noamineo wrote on May 9
th, 2016 at 12:08pm:
If they implement gating it'll be based on Astral Shards, and it will cost an unreasonable number of them(which, in this case, is any number greater than "0"). Then of course to sell more shards, they'll have to make the gate very long(say, a week or so per shard) and of course to sell more bypasses they up the shard count. Maybe 6-7 per item, plus shards of potential. So, yeah, you can make an item without paying... when pigs fly.
The current gating method is more than sufficient. It takes a very long time to level crafting, and a TON of ingredients. Its already open to casuals since "grind chests and decon random loot" is about the casualist thing you can do. When I was first life on my first character and absurdly gimped, I hit a wall around lvl 11. So I passed the time by running Tear of Dhakaan on casual and deconing the loot to build up my crafting. I eventually de-gimped enough to play to get into the game, but it was a great time since for the overtly casual player.
No, it's not accessible to casuals unless they exploited.
My wife didn't use the exploits and for
years she's broken down every single item with a deconstruction recipe, and has spent hours crafting and she's level 50. It briefly was accessible to casuals if they exploited, but it is not now. You can't make jack shit at level 50. OK, twink gear for a level 10 character, maybe. And they added mats you had to get from raids.
I don't think Turdbrains are smart enough to even ask themselves what they want from crafting, but if they did, and the answer included having a system that was interesting to and useful for casual players, then they need to make fundamental changes in the system.
If you control it by making the decon and practice shard grind a barrier, as it is now, then either the barrier is low enough for casuals to make something and power gamers can flood it, or it's high enough to restrict powergamers and casuals are effectively locked out.
If you control it by making the results too weak to compete with anything, as it also is now, then practically nobody bothers.
Right now we have high investment and low reward, so it's hard to imagine they could screw it up worse than it already is, but I learned long ago not to underestimate Turdbin's capacity to further break things

But a time based gate with a shard bypass wouldn't
have to be terrible. If they didn't get greedy (I know, this is Turdbin we're talking about, but bear with me) then a slow free drip would let casual players fill in the gaps with high quality crafted gear, but not trick themselves out in a full set of it. Similarly, powergamers could fill in a slot or two for free on one character, or use some shards to get more. Powergamers have better access to shards through gear they sell. Obviously it would be better for the game if shards went away entirely, but then finances would rely on Turdbine making good enough product for people to want to buy it.