Crafting and me

I'm never quite sure how to describe my attitude towards crafting in MMOs. I'm not exactly a huge fan, considering that whenever I read a post about how involved crafting is in some other MMOs, with mini games and what not, I can only raise my eyebrows and frown. Why would I want to do that? Personally, I wouldn't.

However, it's all relative. Back in WoW I was surrounded by players who'd level alts without training any professions at all, or they would give them two gathering professions which would instantly be dropped for something else at max level. It seemed like people cared little about crafting beyond the perks it gave for raiding.

Me on the other hand, I still picked a matching gathering/crafting combination for most of my characters (like it was recommended back in the days of vanilla WoW), considered which ones would feel appropriate for which character, and then levelled them up as I went along. I don't recall ever dropping a profession to replace it with something else later on either.

This was just one more reason why I found myself increasingly frustrated with levelling in WoW towards the end, as keeping character level and profession skill in sync became more and more difficult over time. Cataclysm pretty much made me throw in the towel entirely. It was just too much of a pain to spend hours farming grey mobs for leather just to get another couple of skill points, while my character level ran away from me as soon as I did anything that granted XP.

In TOR I've been enjoying the fact that crafting while levelling is easy and you end up with useful items along the way too. (If anything it's my mission skills that tend to fall behind, because you can only send the minions out one at a time, and I tend to forget to do it.) However, I've also been feeling like a clueless dork as far as crafting is concerned, as I've been surrounded by nothing but people who are way more into crew skills than I am. They had alts for all the different ones within a month, got every new schematic as soon as it came out, and were generally complaining that the crafting isn't involved enough - while I was still confused about where exactly augments came from.

However, lately I've been getting a bit more into it, and while I'm still kind of surprised by this development, I may have actually found a niche for which I enjoy crafting and that makes me a little money too. It all started with me accidentally getting the schematic for a low level Resolve augment from a level one slicing mission. While the market for max level augments is pretty crowded on my server, there is a lot less going on when it comes to lower level ones, presumably for two reasons:

1) Most people only run max level missions most of the time, so the schematics for low level augments are comparatively rare, and
2) people think that nobody cares about low level augments anyway.

The latter seems like a perfectly logical argument until you end up crafting a piece of armour for a lowbie alt and it just so happens to crit. I hate staring at empty sockets in my gear, and I'm hardly the only one! Gotta put something in there, even if it won't last long. That gaping hole is just wrong.

Also, there is the option of twinking with augments. While you can't have twinks in TOR in the usual sense, since you can't do PvP without gaining experience unless you leave every warzone before it ends, you can significantly boost your stats in PvP by making sure that you wear the best gear possible for your level. It factors into the bolster mechanic in a big way, and most levelling PvPers will just be wearing random levelling gear that's probably a few levels below them.

At the moment I'm putting five lowbie augments onto the GTN each day, and they always sell, so the demand is clearly there. Only today I discovered the schematic for another useful lowbie augment, so I might soon be able to double my business. Considering the low price of each individual augment, it's hardly something to write home about, but it does add up over time and I've been getting a strange enjoyment out of knowing that I'm contributing something to the in-game economy that people actually want and use.