seen to date, barring the insane production of ground-out goods used in the levelling process, and the fact that people on their way up could almost never compete with the masters. (There were a few exceptions - tailors, to a degree, and architects, whose furniture goods didn't rely on experimentation.) The thing that bothered me about it in the end was that a crappy crafter with great resources could often outcraft a great crafter (who knew what they were doing) with average resources - I liked the harvesting, I liked the resource grades, but IMO there were too many spawns over time and the quality of resources could negate the quality (or lack thereof) of the crafter. This coming from someone who had 3 medium houses full of AS and WS resources, some of them excellent. (I played pre-CU, and have no idea what things are like now. Heck, I played before they started giving you colour coding for the quality of your resources.)
Having crafted in every game that offers it to date, and being an admitted crafting ho, I'm mostly very happy with Vanguard's system. For one, it does give a considerable place to player skill in terms of choosing what's on the table and what skills to prefer over others. For another, it lets you walk away in mid-craft which, to someone like me who has to AFK frequently for varying lengths of time, is a great boon. In that sense I vastly appreciate that Vanguard crafting
doesn't require twitch-based reactions. All twitching does is test how well I'm watching my screen - it doesn't test my skills in any way once I've learned what reaction to use in a given situation (as in EQ2).
The lack of resource quality-grades is a bit of a shame, but probably an excessive variable for the system as it stands. I guess rares will sort of play that part. Another of my longer-term concerns is that strategies for becoming a competent crafter will emerge as the only decent "cookie-cutter" choice - for instance, I'm worried we'll discover that maxing out station skills and utilities and leaving tools to lag behind is the most efficient way to craft - in which case everyone will do that and player skill won't play much part in things anymore.
It's hard to draw any firm conclusions at this point, I guess, since they were tweaking and adjusting until the last minute and will no doubt continue to do so. I just hope the system is flexible enough to prevent it from becoming the no-brainer system every other game has ended up sporting, once people figure out its quirks. In that sense, SWG was a ground-breaker -- but on the bright side, I believe we're going to see experimentation in Vanguard pretty soon too, though I don't know what shape it's going to take.
Anyway, sorry for the ramble.
Here's a question for you guys that I think is related to the debate: does a player crafting system need a player-based economy in order to really shine? As an example, I think SWG with its 100% player-based economy was the best I've seen - sure, there were gougers, but there were also plenty of dedicated, reasonable merchants out there - and the point was, you *couldn't* get most stuff from anyone but other players, as someone mentioned above. One thing that worries me a little about Vanguard is that most gear can be obtained from NPCs as well as from players and loot - in which case, how many people are actually going to bother with player-made stuff, even if it's better? I'm thinking at this stage that the NPC vendors only slightly dilute the economy, since their stuff definitely isn't as good as even basic crafted stuff, but we'll see.
(Honourable mention among crafting systems should also go to poor Horizons, because they really tried to make something new and interesting.)