....by the fact that adventurers can reach max level in a crafting profession (wood/metal/cloth) faster than a crafter who is 100% focused on their trade without ever crafting a single item.
The Elder Scrolls has always been about getting better at something by doing it. When Daggerfall was released in 1996, Bethesda talked about this concept and made comments like "we always wondered how someone got better at picking locks by killing monsters" in reference to the D20-style experience system where you just level up and get experience. That is why they created the Major/Minor skill system that has been used in some form or another since then. It just makes SENSE.
So why can someone become the best, most awesome crafter possible, with every skill, without ever having crafted a SINGLE item?? How is that even possible??
I played 16 hours a day every single day of the 5 day early access - the *entire* time focused only on crafting in the most efficient manner possible, and sacrificing adventuring/questing to do so. By this past Sunday I just managed to hit 40 (43 now), and yet there were level VRx adventurers at that time who had already maxed out multiple crafting professions simply by farming mobs and deconstructing the items. Seriously?!
Let me make this clear - I'm in a 100% crafting-focused guild. I had access around the clock not only to other crafters to make items for me to deconstruct, but people sending me materials to help speed me along. The absolute, 100%, without a doubt fastest way to level is deconstructing items. If you're a pure crafter, that means teaming up and deconstructing items crafted by the other person. And apparently if you don't give a hoot about crafting, you can just level up adventuring and go ahead and get max crafting with almost no effort.
Why ZOS? Why in the world would you make it so that dedicated pure crafters get shafted and have their experience completely trivialized and cheapened by allowing people who didn't put in the time and effort to be able to do what we do?
Why can't I have a VR1 adventure level as a bonus for the 4 days /played I had at the end of early access like those VR1s got a free max level crafter - again, without EVER crafting a single item??
What's the point of me focusing on crafting with the hope that I can make a sacrifice of questing and adventuring in order to get a skill that I will then be able to market to high level adventurers/pvpers - only to find out that they can already do it themselves?
I feel completely demoralized by this and that I just wasted a week of my vacation for nothing.
/sad face
That being said, I really think you guys should consider putting in some mechanism to address this. Find another way to encourage crafters to work together that makes it so deconstructing items doesn't give more than DOUBLE the xp as creating an item yourself, or make it so that you only get that awesome xp if you deconstruct a *crafted* item, not world drops. Sure, keep the mats that can be had from world drop deconstruction, but even the chance of that should be tied to a crafting skill/level that can only be acquired by ACTUALLY CRAFTING.
That is all I suppose. I'm sure I'm going to get flamed to hell for this. Oh well.